A Retrospective
I grew up in Camden, a small sleepy town on the cusp of where Sydney turns from urban to rural. It’s situated about 65km south-west of the Sydney CBD by road. The town hasn’t changed much and the town has not grown a great deal since – development is restricted by flood plains and residents eager to preserve the pastoral feel of the place. Neighbouring suburbs like Narellan have expanded, but Camden has mostly retained its charm.

In early 2008, Camden made the press for all the wrong reasons. Newspapers as far away as the UK reported on a proposal by a muslim society to build an Islamic school in the area. The local reaction was jarringly zealous. Residents immediately condemned the idea. A “rally” at the Camden civic centre was packed out. When the council solicited written public submissions on the proposal, they were flooded with thousands and thousands of them. It seemed that more than 5% of the local population were motivated enough to write in. Most of them were negative. The council ended up rejecting the proposal purely on “planning reasons”. That may have been fair enough, but the mood of the actual residents was distinctly hostile. The affair was spoofed on national television.

This is all the more troubling given that my parents migrated to Camden from South-east Asia in the 1970s and I grew up there during the 80s where the Asian population was not that far from being a single-digit. Sure enough, I copped a lot of racial teasing in school. Inevitably this provoked playground brawls – nothing I said could get the taunts to stop, but violence seemed to work –and this saw me visit the principal’s office on more than one occasion. But all in all, it wasn’t too bad. It was probably a result of spending the first few primary school years in a country town school that led to me refusing to learn how to speak Cantonese from my parents. Although I understand it, that was more a result of osmosis than a conscious effort to learn it. My memories are pretty typical for the region. Hot Summer days spent brushing away the flies, running around the stores with friends on Argyle Street, ice blocks at the milkbar, climbing Mulberry trees and periodically getting up to mischief into trouble. About twenty years have passed since then, but it doesn’t seem that Camden’s attitudes have changed all that much.

After attending a local public school for a while, I attended Trinity Grammar which was located in the city. In 2000, two years after I finished high school, Trinity made the press for all the wrong reasons. Newspapers as far away as the UK reported on an “incident” that would irreparably sully Trinity’s once-reputable name. Now dubbed the “Anaconda incident”, the affair involved various implements made in woodworking class (including one eponymous implement with serpentine qualities), a bunch of bullies and one Year 8 kid who ended up with a very sore backside and an even more damaged psyche. The Anaconda incident immediately eclipsed the Knox Grammar “Apple Chapel” legend and 5,000 boys from other schools at inter-school sports meets found something else to chant about. I have experienced 5,000 boys rhythmically incanting, “Ooh, ahh! Apple chapel!” (complete with pelvic thrust) while teachers watched helplessly. That chant has since been replaced by “An-a-con-da! An-a-con-da!” Even today, when people ask me what school I went to, my slight hesitation often causes them to pre-empt my answer with a correct guess and a snigger. But sullied names aside, it was a terrific school while I was there. High school was memorable was where some of my most enduring friendships were forged.

I completed a Bachelor of Science in Business Information Technology under UNSW's Co-op Program. This included the trials of writing a thesis which totally consumed my life in the month preceeding its due date, before I then moved on to my current degree. I started the degree near the apex of the dot com boom and ended it around the nadir of the dot com crash.

After figuring out that there were no more exciting jobs in the IT industry on offer anymore and with firms shedding staff, I had to figure out what to do next. Having worked full-time during university (in tech support, as a web developer and as a business intelligence systems analyst), I had quickly come to the conclusion that uni life was generally much more enjoyable than working life. More disturbingly, throughout recruitment season, I felt I was being increasingly typecasted as "one of those IT guys", which really did not bode well if I wanted to move to another industry down the track - and many other industries I had learned about in the meantime did seem appealing. IT as work, and IT as a hobby are two different things. If you can successfully combine a hobby with work, you are lucky, but often the case is that the two things are different.

So I weighed up my options, and after being influenced by conversations with various people, decided that I wasn't that old and an additional three years of study to get a law degree wasn't that bad an idea. But a lot of people were incredulous at the idea (“why don’t you just get any old job and start working – at least you’ll be earning money”). Despite being a "degree of words" and being strongly stereotyped as a humanities degree, I concluded that law involved a lot of structured logic and analytical reasoning, which appealed to me given a background in IT. I'm happy to say, this turned out to be the case.

After studies, I joined what I parochially regard as Australia’s best large commercial law firm and practised as an IT lawyer (together with a stimulating stint as a Banking & Finance lawyer).

A couple of years in, with people rapidly leaving Australia for London and New York, I decided it was time to live overseas for a while. But I didn’t want to experience it all stuck in an office until the wee hours of the morning, so post-graduate studies seemed to be the best option. I applied for several programs and was astounded when I gained admission, along with a dozen other IT and IP lawyers from around the world, to Stanford Law School’s Master’s program.

About Hear Ye!
This site, in its present online journal form, started in January 1998 when I was 16. That was the start of my final year in high school. The term “blog” arose with the coming of the third millennium. I actually disliked the term “blog” when it was first bandied about, but after a few years the term entered into common parlance and now it’s part of virtually everyone’s lexicon.

Hear Ye! is over a decade old. You can see every post I’ve made since then in the archives. You will also be able to see how my opinions and worldview has changed throughout the years.

In the 1990s, personal homepages were mostly static, one page things, inevitably with a tilde in the URL. I somehow still have a couple of them lurking around on my hard drive, datestamped as early as 1993. One of them from 1996 (and very popular back in its heyday!) has been re-uploaded here.

On Religion
I am Christian.

Site Info
This site runs on a proprietary content management system I made in 2001 called Livewire. CMS packages out there like Movable Type are probably more fully featured and better than mine, but nothing beats the satisfaction of creating something with your own hands, which is what is what I find is alluring about programming. Livewire is programmed in PHP.

Photo Gallery Info
The pictures you see in the gallery have most likely been taken with the following equipment:

Canon EOS 350D Digital SLR Camera
4GB Microdrive, 4GB CF

EF-S 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6
EF 17-40mm f/4L USM
EF 50mm f/1.4 USM
EF 28-135mm f/3.5-5.6 IS USM
EF 70-200mm f/4L USM
Speedlite 550EX Flash

Olympus C-50 Zoom Digital Camera
5.0MP, 128MB XD

Photo Use Policy
You can basically do anything you want with the photos for private use. Public non-commercial use is allowed as long as you reference the source, and it would be nice if you let me know you're using something. For any other purposes, e-mail me.

The work is licensed by the Attribution-NoDerivs-NonCommercial 1.0 Creative Commons licence.