Welcome to my first ever blog entry on an area of my website dedicated to the inner workings of my IT life. I have never bothered to write anything about my inner geek as there has always been a part of me that denied its existence. I am however sitting at my computer having caught up on Loaded, Geek Brief TV, listening to the latest installment from the SharePoint Pod Show before heading to Twitter to continue conversations with other developers from around the world. OK, perhaps I am a bit of a geek. Just a little bit.

Many many moons ago I was studying to become a full-time musician, (hence my double-life) when I found I enjoyed designing databases and building user interfaces for them. My father was running a publishing company which made books of responses to questionnaires; these were forms with a hundred-or-so fields that would be returned and manually entered into Microsoft Access databases by a typing pool.  When things went wrong Dad would pay through the nose, teeth and left kneecap for a database designer to tweak a field length or reposition a combo-box or two. One day I decided to have a crack at all this myself, which of course immediately brought down the entire database. There's nothing like a major disaster to get you thinking on your feet.

In my spare time I was building terribly meaningless websites and fiddling around with designing more attractive interfaces in Paintshop Pro. It didn't take long for me to realise you could connect a website to a database, at which point I started down the path towards web-based, multi-user applications. With a foot in the door at a research company (actually, an entire leg thanks to my future father-in-law's position as a divisional manager), I took to the corporate Intranet field.

With some hefty applications tucked under my cap I spent 2008 working as a Microsoft SharePoint developer and consultant, while still working on the occasional custom-built application. After a redundancy in May 2009 I commenced working for the International Road Assessment Programme, a road-safety organisation based in London.  I develop a suite of tools using maps, charts and tables to display road assessment information in conjunction with background processes to run economic and logic calculations over hundreds of thousands of kilometers of road networks around the world.

This blog will be a mixed grab-bag of sorts.  I don't want to harp on with mundane, uninsteresting technobabble.  I find tools, tips and tricks and all manner of information every day that can be of use, and hope to bring that to you here.  If you have found this blog and want more information about me and what I do, please don't hesitate to use my contact form or email me at richard ~at~ richardthornton ~dot~ com.