Born on the Channel Island of Jersey, but now living on a somewhat larger geographical scale in England, Simon Bisson has lived in several places across the South and West of England.

At one point he lived in Borehamwood where his local supermarket had spent some time as the Death Star. He's now living on a semi-leafy street in Putney...

Simon used to play with fast computers, very fast lumps of metal and electromagnetic launchers at Bath University - until the money ran out. He then didn't wear T-shirts and bermuda shorts at the GEC Hirst Research Centre's Network Systems Group whilst conducting architecture studies for cordless multimedia systems (they're cordless, and they're multimedia...).

Then he was down in the West Country as the Technical Manager of the value added Internet service provider UK Online, coincidently leaving the day they were bought by Easynet. Don't even think about breaking those machines - a fully fledged BOFH, Simon still has a lime pit somewhere. The UK Online brand lives on, and is now part of Sky TV.

He tidied up a bit, and moved to London, to work as a consultant with ECsoft UK Plc, building large scale web applications - including the web-based email service for Freeserve.

He's also done dot-com casual at Scient working as a technology strategist and systems architect, and logging up the air miles. It's a job that took him around the world - to Hong Kong, Newfoundland, the south of France, Portugal and San Francisco (as well as Nottingham and Leeds...). Projects there involved architectures for multi-terabyte online image stores, designs for B2B information hubs, next generation mobile network architectures, processes and tools for digital architecture development, and knowledge management solutions.

He then went back to ECsoft (just before it became part of CIBER), doing much the same sort of thing. It was there that he started getting very interested in the idea of using web logs as a knowledge management solution.

Now he's a freelance technology writer (with some consultancy on the side). He's Messaging Editor for Server Management, a contributing editor for PC Plus, and looks after the networking and server sections of IT Pro with Mary.

Simon has written for along list of publications including The Guardian, The Financial Times, PC Plus, The Official Windows XP Magazine, Computing, Bluetooth World, Data Business, Mobile Business, PCW, PC Answers, IT Pro, The Register, Server Management, Hardcopy, Think Camera, Application Development Advisor, PC Format, Practical Web Pages, Web Developer, Web Designer, Internet Works, IT Week, Computer Arts Network News, THe National Computer Centre, .Net, T3, AOL, FYI, PC Magazine, Techworld, PC Advisor, ZDNet, Vector and SFX.

It's a job that lets him meet interesting people, learn fascinating new facts, and then tell people about them. He also gets to go to interesting places.

He's blogging at Technology, Books and Other Neat Stuff.

Not an urban person (unless it's somewhere with lots of bookshops, so it's thank goodness for Charing Cross Road!), he walks, climbs and occasionally builds narrow gauge steam railways up Welsh mountains. Mind you, after 10 years living in London, he's starting to wonder if it's time to change his mind about cities.

Fannishly he reads far too much SF (at the last count two and half fully shelved corridors worth of paperbacks), collects original Jim Burns artworks, and was the accidental founder of the Bath SF Discussion Group. These days, he just gets grabbed by masked strangers and forced to run conventions...

He blames it all on watching the Apollo-11 moon landing on a flickering black and white TV at goodness knows what time in the morning at a rather impressionable age. That and an encounter with Ted Nelson's book Dream Machines at the age of 13. These days he'll be happy to suggest three things: searching on Google, updating bioses and warming up a trusty old soldering iron.

Simon lives with his wife, the delightful Mary Branscombe, in a flat in sunny Putney. Unfortunately Cicero the cat died in early 1997. She's lying in the sun somewhere, or else chasing a pocket laser with batteries that never run out. As a result Simon and Mary have now been adopted by Callisto, Ben, Pebbles and Jeoffrey. And now, two robots...

You might want to wander over to the home page of their onetime housemate Clive Grace (aka Tanais Fox) - storyteller and web designer extraordinaire.