About Me

Kieran O'Shea - Mug ShotProfile

Name: Kieran O’Shea
Age: 22
Location: Leeds, UK
Occupation: Computing Student & Web Developer/Designer/Host

Hobbies & Interests: Jazz music, radio broadcasting, web design, web development, programming, golf, cinema, travelling, meeting new and interesting people and most of all, HAVING FUN

Favorite things:
Music: Jazz, Blues, Funk, Soul, Diana Krall, Cassandra Wilson, Alexander O’Neil
Books: Lord of the rings, Northern Lights, Harry Potter
Films: Lord of the Rings, Donnie Darko, James Bond.
Place: Any place where I’m happy

Mug Shot: The mug shot on the top left was taken at a family gathering in August 2006 for my Grandmother’s 80th Birthday. There are most likely better photos of me knocking about in the photo gallery if you care to look over in that direction.

The life story (well, what I’m willing to tell you…)

I provided the above profile for those who want to feel like they know me, for those who actually want to get to know me, and of course to remind those forgetful ones who have actually known me for ages. The truth is though you have never really know someone till you have spent a little time with them…. or do you? For those hard core people (or to be honest those who are probably just bored and surfing the web) here is where I just talk about myself and my life pre-website and blog, after all, theres nothing one really likes more than to talk about ones-self is there….. You have been duely warned….

Most “older folk” would say I haven’t covered all that much ground yet in the sphere of life in general. Not withstanding the fact that they are probably right (after all, what do I really know by now?), I like to disgree with them and so I maintain this website. Not being perfect however, I provide you with every opportunity to disagree with my views, opinions and takes on life in the form of my blog comments - so feel free to post away.

Many of my friends are due to graduate this year, or for those who are a tad younger than myself and/or decided to go off galenvanting for a year or so, next year. Did I decide to take the straight forward path like the rest of them? Er.. not quite.

After what seemed like a lightening trip through Verulam Secondary school near my hometown of St. Albans, Hertfordshire I left with a reasonable set of A Levels, sufficient to gain me access to the halls of learning at the University of York, where at the age of 18 I joined the physics department as an undergraduate.

Despite my love of physics from an early age, it soon became apparent that it wasn’t all it was cracked up to be and in fact there was so much maths in the course that there was hardly time for the physics (ok, not quite but it seemed that way to me). The net result is that after two years in the course, I had to leave.

This was a tough decision making crunch time, especially when I had been so involved in so many other aspects of life at York (see my pages on web projects, radio etc.), especially life, work and student politics at Halifax College. Despite all of this though, I turned my back on all but my friends and aquaintences there and decided to start a new course; Computing at the University of Leeds.

I had long been spending more and more of my time developing web applications (see my projects pages) and other programming exploits so it seemed the logical choice. Computers have in fact been a love of mine for many years, and perhaps with the focus on “doing something at uni you did at A Level” I hadn’t really considered studying computing at all.

Thats not really the point though, as now, I really am doing what I want to be doing. I’m studying harder than I ever felt I wanted to or thought possible, acheiving results that I never thought I could, and turning out personal projects at an impressive rate - feel free to check out my portfolio for some of these.

Private projects aside, I have designed a large number of websites for others that they are very happy with (again, see the portfolio), built a number of custom software packages and CMS systems and my web hosting server coninues to serve a large group of poor students and my ludicrous appetitie for disk space and bandwidth useful for my own projects! If you want something web based sorting out (a site, web application, or somewhere to host your creation(s)) I may just be able to help - get in touch.

Thats about it really, everything else is in the blogs!