About me

After a varied carreer in mechanical, electrical, electro-mechanical, nuclear and electronic enginering I ended up in Hong Kong in 1972 working for the British Foriegn Office. For most of my working life I have done a full time day job and done part time work, mostly running companies, during weekends and evenings. This included everything from rebuilding power boats to making furniture and selling computers to managing rock and roll bands.

In 1982 I resigned from the British Foriegn office to sell computers full time.  This led to writing articles for most Asian computer magazines about how to use computers reviews of software, etc. When Desktop Publishing first arrived (Pagemaker on Macintosh) I was the first to write tutorials etc which led to a graphic design company and I became the desktop publishing "guru" in Asia.

In 1994 I moved from Hong Kong to the Philippines to join the Global Sources Media Group and in 1995 started a new division to build what became one of the biggest business to business Web sites in the world.  Later I moved to iQuest to build Worldroom.com

A few years ago I retired and spent my time building Motorcycle Philippines. The expertise gained over the years soon showed in the rapid growth of the site.  Motorcycle Philippines quickly grew to be one of the most popular web sites of any kind in the Philippines. By January 2006 it was getting seven million page views per month, had over 20,000 registered forum members and was gaining new registered members at the rate of 1,000 per month.  The site had become so huge that most hosting companies could not handle it.  Apart from some help from a moderator I did everything myself while the repeated hacking attempts and constant spam attacks by competitors made it harder than it needed to be. This was not what I retired for so I eventually decided to "retire" again and gave it all away.

I have other small sites to look after and need to keep busy so this little site was created as the portal to the sites I build and host.

When I gave away Motorcycle Philippines I was burned out and needed a rest but after a few weeks I was persuaded to return to work and build carsalesasia.com A multilingual, multistyle web site with many sophisticated features.

I am just an ordinary English guy.  I am certainly nothing special and no better than the next guy but we all have our stories to tell and the older we get the more we have.  Some of what I put on this site will get a "so what" reaction from many while others will find the same writings hard to believe.  Typical examples would be the articles on Philippine roads and local governement that seem quite normal in the Philippines but hard to believe in the western world, or my experiences in the spiritual world that may seem nothing special to some while others will be shocked and maybe very unconfortable. Unfortunately the most interesting experiences are those I cannot write about on a site like this because they would almost certainly trigger serious problems for some people but I will work around it and those who really want to know more are welcome to ask.

I am supposed to be retired but working harder than ever.  I have spent the last 35 years in Asia and about 20 years ago I changed from an athiest to a spiritual teacher through an experience of epic proportions. I went from a henpecked guy afraid of his own shadow to VP of an international corporation. I built some of the biggest and most successful web sites in Asia. I built communities and fought corruption. I met with the President of the Philippines a few times and have become a mix of Asian   and English. I now consider myself a citizen of the world and home is wherever I happen to be living at the time but this of course also means I don't completely fit in anywhere anymore, certainly not in my own country.  Along the way I made a lot of mistakes and had many painful experiences. I went from rags to riches and back again a few times. I met men and women I will never forget and many I would like to forget.

I was married to an English girl for nearly 20 years and have two children in England that I am very proud of. My complete change of personality coincided with divorce, massive emotional and spiritual problems, drastic changes in finances, etc.  I then met the lady who made my new life complete.  My current Filipina wife is in many ways a typical Filipina while in others she is truly exceptional.  We have one of her nieces and one of her nephews living with us and being adopted.  Not many people have a family, go through a complete personality and lifstyle change, then have another wonderful wife and kids.  Its almost like two lifetimes in one.

My very good friend and spiritual teacher for the last 20 odd years, Clif Sanderson, suggested I write a book about what he called my "mind boggling experiences". I don't think I am ready for that yet but this Web site gives me a chance to get started on writing and see what happens. - That is if I ever get time to write it.