About
What’s this all about?
randomwire.com is a blog which mainly focuses on China, technology and everything inbetween (in other words anything which takes my fancy!). The site has evolved over the years and in general I like to post about interesting places I’ve been, photos I’ve taken, technology trends, visual design, stuff going on in the China and just about anything else that catches my attention. Whilst I cannot claim anything I post is necessarily interesting of insightful I enjoy doing it which is my main motivation. To stay up to date please subscribe to the RSS feed.
Who are you?
A question I have often asked myself and have yet to come up with a satisfactory answer!
For the record I grew up in the South-East of England in the fine city of Norwich which was my home until circa 2003 and where I occasionally still make an appearance. I graduated in 2005 from Durham University with a BSc in Software Engineering (basically Computer Science) and then worked in London for three years as a technology consultant (loose definition!).
After a short stint in Beijing I decided to take the plunge and relocated to Shenzhen, China in 2008 where I now live and work for IT outsourcing services firm. Just in case you haven’t noticed I like travel, photography, technology (big time), foreign films (mainly Asian), and just about everything else which stems from those things. Most of my photos on Flickr were taken with a Nikon D70s and more recently a Panasonic Lumix LX3. I’ve been blogging since 2003.
What’s in a name?
I have been asked on numerous occasions why I choose to call the site ‘randomwire’. If you’ve read the above I’m sure you can already guess. Added to the random factor even back in 2003 there we also so few decent top-level domain names left (.com etc) that this was the best I could come up with that was catchy and easy to remember/spell (to me anyway). So far it’s served me well!
The Chinese writing in the logo (随线放矢 – Sui Xian Fang Shi) is adapted from a idiom which means to speak or act with a well-defined objective in mind (有的放矢 – You Di Fang Shi). It’s a word play on the name ‘randomwire’.
What powers this beast of a site?
The site is hosted on a rather powerful Ubuntu server running WordPress. In the dim and distant past I hosted everything off a 2mb ADSL connection from home but after the hits mounted the bandwidth simply wasn’t enough!