IMPORTANT!!! Please take note that there are no pearls of wisdom contained in the post below. At no point will I disclose the secret of life or any other answer to a hotly debated subject.

If you are here reading this and aren’t looking for any answers of any kind then please read on you never know you might glean something out of the mess that is my brain in word form.

As Sun Tzu said in The Art of War:-

“The skilful employer of men will employ the wise man, the brave man, the covetous man, and the stupid man.”

I think I can cover at least one of those roles. They also say there is a fine line between insanity and genius, I have spent most of my life flirting with that line, admittedly on the wrong side of it for greatness.

So…yes…why am i here? oh yeh! I’m a new article writer at Wuup! You would think that I would have some kind of special plan laid out for my first article, but alas you would be wrong.

I only offered myself for the role less than 24 hours ago and here I am writing my first piece…ever! (apart from a stray blog post here and there *SHAMELESS PLUG #1*Spyda Web Design Blog)

By this point you’re probably thinking to yourself…“Who is this strange person?”. It’s a question I ask myself daily as I stare in the mirror. To be honest I never come back with an answer to myself. I am a work in progress. Unfortunately, I seem to be comparable to that design you’re working on…the one that seems like it just needs something else doing to it to make it right…the one you just can’t get to look right whatever you try…the one you end up breaking because you can’t decide why it doesn’t look right and do too much to it.

So who actually, arrr you?

I am a 34 (just turned) year old man(boy); my body despite only being part way through it’s lifetime insists on feeling like it’s been round twice and starting on it’s third time around; My grey hairs have doubled in the past year and a half; Despite having a healthy head of (greying) hair I notice more and more of it on the brush…when I use it. In short, I’m falling apart slowly. If I were a building I’d be going up for protected building status. The kind they give to run down old shacks because noone wants to fix them anymore and it would cost too much to knock them down.

As a father to four children (3 living with me 1 not) I constitute 1 part of a post-nuclear family. There are many other parts to this family and I’m sure they will all get a mention as we go through more articles together. Like I say I’m a father so yes that involves sprogletts. Miniature DNA clones of myself which I grew in a test tube(Irene my lovely wife to be) without causing uproar from anyone, even the Daily Mail! Two of these clones are not clones of myself but my partner Irene. These two are the older two (Shannon 12 & Tyler 10). If I try really hard I may be able to mould them in the way I think they should be…or rather how their mother says they should be and I back it up.

The other two (Abee 8 & Paeton 21 months awwwwwww) are direct facsimilies of myself with no apparent degradation during the copying process. In fact if anything I would have to say they improved on the original design. Ren 2.0! To me my kids are the equivalent of HTML5 or AS3. The same basic package just made for a different point in time with the benefit of wisdom and hindsight.

Parenting tip #1: Hindsight has 20-20 vision to enable you to see your kids making the same mistakes you did and be completely unable to stop them making them again.

With this in mind I can safely say that I am also, obviously, the worse half to my better half. She’ll be the one proof reading these articles before I post them. It’s not just because she’s picky and will weed out anything that shouldn’t be here(or just tell me it’s crap)(If this is still here then she didn’t take offence at the picky part) it’s because I have numerous conditions such as Dyscalculia (mixing up numbers, makes PIN number entry fun), Dyspraxia (Social Ineptitude) and Dyslexic fingers (Chronic bad typing and typo disease, it’s rife on the Internet, careful it may be contagious!)

Of course this entails the usual manly type roles, such as being a hand to hold, a face to slap, a shoulder to cry on and someone to point and laugh at when there are no other available candidates for the role of personal entertainer to the one in charge. We have a trouser freehold in our house. I wear the pants up until something goes wrong, then I am evicted from my official trousered post and replaced by the person that should’ve done it in the first place.

As you can guess this may be a big source of material

On top of all of this I am fighting with the start up of my new business *SHAMELESS PLUG #2* Spyda Web Design. I found that the government were silly enough to throw money at any willing individual silly enough to say ok fund me to do this, make a business and fill out countless forms that continue coming for 6 whole months! So of course being a good citizen I decided to take them for as much as they would give (Not much it appears).

Spyda is still in it’s infancy but is growing all the time. Making us ‘totally unique’ in the web development/design field we offer “great high quality designs for low affordable prices”, that’s unique in the human being style of unique…We are all different, interesting variations but at the end of the day we’re bipedal, upright walking, homo-sapien(-sapien)s (if you want to be pedantic).

My speciality has to be databases. I prefer MySQL to any other, it’s simple, easy to use and effective. I also have the advantage in thinking in 3rd Normal form. I can slice things into tables, fields and classes too for that matter just by looking at a system.

My background strangely begins with a typing GCSE in high school. From there I sat on the dole for years, effectively portraying myself as a student of the University of Life. They have the same drinking and naughty behaviour associated with being a student, but none of the studying involved. Perfect for a young boy with a seriously sheltered upbringing.

After getting exceptionally bored I went back to college and got a couple of qualifications in computer languages, C and VB (I think it was VB version 3 we were using). Amazingly I used these crap qualifications to get on a computing degree course at Sunderland University, where I flung myself back into the binge drinking and random naughty things again with renewed vigour. Here I learnt SQL in the form of SQL Forms and also HTML (all tags in uppercase to show my age) for the very first time and man did I think it was useless!

Don’t get me wrong, it was easy enough to code and remember syntax for but I wondered what the point of it was.

Firstly the Internet…strange idea. Put information on a computer about anything you like and people might read it? What’s the point in that? Isn’t it a bit bland (Images were frowned upon unless you were one hot computer geek)? Why would anyone want to read what I’m thinking?

These were all questions I wanted to ask but didn’t, I just put my head down, finished the course and then forgot about it in favour of “things that will get me a job” as the careers advisor told me in Uni. As with many things (20-20 hindsight again) I was completely and utterly wrong. Little did I realise that the job I chose was in VB development a piece of software soon to become all but extinct.

For 5 years I spent coding VB6 integrated with an SQL Server 2000 database that produced a wonderful little product called Something Software (names have been changed to protect the guilty). A piece of software developed from a different piece of software, developed from a different piece of software, with no access to the original code or class coding. A piece of software so riddled with bugs and work arounds that we probably could have written an whole other program using the bits we put in and the time spent hunting for bugs in classes you couldn’t see and resorting to putting a fix function on the output to put it right. After 5 years work I was given 1 months pay off and a P45 detailing the pityfull contribution I had made to the countries tax capital and my pension.

Amongst other jobs I’ve had I have spent a lot of time being “artistic” and “creative” and other words that job center staff hate to hear. Eventually I ended up where I am now, which honestly I won’t complain about.