The incredibly boring and
thankfully brief (Auto)Biography of Owen Cliffe
Born in
Preston, Lancashire, UK in
1979 at some ungodly hour of the morning. Second of 3
children with an older brother and a younger sister, I am very
distantly related§ to
Terry
Nation (the inventor of the Daleks and Blake's
7). We moved to Stapleton,
north of Bristol (opposite the ground where, rumour has it, W. G. Grace once played cricket, on occasion)
for a couple of years where I attended the nursery and infants of Begbrook Primary
School
. In 1985 we departed this fair isle and moved to the
vicinity of Newark, Delaware in the USA
(which, incidentally is near where Cedella Booker, Bob
Marley's Mother lived until 1976) , where I attended John R. Downes
Elementary School for a year (I also briefly attended an
Ascend * class for one day a week
at another school whose name completely escapes me). In 1986
we then moved to the municipality of Overijse near Brussels (in
Belgium) where I attended the British School Of
Brussels until the christmas of 1992, at which point we
moved to
Dorridge, Solihull (where the
last known victim of Smallpox died in 1978) in the West-Midlands, UK. I then
attended Arden School, Knowle, where Ben Powderhill and I set
up the (now defunct) company Quality Genius
which wrote software to help people fill in forms (it seemed
like a good idea at the time). I left Arden in 1995 with some
GCSEs and
went on to do a few A-Levels and
A/S-Levels at Solihull Sixth Form
College before departing Solihull for the University of Southampton in
1997 where I graduated with my B.Sc. Degree in Computer
Science in 2000. During that time I also worked part time for
a small (now defunct) web development company called Cambro
and briefly (in a summer holiday) for British Telecom. After university I
moved to the beautiful city of Bath where I worked at
EduServ full time for
about 18 months, before starting my Ph.D.
in Computer Science in 2001. In 2001 we dissolved Quality
Genius software and transfered our software rights to ISDE who retain them to
date. In 2006 I married my wife (she wasn't my wife before
that) and, after a protracted period of procrastination I
finished my Ph.D. In the final year of my Ph.D. I followed
calling to the sysadmin trade when I took a job as a network
administrator at the University where I worked for a 18 months
or so before returning to research in the computer science
department.