I've retired early after 4 years working as Allinea's QA Manager testing HPC software, having spent 3 years working for IBM for the Met Office porting their software to a new supercomputer. Before that I spent 2 years in Boulder, Colorado, working for NCAR. I've also worked for Compusys, and was a high performance computing specialist in the Numerical Weather Prediction division of the Met Office for 10 years.
I now fritter my days away doing conservation work with 4 local groups, changing wikis and scanning SF convention publications. I've developed the Expounder software that displays Wikidata in very clever ways. See the Warlike.info, SFnal.info, Underfoot.info, WhereToday.info and Spacefaring.info sites.
I'm a fan of the literary and hard science ends of Science Fiction, am mildly interested in TV and films, and couldn't care less about Comics and Anime. I occasionally run SF conventions, and their (science) programmes, most recently Loncon3 and Mancunicon. I was joint editor of Fancyclopedia but abandoned it because I could not stop bad practice by other editors.
C. S. Forester is my favourite author, and I run the Hornblower wiki and work on Hornblower stuff.
I've set up a planet designer (currently broken) that does all the fiddly physics calculations. The latter should be very useful to all those people at Contact who I've been involved over the years, and the London-based Space Discussion Society I attended for 2 decades.
I wrote a website Fortress UK, artillery fortifications in Britain, but have folded the information into Wikipedia now. I'm still keen on forts, and underground sites.
Born a Kentish Man in Orpington, SE London, schooled at Dulwich College, I read Physics at Exeter College, Oxford. I came into SF fandom via OUSFG where I helped organize a small convention, Conine, and collaborated on the Bloomsbury Good Reading Guide to Science Fiction and Fantasy. I organized the programme for Illumination, the '92 Eastercon, and briefly ran an Electronic APA Earth calling Biscuit Barrel all while working for software house Logica
I'm always travelling (55 countries, 29 US states) and find it very hard to sit at home on a sunny day. I'm a more passive fan of musicals (especially Gilbert & Sullivan), gardening, history and industrial archaeology, and try to find a happy medium of hill walking and beer. The hill walking is much harder to do in London compared to Colorado, but the conservation volunteering (3 groups now) is fun.
There are other John Bray's on the Web
