james mckay dot net

Er, hi there.

I guess you’re here because you would like to know a bit about me, so here goes.

My name, as you’ve probably figured out, is James McKay, and I work for Parliament as an Analyst Programmer, writing computer code to turn all the lively interchanges between Gordon Brown and David Cameron into Word documents and web pages. Previously, I was the Senior Developer at EurekaStep Ltd, an Internet and New Media agency now based near Covent Garden, and before that I was the webmaster for Kingdom Faith, a major church and Christian ministry based in Horsham, West Sussex, where I live.

In my spare time I maintain the website for The Way of the Spirit (the Bible Reading Course written by my father), several WordPress plugins (notably Comment Timeout, which allows you to close comments on old posts), and a blog, which you are almost certainly reading just now.

I am a graduate of Selwyn College, Cambridge, where I read Natural Sciences (Physics).

Contrary to popular belief, I was not born in Scotland. I spent the first eleven and a half years of my life in Hull, which is about a hundred and fifty miles south of the border. When I was a child my friends all told me I was Scottish, but up in Scotland all my relatives told me that being born in England made me a “Sassenach,” in other words, irredeemably English. For some reason that I never quite understood, they seemed to change their tune about that after I got into Cambridge though…

On the rare occasions when I’m not at the computer, I enjoy doing various other things including music, photography, and entertaining my two nephews. My favourite food is Sara Lee double chocolate gateau and my pet hate is mince.

About this blog

The reasons why I started this blog are lost in the mists of time somewhat. My original plans were to either (a) make it a complement to my contributions to the ASP.NET forums and whatever other online communities I am involved with, or (b) act as a complement to, or even a substitute for, our annual Christmas lettter. It has actually ended up being my random ramblings on anything and everything you can imagine with no particular end in mind. There’s a lot of geeky stuff on here (I am, after all, a computer geek), but hopefully there is enough non-geeky stuff to capture the interests of everyone.

This blog is a member of the 9rules Network, and therefore contains only quality commentary and content. I’m never known to post inane quizzes telling the world which Star Wars character I am, and I never ever link to YouTube videos. (What, never? Well, hardly ever.)