I live in Cork Ireland, with my wife and two sons. I have lived here since 2000 when I started work at Cork Institute of Technology. I grew up in Cork, but after college I moved around a bit and have lived in Berkeley, California; Limerick; Braga, Portugal; Waterford; Dublin; and Savannah, Georgia. I miss most of the places I’ve lived, but I like Cork a lot. It’s just about the right size for my tastes. I also spend some time each summer in my wife’s village Chañe in Spain.

I like to take pictures and I used to take it very seriously. I completed a City & Guilds certificate in Photography at Waterford Institute of Technology. It was fun to take a hobby seriously. But apart from holiday snaps and baby pictures I’m on a break from pictures at the moment. I am waiting for some inspiration and a new camera. I used to teach a night class in Photography and darkroom use, but people don’t want to use darkrooms anymore. I like to take pictures of the man made environment and I like the details that I can find in cities when I look hard enough. I’m very interested in the graphic qualities of the man-made environment. My last big project was documenting commercial typography in Porto. For a number of years I’ve been collecting pictures of street covers.

I work as a lecturer at Cork Institute of Technology. I teach computing courses at a variety of levels and lately I’ve mostly been teaching web courses. Before working at CIT I taught multimedia at Waterford Institute of Technology (WIT) and at Savannah College of Art & Design (SCAD). Before teaching I worked on interactive projects and even worked as a technical writer for Macromedia for a few months. I miss working in multimedia but I am starting to think that as the technology becomes easier to use the field is best left to design professionals.

I am interested in digital video compression. I wrote my Master’s thesis on Block Matching Algorithms. That was way back in 1995. But I’m surprised how many hits my thesis still gets after all this time. I suspect with the roll out of digital TV across the developed world, people are curious about how digital video works.

I am interested in podcasting. Ironically, I used to never listen to the radio when I was younger. Now I listen to radio programs from all over the world as well as from RTE in Ireland. You can find links to my favorites here. I’m also interested in the educational possibilities of podcasting. I started putting recordings of my lectures online in 2001. Since then that process has become easier. In 2007 & 2008 I offered a course on web development that was delivered primarily online. This was an interesting experiment.

Misc

The Use of Props in Hawks’ His Girl Friday

Guided Tour of the Architecture of Cork

Photo-Journalism ethics in the Digital Age (pdf)

Podcasting in Education (pdf)