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This picture, from May 2005 shows my wife Fern and our first child, Nicholas Mun-Yew Smith. It was taken in Palau Langkawi. Background from this image was used as the signature image for this site.
Long before I became a father, I started my career working in traffic management with Vic Roads, in an area principally involved with traffic signals, but more recently with automated incident detection systems. This job involved a mixture of hardware and software work, so it was never boring.
More recently I have been working at Thales on the Eurocat air traffic management system. I recently moved on from my job as an HMI software engineer, and I am now working on toolchain applications in Java, with a focus on automated testing.
Apart from that, I have continued to work on my web hosting business, Network applications which hosts this site, among others. This business has allowed me to stay up to date with the wider software industry, something which is not always possible when working for a large company.
Before I was married, and when my free time was (it seems) infinite, I used to do a bit of cycling, cross country skiing, bush walking and sea kayaking.
This picture is a scan of a photograph I took in Hattah Kulkyne national park some time during the late 1980's. This is the only part of Victoria which is representative of Australia as a whole. It is dry, flat and sandy. It is also quiet, and gifted with very dark skies. I like to go back there as much as possible but lately I have managed only one trip every five years or so. Needless to say, it never changes between visits. The Mallee has been there unchanged for hundreds of thousands of years.
Its not always possible for me to go to these remote areas now but I try to find outlets by riding to work as much as I can, and I get on the water when the weather is right.
I recently bought a small sailing boat. Small because it has to fit into the back of my van, and sailing because it's a good excuse to get on to the water. This is a picture of Nicholas and I on Albert Park lake in Melbourne.
Nicholas will be a brave sailor one day. For now he just sits down and holds on.
If I have time to spare from my other activities I like to spend time on the tech website slashdot. Otherwise I have been known to haunt the sci.space newsgroups which is where space technology fanatics tend to gather.