About

Per­sonal Story:

I am 40-plus-ish and live in Sydney, Aus­tralia. Mar­ried to Avril with one son, Liam. I am a geek by nature. Whilst I con­sider myself more of a soft­ware geek than more than hardware/gadget geek: gad­gets kinda inter­est­ing. Espe­cially if you can write stuff to run on said gadgets.

From an early age, I have been fas­cin­ated by these things called “punch cards” and “prin­touts”, used as scrap paper in our primary school. Grow­ing up on a farm, and going to a remote coun­try school, Mr. Stew­art finally intro­duced me to com­puters via school circa 1981, the first PC I used was an Apple II from the SA Angle Park Com­put­ing Centre.

My Dad had the good sense to buy me a TRS-80 Model I. And I loved this machine. From this com­puter, I learnt to pro­gram; leav­ing a life-long love of mak­ing software.

One day in late 1983, my Dad and I saw the Apple Lisa. A few months later, we pur­chased the first Macin­tosh 128K sold by Tim Klee­man from Ran­dom Access in Adelaide. In 1986, I joined Tim at Ran­dom Access and my career path was chosen: the IT industry.

I met my wife, Avril, at Ran­dom Access. Liam was born whilst I was work­ing at Ran­dom Access. The skills learnt in Adelaide from people such as Lind­say Simpson, Daryl Schulz and oth­ers launched me into my per­sonal dream: work­ing for Apple, itself. Three years at Apple and I soon found that work­ing for a multi-national cor­por­a­tion is not as won­der­ful as the bro­chures make out. Work­ing under CEOs like Mike Spind­ler, Gil Amelio and finally Steve Jobs; local Man­aging Dir­ect­ors Steve Vamos and Di Ryall — and thanks to Mark Pieper and Lars Marcher for teach­ing me the ropes of the cor­por­ate world.

Mark Pieper, now at Adobe, found me again: and off I went. I joined in the darkest days of Adobe: around the time Quark “announced” they were buy­ing Adobe (a stu­pid move from a smelly com­pany) and left near Adobe’s height. Through this time, I saw the rise of Adobe InDes­ign to take over QuarkX­press in the Aus­tralian mar­ket. For vari­ous per­sonal reas­ons, this was a tri­umph to see Quark slowly die.

After 20 years on the job; much inter­na­tional and local travel, I decided to take a break. As a man­ager said to me at the time: this was a brave move. With no job to go to, I was tech­nic­ally unem­ployed. 6 months later, Frank Arrigo saved me from obscur­ity and hired me as an Evan­gel­ist into Microsoft Aus­tralia. Chan­ging my busi­ness card title to “Pro­fes­sional Geek”, I feel the inner me is attached to a job I love: soft­ware tech­no­logy and cool customers.

And his­tory here is still to be written.

This is me with Avril Hodge, my beau­ti­ful wife. If you are a fan of Chris­tian Slater

This is Liam with Avril, geek-in-training.

The fam­ily own also two MINI Cooper S’s; one named Scar­lett (left) and the otherMegan (right). Yes, the MINIs have names.

Our fam­ily has two Kor­ats; Mee Noi (left) and Lucy (right). They are pure bred Thai cats, known as Si Sawatin Thai­l­and, Korat out­side of Thailand.

My present gig is Pro­fes­sional Geek at Microsoft in Aus­tralia. Pro­fes­sional Geek is a polite way of say­ing I do stuff with soft­ware run­ning on com­puters. Pre­vi­ously, I have worked for Adobe and Apple. These pre­vi­ous employ­ers have left me with a life-long love of the Mac and Pho­toshop. Depend­ing on the ver­sion of Adobe InDes­ign you use, you may see my name in the About Box…

This web site, pre­vi­ously called mun­genet, has been on the inter­ent since 1996. It pred­ates the hype/craze of “weblogs/blogs/blogosphere/web2.0″. His­tor­ical views of mun­genet on www.nickhodge.com and mun­genet on webstuff.apple.com. Apart from the design com­ing a long way; tech­no­lo­gies have too.

My per­sonal likes are books (his­tory, spe­cific­ally mil­it­ary his­tory); soft­ware gen­er­ally; gene­a­logy and music (except R&B, Jazz) — espe­cially music of the 1980’s; and any­thing by Neil Finn.

Travel has been a part of my work, and thank­fully some­thing the whole fam­ily enjoys (70 Days, 7 Coun­tries and Jour­neys in 2005). In my Adobe days, I vis­ited New Zea­l­and and major cit­ies in Aus­tralia regularily.

Writ­ing soft­ware is bas­ketweav­ing for the mind — it clears the head. The pre­vi­ous CMS for this blog was driven by the mun­gen­eten­gine; writ­ten in PHP and is greater than 2000 lines long.