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I was born in Northborough, Cambridgeshire and had an early three years in Singapore. At the age of five I moved to Nairn, on the Murray Firth, with views of the mountains from the house and the beach down the road. Comprehensive school was in Poynton, Cheshire and at the age of 15 I had the misfortune to move to Luton, Beds. I attended Hatfield Polytechnic, taking a year out working in Harrow, Middlesex (living in Wembley) then moved to Old Welwyn, Herts, onto Biggleswade, Beds and then spent six years in Wokingham, Berks before moving back out to beautiful countryside in Newland, Glos.
I work in the IT business as a SQL Server DBA , so don't be surprised if I make use of the mySQL database resources available. I am married to Cath and have an 10 year old son, Will and two dogs. See our SidAndBob site for more details and pictures.
We had Golden Labradors as kids, so got into the ways of walking back then. We would go up to Lyme Park most Sundays and walk for what seemed like hours then. It wasn't until I bought my own house in Biggleswade that I got a bike and started enjoying the countryside again, but the roads were so busy when we moved to Berkshire that the bikes where condemned to the shed. We got Sid, a Golden Retriever, our first dog of adulthood. This was where the walking started. We lived very close to Ludgrove School where Princes William and Harry were at the time. The walk past the school and up to Bracknell Forest was easily the best in a built up area. When Will was two we decided it was time to get out of the rat run that we lived in and give him the sort of childhood that we both had. As Cath is from Pontyclun in Wales, this direction seemed the obvious choice. We found Newland, loved the place, and the rest is history.
In Sept 2005 we got Bob (Border Collie cross puppy), who needs one heck of a lot of excerise and in April 2006 I discovered Geocaching. These two things led to an increased interest in walking and what with TrigPointing as well, the whole thing has just escalated. As I'm running out of geocaches within a 30 mile radius it's time to look for new ways to enjoy the surroundings and it's become apparent how little I really know of what's available in my locallity. By the way, our geocaching name is SidAndBob.
I started using a yellow Garmin eTrex in Dec 2003 and upgraded to a Garmin GPSMAP 60 CSx in May 2006 with Topo Great Britain v2 and a 2GB Sandisk micro SD card. I complemented this with an HTC TyTN II in March 2008 primarily to run Memory Map and Cachemate.
My camera is a Canon Powershot A720is, which takes great pictures for a small camera. I loved the camcorder style moveable screen on my A80 which allows you to take pictures with the camera held high, or down on the ground without lying in the mud, but it gave up the ghost in Sept 2007.
I'd love to hear from anyone who either knows me from the past or who is interested in any of these projects.
Email me at pete@peterdean.co.uk.
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