My name is David Shield. I've been alive since May 1982, and to plagiarise Terry Pratchett, am not dead yet.
By profession, I'm a Mechanical Engineer, living and working in Nottingham, UK. I spend the majority of the working week designing and analysing gearboxes. I've been in my current job since September 2005, before which I was a student at the University of Bath.
Evidently that's not enough to satisfy my urges to probe into the inner workings of mechanical devices, so I keep a garage full of motorcycles in various states of disassembly, a car which requires pretty much full time attention to ensure it is up to the task of carrying my wife to work every day, and another car which isn't actually a car yet, but which one day I may finish constructing. I have a MIG welder, and in my dreams there is space and money for a lathe and milling machine.
Occasionally I manage to actually ride one of the aforementioned motorcycles - be it the three mile trip to work, a couple of hours blasting around the local countryside on my own or with friends, or a 2700 mile trip around mainland Europe. I'm also maintaining a healthy trackday addiction, with Anglesey and Cadwell Park (twice) notched up so far.
This is my site. It's a place for me to show off some of my photography and writing. Because I can. Show off that is, not necessarily write or take photos with any degree of competence.
My photography can be of anything and everything. I am fortunate enough to have a very beautiful wife, who features in a lot of my photos, but so do all sorts of subjects as I attempt to get to grips with my camera.
My writing tends to revolve around motorcycling. I feel alive when travelling on two wheels, and I endeavour to find ways to communicate this feeling to the reader through mere words on a computer screen. Successfully? You decide.
This site is lovingly hand-coded in (hopefully compliant) XHTML 1.0 using a variety of linux text editors (depending which computer I'm sat in front of), and hosted by streamlinenet. No flashy layouts, no scripts, just clean and simple. Although learning PHP is somewhere on my long term todo list.
I occasionally check my email - dave at wildchild dot org dot uk.
See the licence page for details.