About

Welcome! Firstly, given that there are multiple billions of active pages on the interweb, I will assume that you haven't reached this site by random chance alone and thank you for your interest in my little corner of the net: girv dot net. If you have in fact reached here by random chance then you should immediately run out and buy a lottery ticket while your luck warp lasts. Try not to get hit by a bus while you are doing this as the irony would be too much for me to handle.

My name is John Girvin and I'm a software engineer, sci-fi buff, cyclist and retrocomputer fan (ie: nerd) from Northern Ireland. For the geographically challenged, Northern Ireland is the small bit at the top of the small bit beside the United Kingdom mainland, which is the small bit just north of mainland Europe.

This is one of the sites I maintain regularly. It's been around under various domains and designs since 1996 and this incarnation is probably more-or-less approximately in the region of number four(ish). Kinda. You'd think I'd be better at it by now.

From an early age, since the 8-bit "home micro" heyday of the early 1980s, my primary obsession has been with programming and computers in general, with games being the focus of this obsession. I've spent many hours playing games, many many hours developing them, and many many many hours hacking and cracking them for various nefarious reasons. The interest in computing has, not surprisingly, guided my academic and professional careers from early on, and I now find myself employed as a senior engineer developing Java based software for a market leading e-commerce company. It's not rock and roll, but I like it. Which is handy, since I was never much good at anything else.

For more information about my career, skills and experience, to see some of the real life web projects that I've worked on or even to download a CV, check out my resume / portfolio website over at johngirvin.com. There's a johngirvin.com blog there too, to which I occasionally post articles of a more technical nature.

I also like to cycle, and cycling enthusiasts may be interested in Rain Miles Count Double, a blog about owning, maintaining, commuting and having fun on bikes in Northern Ireland. A place where, on average, it rains somewhere every other day.

Finally there's Wee Doors Banging, a catch-all blog to collect random miscellanery that I'd otherwise lose track of. The name comes from something my dad used to say to me when I was going on about some mad idea or other: "John, your head's full of wee doors, and they're all banging".

If you'd like to contact me to comment on the site or for any other reason, you can use any of the following methods:

	Use the website contact form
	E-Mail:
	ICQ:
	Jabber / Google Talk:
	MSN Messenger:
	AIM:
	Yahoo! Messenger:
	johngirvin.com	Visit my professional website
	Rain Miles Count Double	Visit Rain Miles Count Double
	Wee Doors Banging	Visit Wee Doors Banging
	girv.in	Visit girv.in
	LinkedIn	View my LinkedIn profile
	Google	View my Google Profile
	Facebook	View my Facebook profile
	Twitter	Read my Tweets
	Friendfeed	Read my Friendfeed
	Delicious	View my delicious.com favourites
	Digg	See what I Digg
	Last.fm	View my Last.fm music

Thanks for taking an interest in this site and I hope you enjoy what you find here!

Have fun!