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Dave Whiteland

Just the facts.

Beholder: I write, draw, and program the Beholder projects.

Current project:
I’m currently working on a story about a cat.
Most recently, Dwindle: a Tapir’s Tale went live on World Tapir Day, 2017.
Exploding Pen: I keep Exploding Pen ticking over, which publishes the Beholder book projects Fudebakudo and The Knot-Shop Man.
mySociety (2010–2017): For seven years I worked full-time as part of the international team at mySociety, a UK-based charity that makes websites and digital tools that empower citizens all round the world.
CompSci: I’m a Computer Scientist by training — I studied and later taught at the Comp Sci department at Royal Holloway. You can see some remnants of this in my vintage illustrations.; Most of my life in computing has been as a programmer (although these new-fangled days the industry term is "developer"). I tend to think in Perl for comfort-coding (not least because it seems to me there is something slightly backward about being forced to express yourself in a language doesn’t have pronouns), but actually I've worked professionally in Java, Python, Ruby and PHP, together with a quite a lot of Javascript. I do estoric code too: the Fudebakudo helmet was, for the challenge of it, crafted entirely in POV-Ray using a text editor (yes: no wireframe modeller used for that!). Going back in time, my first full-time job was on the early HOLMES system used in UK Police incident rooms, and before that I wrote Assembly code for a summer job. I did my algorithms coursework in ALGOL68 (on a VAX), and way before that I was coding BASIC on a 8+32Kb UK101 in a case made of wood.

Aikido: Not brawling for no prizes. In skirts. Weird.

Sotenjuku dojo in Egham and Staines
Renbukan dojo, Bangkok (Phra Khanong)
Suibhneas dojo, North London (Wood Green)
Airenjuku dojo, Central London (SOAS)

Thailand: I’ve spent around six years, on and off, in Thailand. For two and a half of those years I was a volunteer at a girls’ school, where I taught art to 6-year-olds, and English to 11-year-olds.
Bike: I’m an ex-biker, and I miss it. Many, many years ago I had a trusty CX500. More recently, I was riding a Honda NT650DV. If you don’t know about bikes, you’ll think: ooh, big bike. If you know the difference between an NT and a CBR, you’ll think: Dullville.
Boat: I sometimes crew a type of sailing boat called a Drascombe. Two masts, tan sails (you care? OK: a gunter-rigged yawl with a loose-footed main) and the whole thing the size of a very large wardrobe.

Drascombe Association
Plymouth Sound webcam

Other things

For not entirely practical reasons, I used to be a member of the IGKT:

International Guild of Knot-Tyers

I‘ve been a reader of the following things for a long time:

Private Eye: The celebrated satirical magazine, featuring some of Britain’s best cartoonists
Gruts: A fine example of blogging: personal, silly, clever, funny
The Straight Dope: “Fighting ignorance since 1973 (it’s taking longer than we thought)”

Three worthy causes to which I belong:

Amnesty International
RNLI
Open Rights Group

There are a number of people whom I greatly admire, and luckily for me several of them are my friends, colleagues and teachers.

Finally, in a list of no particular order, here are some people whose lives or work are, to my mind, especially deserving of a standing ovation:

Captain Hans Langsdorff
Karen Woo
Richard Feynman
Ted Nelson
Ricky Jay
Terry Gilliam
James Randi