About
Me? Well I’m Adrian Spender. It’s nice to meet you. You can call me Aidy. I was born in Watford, England on 3rd November 1975. To be precise, I was born in what was then called Shrodells Hospital, now known as Watford General Hospital. This is important to me for geographical reasons which will become apparent.
At the tender age of two, my parents moved us to Luton in the neighbouring county of Bedfordshire. Here I did most of my growing up, but I commuted to my place of education: Bedford School, which is about 20 miles away from Luton. At age 18 I left Luton for good (apart from occasional visits to see the olds - hi Mum & Dad!) and headed 200 miles up the M1 Motorway to the University of Leeds where I spent three fantastic years studying for a B.Sc. (Hons) in Information Systems.
During my time at university I was sponsored by Ford Motor Company and spent a total of 18 months working for them in Essex locations including Dagenham, Warley and Aveley. Despite an offer of a job with Ford, I decided to pursue a career elsewhere, and headed to Hampshire to join IBM at the Hursley Park development lab. I’ve been here ever since. Eight years or so and counting.
Currently, I am working on the development of IBM’s WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus product. Prior to that I developed componentry for WebSphere Application Server, and also spent a very enjoyable couple of years as a services consultant dealing with our WebSphere clients throughout Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. I still keep my hand in with client facing work, and occasionally present at conferences and user groups.
Outside of work, I live with my girlfriend of four years, Lana, in a nice flat with a marina view in Southampton, Hampshire. I spend far too much money on gadgets, which is probably why we rent our flat rather than own it! I am a passionate follower of Watford Football Club (the significance of the hospital comes into play here - it is next door to Watford’s Vicarage Road ground. The more football astute of you will also realise that I grew up in Luton, Watford’s traditional local rivals.) I was a season ticket holder for about seven years until I decided to give it up last season for a number of reasons. We promptly got promoted to the Premiership, so now I’ve bought one again.
In the past I’ve gone through hobbies and passtimes with varying degrees of commitment. Ones that have fallen by the wayside include power kiting, karting and more recently scuba diving (I’m still a PADI qualified diver but have sold all my gear and haven’t been in the water for over a year so consider myself lapsed.) However the one hobby I’ve taken to with relish and lasting enthusiasm is photography. So much so that a fair proportion of the posts on this blog are about it. My flickr photostream is the place to go to see my work.
[...] About [...]
Pingback by Drive Through… » Blog Archive » …there’s nothing to see here — June 15, 2006 @ 1:31 pm
[...] Hursley’s Adrian Spender has just started his own blog. You can find out more about who Adrian is on his comprehensive About page. In summary - he’s a key developer working on our WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus technology, and a great guy. His blog already has some great content - love the post about best and worst gadgets, for one. [...]
Pingback by The lost outpost » Blog Archive » More bloggers escape from Hursley — June 18, 2006 @ 6:41 pm
Hi Adrian
I came upon your blog via David Currie’s site - I’m also an orienteer like David. I was interested to read your recent post re: Apple / Leopard. I took the plunge and bought a MacBook earlier this summer after reading reports about how bad Vista was. I get enough grief from PCs at work. I mainly use my Mac for email, internet access, photography and running the Southampton Orienteers website (www.southampton-orienteers.org.uk). I developed this using Dreamweaver on my home PC (which I still have) but I’m in the process of rewriting the website using RapidWeaver and my Mac. I recently created a web gallery for a large orienteering event using a web gallery ‘creator’ from with Photoshop Elements 5 on my PC. What I’m looking to do is to move away from the PC altogether for maintaining my photos but need a facility to create web galleries. I’m trialling Apple’s Aperture at present but whilst it seems very good at managing the photos at first look it seems lacking in more extensive editing facilities e.g. it dosen’t support layers. You mention on your blog that you’re keen on photography - I’d be interested to learn what apps you use on your Mac to edit / manage your photos. I’ve read good things about a digitising tablet from Wacom called Bamboo and this comes with Elements 4 for the Mac for about £60. Maybe i should use Elements for editing and iPhoto to manage folders / collections etc. Any thoughts?
One other thing, iChat. When I bought my Mac I signed up for their .Mac service but this expired after 60 days. I’ve read that I can ‘register’ an AIM name = removed to use iChat. Is this correct? If so, would you be willing to try and call me sometime to test that I’ve set things up properly? My brother is keen to get a Mac as well in the near future and it would be great if we could get iChat working between us asap.
Many thanks
Steve Pullen
Comment by Steve Pullen — November 7, 2007 @ 3:13 pm
Hi Steve,
Aperture is mainly a library managment and RAW processing program. You don’t mention what camera you have. If you use a Digital SLR that can produce RAW files then Aperture or Adobe Lightroom would be a good bet for you. Personally I use Lightroom and love it. It is particularly good at producing web gallieries, though it is limited to how you can modify the supplied templates. There are rumours that a plugin mechanism will be announced soon allowing third party plugins to expand Lightroom including adding in extra gallery support. As an example of a Lightroom gallery, check out this one I produced with some shots of a friend’s wedding.
If you don’t have a DSLR or don’t shoot RAW then a lot of the power of Lightrrom or Aperture will not be required. Photoshop Elements 4 is the current version on the Mac, and is a few years old now. They never brought out Elements 5 for Mac but Elements 6 is on the way in 2008. I use Elements 4 on my iMac for image editing (layers etc) and it integrated nicely with Lightroom as well. I haven’t used it to produce galleries. I’ve not seen the tablet you mention but at that price it seems worth a punt.
FYI, my typical photo workflow involves importing into Lightroom, RAW processing, doing any touchup in Elements and then exporting JPEGs from Lightroom which I import into iPhoto from where I can view them, upload to flickr etc.
You can use iChat with an AIM account or a Google Talk account. I use a Google Talk account and it works fine. The new Leopard based features such as screen sharing work fine and there’s not really any reason to need a .mac account for iChat. If you register for a Google Talk account I’d be happy to give you a quick call to try it out. BTW, I have edited your original message to save your email address from being picked up by spammers.
Regards,
Adrian.
Comment by Adrian Spender — November 11, 2007 @ 6:21 pm