I was born in London but lived in Sheffield
for fifteen years so this feels like my home town. I'll admit that though I lived in
Stockport for nearly as long, I don't feel quite the same affection for it.
Edinburgh on the other hand - where I now live - is quite something.
I'm married to Rob Jones, and we have four children - Ben, Mark, Eleanor and Owen, all born in Sheffield.
Sheffield babies can be easily identified as they have 'Made in Sheffield' stamped in their belly buttons.
Owen and Eleanor are twins. (Please do NOT ask 'Are they identical?'
given Eleanor is female and Owen is male).
Ben did a History degree at Sheffield University, took a
conversion Masters in IT at Brighton University, and then helped keep Morgan Stanley's networks running until 2012, when he moved to CERN.
Mark studied Archiitecture at Sheffield and also took a conversion course, at Teeside University. He now works for
Lexis Nexis, helping to maintain their webpages
Eleanor has a BA in Fine Art from Brighton
University and an MA from Goldsmiths; she makes art in Berlin.
Owen studied history at Oxford and is a journalist and commenter. He's the author of
Chavs: the demonisation of the working class, and if you haven't read it yet then you should!
My two brothers are also both in Scotland: Jon Aylett used to work for Intelligent Applications in Livingstone
but now works in Glasgow, and Matthew Aylett is a Speech technologist
who used to work at a startup company called Rhetorical Systems but now runs his own startup called
Cereproc (which stands for Cerebal Processing and is not a breakfast cereal).
My sister, Sarah Aylett, is not a computer person but works
at Great Ormand St hospital in
London where she is a Consultant Paediatric Neurologist.
In whatever time is left from work and kids, I read a lot, especially
science fiction.
Inevitably I have also started writing my own stuff too.I also enjoy
gardening (here's another)
and like listening to (mainly classical) music. My favourite composer is
Shostacovich (and another).
In contrast I really like early music. A whole site on
the crumhorn, wow! (And this
is a pleasant little piece).
Too much keyboard (and especially mouse) bashing has given me
RSI (and here's a comprehensive American site),
so I now have an interest in speech recognition
systems, especially on the Apple Mac.
Finally, like other people with a slightly unusual last name, I have been sucked into
a 'hunt the ancestors' (mine apparently came from Essex but I decided a
short white mini skirt and large gold hoop earrings would only reinforce a totally incorrect stereotype).
