About Myself

'Who are you, aged man?' I said,
'And how is it you live'?'

(Lewis Carrol, Through the Looking-Glass)

Contents:
        Who am I?
        The Work I Used To Do
        My Musical Interests
        My Art Interests
        Computers
        Other Interests

Who am I?

Well, my name is Roger Yeates and I live in the county of Devon, England, on the northern edge of Dartmoor - our village does have a pub and a church, but no supermarkets or multi-storey car parks as yet!

The boss, in the boss's chair (You will need to look at this picture, if you enter my competition.)

I was a technical manager for BT but am now retired, and enjoy cultural things like music, art and philosophy (various!), and technical and scientific things like computers, psychology, industrial archaeology and vernacular architecture. I still maintain an interest in telecommunications and electronics when I can, and dabble in a little tuition and consultancy.

Now I should have some spare time, I hope to spend it on my hobbies!

I would like to use my home pages to encourage contact with people who share the same interests, so I expect to gradually build up more and more links over a period of time - including your site if I like it! I also intend to put in MIDI files, audio files (short ones!), even video clips where possible, as well as lots of pictures. I will include suitable icons as well as text to indicate the file types, for those browsers that will support them.

There will, however, be lots of text, as I do tend to be be somewhat verbose!

"Bright is the ring of words,
when the right man rings them..."

(R.L Stevenson, Songs of Travel)

If you are using Internet Explorer 3 or similar, you should have heard background music on the first page, and seen a scrolling marquee. The music is a MIDI file of part of one of my own compositions, called Nancarrow Music, inspired by the composer Conlon Nancarrow. More on this anon.... Playing now should be a Bach 2-part invention. The music can be stopped by pressing the "stop" button on your browser, if you don't want to hear it.

The Work I Used To Do

After leaving school early (after a dispute with the headmaster over my future studies), I had a couple of "dead end" jobs before joining the BBC. After a few years working for the BBC, I joined what was then (1960s) the General Post Office (Telephones) and remained in telecommunications for the rest of my working life, through all the changes of organisation - from working for the Civil Service to working for BT plc.

During my later working days, I was a specialist in Computer-Telephony Integration (CTI), which is an area in which I still have a lot of interest, and one in which our part of BT did much interesting work.

My Musical Interests

I have played all sorts of music on the guitar for many years, and have now started to learn the piano. I enjoy all kinds of music, instrumental and vocal, and I have included details of my musical world if you would care to explore my ideas and listen to some of my compositions!

My Art Interests

I enjoy painting watercolour landscapes, particularly miniatures. I also enjoy some modern art, although I find it "interesting", rather than something to hang on the wall, although this might change if I lived in a different sort of house! I have included some of my tastes in art as well as some interesting art places (coming soon!), if you would care to follow them up.

If you would like to see some of my own pictures, have a look in my gallery. I could even paint you a picture if you wish!

Computers

My first experience with computers came through the Open University, courtesy of a teletype and paper tape reader at the local technical college! As I remember, it was very much like being on-line to the Internet - every action was followed by a frustrating wait for something to happen. Only the error messages have changed....

I have all sorts of computer interests, but particularly music and graphics at the moment. I am fascinated by operating systems and networking, but only have fairly basic knowledge of them. I have written code and designed systems in a real-time operational environment, but don't really see myself as a programmer, although I have been playing with C on the PC, just recently, and now with VBScript for a few of these pages.

Other Interests

I have other interests, not least my wife and family, and I will expand on these (not wives, etc. - you know what I mean) when I can find time. Before I retired, I had some idea about having spare time. I realise now that there is no such thing!

Roger Yeates
Roger.Yeates@btinternet.com