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The Boring whoami :

British-Canadian living on the wrong side of the big pond!

Married to Louise with two children: Ryan (5) & Erin (2)

36 with a career background covering the chemical, design, food, and I.T. sectors.

I have a number of interests, including:-
  • Reading
    My favourite authors include Terry Pratchett, Terry Brooks, Lin Carter, Anne McCaffrey,
    JRR Tolkien, Craig Shaw Gardner, Piers Anthony, Raymond Feist and Robert Asprin
    At one point I had over 5,000 books (and no space to move...)
  • Writing
    Fantasy novels (none published) and crosswords
  • Games
    I've played chess since I was 5 and Dungeons & Dragons since the late 70's
  • Computers
    I asked mum for my first computer as a teenager.
    "!" came the reply, "We didn't pay that much for the house..."
    I'm not as good as I should be and what I've forgotten could filled volumes, but I can still hold my own :-)
  • Languages
    I've been neglecting my studies this past decade, but I can still manage Spanish and a little French.
    (My Italian and Portuguese are rudimentary at best.)
  • Other interests include Photography, Archery, Ancient History and lost civilisations, and the 'unexplained'

My résumé is so long it's silly, but of the more notable experiences, in no set order...
  • Worked in various labs - including research into aluminium paints and explosives
  • I owned a games design company specialising in promotional boardgames and puzzles
  • Wrote a number of fantasy game books
  • Was a photo-journalist for a while
  • All points between Cleaner in a Trailer Park and Labourer thru Machinist in a various factories
  • I setup the UK's first Shareware library dedicated to fonts (with sales worldwide).
    This later evolved into Signwriting, then into a Computer Store and mail order company - which I am well rid of!.
Sponsorship towards running costs for the site would be nice, getting a decent job off this island and back home to Canada would be better!

I do this to share my experience, and for my own convenience. Ackadia is our family site in the same way other folk show pictures of their goldfish etc. - as such we neither buy nor sell anything, nor do we have any connection with any sites, products or companies mentioned in these pages.

The Site:

The basic site was written in about a week in November of '98 (couple of hours a night). This included learning HTML! The next year will be spent adding content and links. I may add imagemaps, but it's unlikely I'll bother with frames.

For design, this is all hand coded and will remain so. I looked at a number of web packages but they just seem to produce sloppy code...

The reference and study material I used was the following: www.darkmountain.com - Dark Mountain

"Teach Yourself Web Publishing" by Laura Lemay. Sams.net books ISBN 1-57521-064-9 Lemay's home page

"HTML Reference Library v2.2" by Stephen Le Hunte cmlehunt@swan.ac.uk

CLIPART
With the exception of corporate logo's etc (used to link to their sites) virtually all the artwork on this site is done with CorelDraw - either using and editing the clip-art libraries, or designing my own images.

I don't mind folk using my own work as long as I'm asked first...

Subsequent books on HTML I am currently reading and have found useful include:

Sams Teach Yourself HTML 4 in 24 Hours by Dick Oliver  Published by SAMS   isbn 0-67231369-3

He has also written a book entitled "Teach Yourself Javascript in 24 Hours" which I shall look into.

Check out his site - The 24 Hour Cafe





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Copyright © ; 1999 Paul Ackerley. All rights reserved. www.ackadia.com