Well, there's not much to say about me. My name is Niall Douglas, I am thirty four years old and I currently live in Cork in Ireland, though will be emigrating this Autumn to work in the Native SDK division for Research In Motion in Waterloo, Ontario in Canada. Since I was fifteen, I have lived in Germany, United Kingdom, Holland, Canada and most recently in Spain where I worked for two years on EuroFighters. Rather interestingly, my bloodlines (genealogy) can be found here in "The Royal And Noble Families of Britain" though I am very, very distant from anyone important. You can also find my family on Wikipedia here.
I am a software engineer by trade, having graduated from Hull University in the UK in 2000 with a degree in Software Engineering having dropped out of Trinity College Dublin in 1997. Needless to say, quite a lot of my interest falls in that area and I am a computer programmer of some capability - you can see that from the programming areas in this site on the left. Despite this, I recognise that the long-term trend of outsourcing to the East does not look good for computer programmers and hence in 2008 I graduated from St. Andrews University, Scotland having read a Joint Honours in Economics & Management (two professions more secure in the West). In 2009 I graduated from University College Cork with a Masters in Business Information Systems which united Computers, Economics & Management under one roof and for which my team's group project won an Enterprise Ireland award, and I followed that up with a distance PGCert in Educational and Social Research with the University of London from which I should graduate this summer. If you want to see my curriculum vitae in detail, it's on this website.
I originally started my "online virtual diary" long before the term "blog" came into being - over fourteen years ago now I was doing something which is considered commonplace today, but at that time was considered eccentric. Like a blog, I write about various topics but unlike a blog, most of it isn't particularly interesting to anyone other than me - essentially it's an outlet for whatever I feel like writing about myself or what I'm thinking. What that may be, varies considerably. It can range from heavyweight topics such as philosophy, geopolitics, psychology, quantum mechanics and politics to what I had for breakfast. There is a good percentage though exclusively about women troubles, mainly because I used to have no idea how to form a stable secure and lasting relationship and every time I got involved with a woman, it went horribly horribly wrong and I sank into year long depressions - well at least until I met Megan, so far at least. Yes, this is not always a fruity and happy diary! However, it occasionally contains something useful to others - and I have started to put my accumulated life wisdom together into books starting with the Freeing Growth series.
My diary, throughout the last fourteen years, has swung from bad times to
good, sad times to happy, intellectual times to well, pretty humdrum &
boring ones. Like most people a year or two after graduation as they
approach having children, life
becomes routine & boring and so it has been recently and hence the
sparsity of posts during the past two years especially. Mostly though, I look at the diary as the method most of the people I
have met around the world throughout the years use to check up on how I
am, what I'm up to and so send me a reproachful email when I'm being excessive
.
But whether I know you or not, everyone's welcome to read!