About Me

The Man

Greetings, and as you have probably already worked out my name is Michael Parr. I was born and raised in the UK, and until the age of 18 lived in Darlington, a reasonable sized town in the north east whose main claim to fame is being part of the world's first passenger railway.

At 18 I moved to the big city (read as slightly bigger town) of Middlesbrough where I enrolled at Teesside University on a BSc in Computer Programming. Now I have completed my course I have moved back to Darlington while I look for a job in the programming profession.

The Developer

From school to college I have taken ICT courses which have given me teasers of programming. This resulted in me eventually enrolling in a BSc in Computer Programming course at Teesside University.

Through the years of the course I have not only learned how to program in specific programming languages, but also how to apply the basics of programming to different languages leaving only the syntax to master. This was shown to me through my placement year where I learned a language called RPG reasonably quickly with no prior knowledge of a similar language.

My main areas of interest involve the lower level system and how it works in practise as well as system security. I utilised this interest in security for my final year project, which was research into creating a simple to use effective file encryption application for portable media devices. This was created initially to protect USB flash memory devices but could be developed to include other portable devices such as (Removable HDD's).

I have also recently picked up web development skills, building the website you are currently viewing. This has given me good practice using HTML code as well as looking again at PHP. In the future I hope to build on this base expanding into more complex PHP, JavaScript and ASP.Net.

Examples of my work can be viewed in the Programs section of this website.

The Rest

My first real encounter with computers came in 1997 when my family got its first computer and with it a copy of Theme Park. As Theme Park required MS-DOS to run and the computer was running Windows 95, this required me to work with the command prompt in order to play the game. From this point on I have been tinkering with computers and playing video games ever since.

As well as programming for computers I have also built several computers for myself and friends. I find building a computer to be a very rewarding experience from the planning of what to buy, to getting the components and finally putting it together and turning it on for the first time and seeing if what you have created will come to life.

As mentioned above I am an avid gamer, playing a wide variety of games of different types and to different degrees of success.

About This Site

The Name

The name of my site is taken from a song of the same name by a band called Flogging Molly (you can listen to it on Last.fm). I bought the domain name originally thinking it would be a funny name for a company. But as my university career was coming to a close and I began thinking of setting up a website to my work I decided to use the domain to host this site as it is a name which holds personal interest.

The Purpose

This site has been set up to act as a showcase for my work, allowing people to get in touch with me and If they wish to follow my random musing in my blog. I try to bring as much humour as possible into this site as well as building and testing it for a wide range of systems. If you have any trouble with the site feel free to contact me with the issue and I will fix it as quickly as possible.