fouldsy.com

Ah, the obligatory ‘About Me’ page I’ve avoided for 4 years…

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 600+ posts!

My name is Iain Foulds, I’m 24 years old, married to Kat. 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. As of September 2008 I split my time living between Tuntutuliak and Bethel, where I work as a systems analyst in application systems for the Lower Kuskokwim School District.

I graduated from Gateshead College in June 2002 with a National Diploma in Computing & Networking followed by the Cisco Certified Network Associate academy in December 2002, passed a handful of Microsoft Certified Professional exams throughout 2004 and became an Apple Certified Technical Co-ordinator in November 2006. 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 10 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 has gone temporarily on hold thanks to the wonderful internet connections up here!

I’ve travelled 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. This past summer we 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. 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 each month (more like 8 of them actually!). 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 here in my photo gallery and on Flickr as well as a select few quality prints available for purchase. I currently wander around with a Fujifilm S1000fd, believing that it’s the photographer not the equipment that makes a photograph. That and not having a few thousand dollars to spend on equipment.

For now, I’ll content myself with playing video games on the Xbox 360, Playstation 3 and Nintendo Wii; riding snowmobiles across the tundra at $6.50/gallon to go ice fishing; and trying to avoid loosing any fingers or toes in temperatures regularly around -20 to -30F during winter.