A brief description of my interests is outlined below, with links to more detailed information below, or on other pages.

Non computing related:

Sports: - Squash (twice weekly). Walking. Paragliding with the Purple Haze Club in Shoreham. Cycling - racing for Imperial College in the 1987 British Student Championships, and for the Hampshire Road Racing Club, but now mainly mountain biking. Badminton. Snooker. Darts. Table tennis. Golf (occasionally).

Collecting: - Postcards. Rocks and minerals. Toys and gadgets. Mugs. Stamps. Plants, mainly houseplants, cacti (and - rather pointlessly - succulents).

Pastimes: - Water-colour painting and pencil sketching when time allows. Cinema. Listening to classical, popular, and instrumental music. Reading (esp. humour). Travelling and writing. Carpentry. Verbal word play. Driving my Toyota MR2.

Finally for those who may view some of these as rather insular activities: Going out to pubs and parties, and generally having a good time with my friends as often as possible.

On the computing related side my main interests have been in creating and rendering real-time or realistic images on a computer - hence the long term ray-tracing project. Fractals have also featured in many of my programs, one of which was published on the cover disk of a national computing magazine in July 1991. The magazine, sported several images from my program on the front cover, and also contained a three page article, discussing fractals, written by myself to accompany the disk which came with the magazine. Feedback from this program has been particularly rewarding.
 

Squash is my only regular sport, and I play twice a week, once with a work colleague and once with an old university friend. I'm also teaching my girlfriend to play so occasionally it's three times a week!.

Often at weekends I go for long walks in the Surrey hills with some friends. this usually involves finishing at a pub if we have any choice in the matter.

Cycling is one of my favourite activities however But I don't actively race any more. At one time I was racing in three clubs - Hampshire Road Club, West Sussex Racing Club and West London Racing Club to which our club at Imperial College, London was affiliated. When I was at University, Richmond Park was my favourite training circuit - a seven mile circuit for which I was pleased if it took less than 22 minutes. 23 was slow, and 21 was very rare! At home in Portsmouth, the South Downs provided excellent hill training and when it wasn't being used for anything else, it was possible to pay a couple of pounds to use the Portsmouth Velodrome for an afternoon's training. In fact I organized a charity event, hiring out the stadium for a day and got loads of people to get sponsored to cycle as many laps as possible around the circuit. I did 222 very boring laps, but that certainly wasn't the most. One year, with an old school friend, we did the London to Brighton cycle race by cycling from Portsmouth to London, then London to Brighton, and finally back to Portsmouth. Over two hundred miles - which is the most I've ever ridden in a 24 hour period. Nowadays I'm more interested in mountain biking for pleasure than competitive racing.

Paragliding is a recent addition to my interests, thanks to my girlfriend paying for lessons for my 30th birthday. I've not
quite finished my student pilot licence - the first of two stages to complete before being able to fly unsupervised. If you're patient and don't mind waiting for the right weather conditions then I'd thoroughly recommend this to anyone.

Not so much a sport, but worthy of a mention - I've also been bungee jumping twice - the first time over water from a crane in Docklands with the dangerous sports club, and the second time from a crane over a big air filled mattress on holiday in spain.

The other sports mentioned above are in no way regular - They all were once, but now I only sometimes get interested in one of them again and play a few times, before that particular fad dies out again. 

'Littered' is the wrong word since it implies an unordered mess, but since I cant think of another word right now, then it will do: our house is littered with framed postcards all over the walls. Not just a few frames containing single postcards, but twenty or thirty themed frames containing eight to a dozen postcards in each. And all of them coming from the travels of either people I know or my own travel experiences. My sister counted around 320 postcards and that's just the ones which are framed and up on the walls, let alone the shoe boxes full of those less worthy.

Littered, however, is exactly the right word for describing how our collection of plants is spread around the house. In fact there are so many that the top of the television alone is host to three large plants, and space is so limited now, that we've had to resort to hanging baskets on the walls. There is always something in flower at any time of the year, and spring should be a blaze of colour - if they make it through the winter!

Stamp collecting is a hobby that has rather fallen by the wayside these days. I still collect stamps from various sources and keep them in a box waiting for that rare occasion every three years or so when I have a paper removing session, and actually get round to putting the stamps in an album. Somehow my collecting interests seem to have switched to things which can be displayed rather than hidden away on a shelf.

For years now, I've been collecting interesting puzzles and toys and gadgets - as much for guests amusement as for my own I suppose. Prize items include a lava lamp, a plasma ball, a 'light doodler', and a levitron. Generally, I like any of these executive stress reliever style toys that show forces and fluids interacting in interesting ways.

My other collecting interests include collecting rocks and minerals, not particularly through any major interests in geology, but more because there are so many pretty colours and interesting shapes and formations that can be found occurring naturally. That means the shelves are 'littered' with crystalline shapes and brightly coloured minerals rather than 23 different varieties of welsh slate.

I also collect mugs - the kitchen is lined with long shelves full of them - which, as with the postcards, come from places I've visited. This collection didn't start out with the intention of being a collection, but I first realized I seemed to have a lot of mugs when my flatmate and I in Cambridge had a party, and through an entire weekend of people staying over, they didn't all get used up - the mugs that is.