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Woody

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Title: Ambassador
Posts: 165 posts
Bio: My story...huh! By the time I finished college in the mid-70's, I'd qualified as a teacher, gained a degree in Applied Chemistry but had grown tired of test tubes (not to say that the degree wasn't pretty useful when it came to making home brew!), so I started my career teaching Physics and Electronics. One day in 1983, the headteacher appeared in the staff room, clutching a sheet of paper and said, "Here, Woody... there's some course about computers coming in schools, you're a scientist, you better go on it!" That was the day that changed my life!

I was hooked, I just had to have one of these new BBC Model B jobs with a massive 32K of RAM! Now the thing was, I was rubbish at computer games, easy meat for anyone but messing around with applications software was fun... I'm one of those guys who reads the manual as a last resort, it's much more fun to try and figure things out... let's face it, if a piece of software is any good, you should be able to figure it our by going through the menus.

Tempus fugit and along came the internet, had to give that ago! Felt pretty cool when I hooked up that 28K US Robotics modem, fired things up on a Acorn Archimedes and said to the family, "Hey, come look at this!"

The world was using PC's by now, so the Arc was sold on and I bought my first PC in 1997. The website stuff intrigued me so off I went and bought... you guessed it... Frontpage 98! Starting off, it was a great introduction to web design but it sort of put you in a straight jacket, "You will do it our way!, so I moved onto Namo WebEditor, which was better but even it messed up my Xara Webstyle templates so I browsed around for something that played ball. Now I have never been a great fan of market leader, mega-bucks dreamware, so when I came across an HTML Editor from CoffeeCup that used terms like "Cool" and "No Way", I thought, "These guys are cool dudes, like real people! I'll give it a go!" If anyone had told me then that I'd swap WYSIWYG for a, HTML editor, I'd have laughed at them but here we are now, four years down the line, a CoffeeCup addict.

I can make a website do most anything that I want, I'm not a rocket scientist but things work, people are happy. In the not too distant future, I'll be retring from teaching and then I can do what I've always wanted to do... set up my own business doing e-learning resources and web design.
Signature: "Second class fairway is better than first class rough!"
Last Visit: Monday at 04:28 PM