About Me

From Bottleneck.org

Contents 1 Who Am I? 2 Interests 3 Biography 4 Links My Calendar Who Am I? My name is Steven Patterson, this is my website, and this is a little bit about me. Contact: webmaster@bottleneck.org Find me on Facebook Pictures of me My Last.fm profile where you can explore my musical tastes

Interests

I'm interested in motorsport, and in particular tend to follow the British Touring Car Championship. I also play with my camera quite a lot, and always enjoy a holiday, particularly skiing! Recently, I've become more and more obsessed with the idea of learning to fly, but we'll see about that.

Biography

Well, such as it is...

I was born in Wolverhampton, in the West Midlands, UK, on June 10th 1977 - which at time of writing makes me 30, rapidly approaching 31.

I attended the Mount Pleasant Primary School in Coseley, later the Hurst Hill Primary School, and from there went to the Bishop Milner RC Comprehensive School in Dudley. A small handful of A-levels later, and it was off to the University of Birmingham for a MSci degree in Physics.

Having graduated, just about, with a 3rd, I went to work for a little IT company called tMSc, based in Cambridge, where I did general Windows on NT4, Exchange, and Linux administration. I also spent a lot of time coding in C and in x86 assembler. After about six months there, I moved on to the University of Southampton Computing Services department (now ISS - Information Systems Services) as a Unix systems administrator. I remain there to this day, but my job role has changed somewhat. Having become an expert in Sendmail, then apache, squid, bind, INN, ... well a plethora of service applications, I then volunteered to become the University's first Oracle DBA. I built an Oracle infrastructure, watched a small team grow around me, and then was promoted out of that to manage the entire systems and DBA team. I now have between 15 and 20 people working for me (depending on what day you're reading this!), including four DBAs and one DBA team leader - the role I always thought I would get!

So, work aside, I have a house in Hamble-le-Rice, which is a village near to Southampton, bordered on one side by Southampton Water and on the other by the river Hamble. It's quite a nice place to live, reasonably pretty and with some green open spaces, and supports a few more pubs and restaurants than one might expect, thanks to the large influx of "yachties" who have their boats moored on the river.

I share my house with my fiancee, Ruth, who I've been with for over five years now, and we're due to be married on July 26^th 2008.

Links

A few of my more visited websites:

* Facebook Do I even need to explain what this is?	* xkcd A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language
* ctrl-alt-del A webcomic based around obsessive gamers	* Last.fm Keeps track of the music you play, finds people who play similar music to you, and suggests other music you might like, based upon what these other people also like. Nifty.