What’s this all about?

Randomwire is a blog which focuses on life in China, travel, technology and everything inbetween. 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 Asia and just about anything else that catches my attention. Whilst I cannot claim everything I post is necessarily insightful I enjoy doing it which is my main motivation. To stay up to date please subscribe to the RSS feed or email newsletter. Thanks for reading and feed free to join the discussion or get in touch.

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). Since then I’ve worked as a technologist of various sorts in London (3 years), Beijing (3 months), Shenzhen (2 years), and most recently Hong Kong (2011 to present).

Just in case you haven’t noticed I like travel, photography, technology, foreign films, 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. So far it’s served me well!

The Chinese writing in the logo (随线放矢 – Sui Xian Fang Shi) is adapted from an 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!