fouldsy.com

Ah, the obligatory ‘About Me’ page…

Since there’s a lot of people coming in from all over the place checking out the computing articles I’ve written, photos + stories from travelling around, etc., I guess I should give a quick overview of who I am without having to read through 800+ posts!

My name is Iain Foulds, and I’m about 27 years old. Originally from Durham, north east England, where I worked first as a supervisor for the SuSE Linux customer support team, then as network manager at Greencroft School. I moved out to Tuntutuliak, Alaska a few days before Christmas 2006, which is a little Yup’ik eskimo village of around 400 people way out in the west of Alaska about 45 miles south west of Bethel and accessible only by light aircraft or boat in the summer. In September 2008 I headed out the bush and retreated (a little…) to Bethel, where I worked as a systems analyst for application systems for the Lower Kuskokwim School District. In June of 2010 I headed south, waayyyyy south, to St Louis where I now work as a technology support specialist for St Louis University High. It’s warmer here.

I graduated from Gateshead College in June 2002 with a National Diploma in Computing & Networking followed by the Cisco Certified Network Associate academy, as well as being a Microsoft Certified Professional, an Apple Certified Technical Co-ordinator, and a VMware Certified Professional. I’ve also been a student at the University of Alaska Southeast and currently at St Louis Community College working towards something as yet not totally decided upon. I’ve contributed both time, support, code + money to numerous open source projects over the years including Ubuntu Linux, Gentoo Linux, Novell/SuSE Linux, OpenBSD, Linux Questions, Mozilla Foundation, OpenOffice, Samba, Squid, DansGuardian and Open-Xchange.

Outside of computing, I’ve been a keen guitar player for 12 years or so with varying degress of success! There’s a couple of tracks from last summer on my MySpace profile if you’re really keen. I was also heavily involved in the podcasting community, producing two music podcasts promoting unsigned / independent rock bands + artists – the Unsigned Rock Podcast and then TPN Rock alongside Ewan Spence on The Podcast Network. With moving out to Alaska, podcasting was put on the back burner thanks to the wonderful internet connections up here!

I’ve traveled extensively throughout England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland; spent many summers in France with my family; had a few trips to Germany; a couple of skiing trips to Italy; and a couple of short visits to Canada. In the summer of 2007 I clocked up over 6,200 miles in a little under 6 weeks on a road trip through Washington, Oregon, California, Nevada, Utah and Arizona taking in over a dozen stunning National Parks and a whole bunch of state parks and forests. The summer of 2008 got me around Alaska, taking in Seward, Kenai + Homer including a trip on the Alaska Railroad and Kenai Fjords nature + glacier cruise, and then up through Talkeetna and Denali with a bus ride right through to the Kantishna Roadhouse. Japan, New Zealand, Australia, China and the Scandanavian countries are on the list to visit at some point.

I’m a big aviation nut, helped by living out in the Alaskan bush and taking one or two little bush flights around the delta. For years I’ve thrown myself into the flight simulator community, producing my own add-ons for Microsoft Flight Simulator as well as building my own cockpit electronics. All very geeky, I admit!

Photography is another passion of my own, with examples of my work on Flickr. I currently wander around with a Canon EOS 50D with Canon EF 28-135mm f/3.5-5.6 IS and EF 50mm f/1.8 II lenses, plus a Tokina 12-24mm f/4.0 AF DX. I also have an Olympus OM-1 35mm SLR my dad had new from 1974 (I still have the original warranty card for it…) and a Rolleicord 1a type 3 medium format 120 TLR from around 1937-1939 which keep me entertained and developing my own film.