About Me

Taekwon-Do

I started Taekwon-Do at Portlethen School of Taekwon-Do in 1994 training under Mr Tom Slowey II^nd Degree. My first grading went rather well when I acheived a double promotion - the first my instructor had seen in twenty years - which meant that I went from a White Belt straight to a Yellow Belt. I was mightily chuffed. All of my gradings have been conducted were conducted by Mr Leslie Hutchison VI^th Degree. I successfully graded to I^st Degree in on 6^th September 1996.

Academic

I studied (or "read" if your posh fit like what I am) Law with options in Economics at the University of Aberdeen. I then dandied over the Aberdeen Business School which is part of the Robert Gordon University to study Personnel Management (AKA Human Resource Management).

Work

My first "proper" job was with an oil service company called Oilfied Production Consultants where I worked as an Assistant Operations Manager - a rather grand title for someone whose job was to make sure things worked smoothly. I now work at The National Trust For Scotland as an Employee Relations Adviser. This involves all sorts of things but basically anything that HR can do to you that's unpleasant I deal with - also all the legal stuff.

Books

I read books, lots and lots of books. Most are business orientated or management biography type so I'd thought I'd list them here.

This Website

I created this website so that the students I was teaching would have access to reliable Taekwon-Do related information. A great deal of the info of the web at the time (1997) was junk or iffy in some other way. My thinking was that this was a cheap, easy and effective way to provide info. My intention was not to create a site for anyone other than my students although I am aware that many others ahve found the site useful. Since my students had to use a slow connection using Browsers as old as Netscape Gold (does anyone still use it?) I kept things simple and as standards compliant as I could. This kept pages small and quick to load - athough not terribly pretty. I think I achieved my goal.

IT

I am a huge fan of IT, it allows you to do so much that you would otherwise never be able to do. I've learnt massives from the Internet and the people I've met through it or indeed been able to keep in touch with because of it. Whilst I get hacked off when it doesn't work I think of collaborative effots such as WikiPedia or Google Groups which not only allow people across the globe to participate but also act as a historical log of opinions and thoughts.