Welcome to my website! I'm 29 years old and living in Cambridge, UK.
Currently I'm working as a software developer for Solidworks, a 3D computer aided design software company. I've been here over three years now, so have seen three whole releases and numerous service packs.
Outside of work, I do all manner of things... I am a Roman Catholic, and attend Our Lady and the English Martyrs Church (often known as OLEM). I am a contributor to the excellent project Distributed Proofreaders, and a more occasional contributor to the Wikipedia. I can often be found on the #philosophy and #philosophical channels on Undernet. I also enjoy going to the pub, as witnessed to by my semi-famous Pub Guide to Cambridge, an archive of which from 2000 is available here. I'm now aiming to produce an up-to-date version which can also be found here, but now from the perspective of a non-alcohol-drinker. Additionally, I enjoy reading too much (especially politics and biographies, and trying to make time for philosophy), travel (though I don't do enough of it), numismatics (coin collecting), TV, computer things, most music (with a particular passion for the works of Wagner), and lots of other things.
Originally I'm from Huyton, near Liverpool, and attended St Aloysius Junior and Infant schools (who don't seem to have a website), and then St Thomas Becket RC Comprehensive. My family still live in Huyton. I studied Maths for three years at Fitzwilliam College, University of Cambridge, which was great fun (mostly!). I left in 1999 with a first class Bachelor of Arts degree, which because of the standard Cambridge mechanism (for ancient and obscure but actually rather good reasons) was upgraded to a Master of Arts degree in May 2003.
In September 1999 I started work at a medium-sized speech product and research company called Entropic in Cambridge UK, and by November the company had been bought and was part of Microsoft. In March 2001 our group was moved to join the many thousands of other Microsoft employees at corporate HQ in Redmond, near Seattle, Washington, USA. At Microsoft I worked on the Speech Application SDK. You can see the division's webpages here. You can even get a copy of the Speech Server now, so perhaps what I worked on will soon be getting used in speech application development everywhere! Or maybe not... I spent a couple of years in the USA, enjoyed it a lot, but I missed the UK so came back in May 2003.
Unfortunately, I then spent a little over a year being rather ill, but I'm now fully recovered, thanks to the excellent care of my family and the staff of Whiston Hospital and the Royal Liverpool University Hospital. I like Cambridge enough that I then chose to come back again! I'm now living in no less than my fifth home in Cambridge since 1999, so I am quite good at getting around.
Many years ago I decided to teach myself HTML, my knowledge of which is only slightly reflected on these simple pages. My philosophy is the simpler the better. I'll leave Flash, Java, and the rest to the websites that take poor dial-up owners hours to load, and make the lives of text-based browsers (they still exist) impossible. Nevertheless, any pleasant criticisms (or praise!) of these pages is appreciated.
If you really want to see what I look like in real life (you fools!) then this is the best you're getting. Actually, this is a very old photo now - I sometimes have some attempt at a beard, attempt being the key word. I am single, so any fantastically attractive millionaire 29-ish-year-old ladies who are potentially interested in marrying me, even after that, are more than welcome to get in touch.
These pages are always under construction, and get changed occasionally, usually when I don't have much else to do...
E-mail me at mike@mikewmiller.net
