Welcome to the dreaded “about me” page, dreaded I suspect more from my side of the fence than yours, after all it was you who did indeed click something somewhere to get to here.
Unless…
You have ninja teddy bears who break silently into your home during the day whilst you are at work or the local council library getting books out on the art of shaping trees or shrubs into stunning topiaries. Ninja teddy bears who then change your default home page to this exact page in a two fold plan to drive you crazy and drive hits to this page up.
I’m willing to entertain that theory and that says a lot about me.
Well kind of.
Whilst I do have a bizarre sense of humour I am also very good at what I do on a professional level.
I am currently contracted with the Queensland State Government as a project officer specialising in the application of social media and online collaboration amongst its officers and their clients.
So who am I?
Well admittedly I do hate that question but I am happy to write about some of the “labels” that will show you stuff that I’m passionate about.
Blogger/Podcaster
Without even really knowing it I’ve been blogging on and off since before 1999 when the wonderful and patient woman that would go on to to be my wife and I started a simple little site that we would update family and friends on what we were doing. Of course back then we didn’t know it was called a blog and to be honest I don’t think I knew any other bloggers.
Flash forward over ten years, several blogs later and I am still blogging as well as now podcasting. My personal blog Quit Your Day Job is coming up to its fifth year and has seen some really strong community growth and made it into the Top 100 Australian a couple of times. I also write for the casual gaming site Mashing Buttons and record a weekly podcast for The Midnight Movie Club.
Social media guy
I hate it whenever someone refers to themselves as a:
- social media guru
- social media ninja
- social media rockstar
I’m not saying that everyone who says these things aren’t switched on or social media experts but the odds aren’t good. I’m a social media guy, I like social media stuff. We’ve entered an age where people are able to access information and collaborate with others at an extraordinary rate that is growing daily and that just really interests me and gets me excited.
I’m about community building through social media tools, not about the tools themselves. Never get caught up in the technology, you need to get caught up in people and interacting with them.
As well as my contract with the Queensland State Government I’m also consulting/collaborating with some local Brisbane businesses, developing their communities, more on that later though!
Artist
I credit some of my high school art teachers with killing any great ambition or desire to create art as career but only because I didn’t mesh with the way high school couldn’t encourage individual voices. Unfortunately after years of drawing and painting I completely stopped when I left school.
For years I turned my back on it but fortunately in the last five years I have completely embraced it back into my life. I’ve been working on developing a style which I’ll probably be developing for years to come and have been experimenting with different media but my love for comic book style illustration is still the strongest!
Recently I’ve begun selling commissioned artist sketch cards via my blog which has just been fantastic!
Pop Culturalist
I have always been really interested in popular culture, in general as well as focused on science fiction and comic book related material. I’ve studied a semester of popular culture studies as well as mythology classes and I do consider my general pop culture knowledge to be fairly deep. Completely awesome at the local pub quiz night, not so valuable everywhere else.
But then everyone is an expert in their particular field of popular culture, I just probably think about this stuff a little more than the average person.
Okay so that’s kinda me…
Wow that’s a pretty long about me page and I thank you for making it to the very bottom, except for you who just scrolled here looking for some kind of stinger. Now you know a little about who I am, go ahead and check out my portfolio which talks a bit more about what I do and what I can do for you. Don’t stop there you should definitely drop me a line and say hi, let me know what you’re doing and maybe I can be a part of that!
