peterdean.co.uk

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 it won't come as any surprise that most of this site is driven by a mySQL database. I am married and have an 15 year old son, Will and our dog(s). 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 in the Peak District 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 South 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 shortly afterwards 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.

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. I complemented this with a Pocket PC March 2008 and an Android device in Oct 2010, primarily to run GPS/mapping software. In late 2012 I jumped ship to a Magellan eXplorist 710.

My camera is currently a Samsung WB750 (after a string of Canon Powershots), which takes great pictures for a compact camera. I geotag all my photos using GeoSetter.

I'd love to hear from anyone who either knows me from the past or who is interested in any of these projects.

Please feel free to sign the guestbook.