Nick Ward

You’ve probably come to this page looking for details of Nick Ward, yeah?

Well, if its me you want, then you’ve come to the right place.

If you’re looking for Nick Ward the journalist, the writer, Nick Ward the footballer, the actor or even Nick Ward the famous space adventurer, pirate and general Good Guy, then you really shouldn’t be here. Sorry.

So, which Nick Ward are you?

And therein lies the rub:- Who Am I?

A question I’ve been asking myself all my life, and have yet to find an answer.

Every morning as I wake, I ask it.

Of course, this used to be swiftly followed by- ‘Where am I?’

Thankfully that question never comes up these days.

So here are a few facts to help you on your way:-

Born: Sheffield, England, 196…>cough<
Height: 6′ 1/2″
Eyes: Blue
Hair: Brown. On a good day.

Skills:

Website creation / maintenance.
Network design / maintenance.
Computer builds / repairs.
Photoshop.
Dreamweaver. (…if I really have to…)
WordPress.
English writing. Ha! Didn’t expect that did you?
Electronics and micro-electronics. For my sins.
Programming in PIC Assembler, C, Perl, PHP, MySQL.
Actually, I now do do Java. It’s not horrid. (Actually, I was dead wrong in this. It’s actually very, very cool. Unfortunately, I cut my ponytail off some years ago, and I don’t wear open-toed sandals with socks. Or smoke dope, but you get the idea.)
Scripting in HTML and CSS.

The Web stuff I started learning a few years ago as a ‘hobby’, and it kind of took off from there.

In another life, I was self-employed as an electronics engineer. This initially started off as an advert in the local paper for TV & video repairs, then moved into the repair of high-end A/V equipment, including Bang & Olufsen. I also repaired and even designed and built major electronics for recording studios and bands here in Sunny Sheffield.

But that was a lifetime ago.

These days, my major ‘hobby’ (…obsession?..) is allotments and growing my own fruit and vegetables. Just after Christmas 2011, Sheffield City Council very kindly said I could rent my own plot, and I’ve been busy on it ever since.

As well as ‘allotmenteering’, I volunteer for LEAF Sheffield. They’re a voluntary organisation based in Sheffield 5 who offer gardening sessions to local people interested in allotments and growing and cooking their own vegetables. They also cater for the physically and mentally handicapped who want to get out of the house for a couple of hours.

A year or so ago, my electronic design and building skills were called into action. I was tasked with ‘Bringing Light To The Plots’. This I did by hooking up normal road bicycles to generators. This allows volunteers to pedal for a while and charge the batteries, meaning we can have light after dark. Yes, I know its been done before, but not like this! Other systems can’t store the juice generated -they have to use it at the time. The neat trick is the electronics and micro-controllers that sit between the generator and the battery. Its still in ‘development’ in that if someone has an idea for it, I may include it as a feature. The next big event will see the bike with a distance travelled log, speed display and a calorie counter. This last feature will be pretty depressing, so I may leave it off.

So, have you got the right Nick Ward?

Still not sure you’ve got the right guy?

Okay, a few more factoids:

I love my black cat Alfie. And he loves his daddy. Especially at meal times.
I’ve built robots for Prof. Noel Sharkey of ‘Robot Wars’.
I’m happily divorced and now firmly single, thank you!
I have 12 tattoos on my back. Strange but true, courtesy of a drunken holiday somewhere in the Mediterranean. They are cat paw prints, running from bottom left to top right. Truly unique and totally awesome. If you like that kind of thing.
My telephone number: You are of course joking.
My E-mail address: As above. You’ll have to try harder than that

But I hear that ‘LinkedIn’ have a line on how to get hold of me.

So there you go. I’m definitely not the Nick Ward you were looking for.