My name is Damian Counsell. PooterGeek is my blog. I started PooterGeek in 2002, when I was doing bioinformatics for the Medical Research Council at the Genome Campus just outside Cambridge, UK; but this blog was never intended to be about my day job. Anyway, in 2005, my day job ended, when the MRC closed down the Human Genome Mapping Project Resource Centre (later the “Rosalind Franklin Centre for Genomic Research”—or something). I now live in Brighton & Hove, which is still in England, but warmer. These days I do other things for a living.
My contributions to proper science are negligible, but here are my two contributions to crude generalization:
Counsell’s First Law
The Cool Kids are always wrong, even when they are right.
Counsell’s Second Law
The two most powerful forces known to contemporary humankind are peer pressure and the desire for a quiet life.
Because I wanted people who were searching for technical publications written by me to be able to find them easily, I blogged under a nickname invented for me by a student. I’ve been on the Internet for about twenty years, but it was only after lots of people who previously didn’t see the point of the Net started blogging that I saw the point of keeping a personal Weblog.
Partly because of this, I wrote my first blog in raw HTML, with a text editor. This was even more of a waste of time than blogging using blogging software. Having tried a few tools, I have settled on WordPress. I think it’s the best one I’ve used—and it’s open source. These two facts are connected.
The “broken typewriter” lettering of the PooterGeek banner was made with the free GF Halda font from G:fonts.
The photo of Damian Counsell in front of Brighton’s burned-out West Pier was taken by Louise Lawrence.