I think anyone can look beautiful in a black and white photo, except me. Although you can't see the beautiful shades of brown, green and black on the cake my housemates made me!
Hi! The other day someone on #svg asked for another contributor's t-shirt size and I got thinking, "I have no idea what these people I'm working with look like, or what they do". I did a quick search and turned up a couple of photos and details but not quite as much as I'd hoped. So, to fill the void I thought I'd jot down a few details about me in case anyone else is as curious as I was! So long to any pretense of modesty...

My name is Brian Birtles. I'm a Christian. I'm 24 years old and I live on the Northern Beaches of Sydney, Australia. I like surfing and swimming. I work full-time for Canon research (CISRA) where I'm fortunate enough to be paid to work with technologies like SVG.

I studied Software Engineering at UTS, in fact, after 6 years, I'm still going! Working on SMIL animation in Mozilla is my final project so hopefully I'm all but done.

I've also worked for Siemens Mobile Phones in Denmark where I was working on implementing J2ME technologies (mostly JSR 135) in the 65 series of phones. And before that I worked for Solutions First, an educational institution called Insearch and in graphic design (where I was mostly doing monkey work).

Other random stuff about me: I speak Danish (now if only I could find someone else to practice with!), I'm learning Japanese but I really want to learn Korean.

Well, if that didn't send you to sleep... here's some photos and travel stories that are sure to do the trick:

Wow! They're some pretty ordinary photos! Mind you I don't pretend to know anything about photography and they're all taken on disposable cameras.

Cheers to Solutions First for giving me hosting and lots of help with setting up software as I need it. Thanks Andy!