About

 

Mat Smith is in his very early mid-to-late thirties now. (Ugh)

He runs a portrait photography studio and Education IT business, has a dangerous habit of consuming large amounts of filter coffee during the day, a very low musical compatibility with pretty much all of his good friends let alone anyone else he has met, a low boredom threshold, a mild form of linguistic OCD, a general love of long sentences and lists – especially those comma- or hyphen-separated clause-based sentences, a healthy mistrust of Lynn Truss, a thing about apostrophes1, and likes the Oxford comma. Wow sorry, got carried away there.

His background in music and IT is so schizophrenic (the thought of combining the two makes him queasy) that he has now decided to give up on a career in music altogether, and pursue an entirely different life involving photography. Oh, and Education IT. Yes, it’s not a hugely logical step, but this choice is currently providing the necessary level of human interaction, interest, and brain space.

He has a very open mind, loves cooking things out of the ordinary (eg. reindeer stew), and is ever-so-slightly nocturnal, preferring night-time and winter to summer and mornings.

Mat doesn’t write about anything in particular, but the purpose of this blog is to act as an outlet for whatever is in the mind at the time. Some of it is extremely useful to a very small number of (call us ‘niche’) people, but I imagine it’s largely useless to most who don’t know me in some way.

His past reads thus:

Born London, brought up in home counties, year out internship in IT banking, University in Manchester (Computer Science then Music degree), pianist in a function band for a year, work in IT for four years, gave that up recently, and now it’s me and my camera, ready to face the world and eventually change it somehow for the better.  That’s the idea, anyway.

As this is Mat’s personal blog, it seems to make sense to compile a list of websites and enterprises he is associated with, runs, or otherwise takes a great interest in.

Here’s my online business card: http://about.me/matsmith

Here’s my photography portfolio website: http://www.matsmithphotography.com/

Here’s my Education IT Business: http://www.schoolcomputergeek.co.uk

Some other Mat-administered sites:

Mat Smith Photography / Shop / Blog
Natalie Raybould Soprano
Juniper Kick (no longer): Home of London based vocal jazz duo
Miratus.com (no longer): not a website but an application testing ground
This one: WordPress blog
DrinkLeaf.com (no longer): Yeh, that business idea for a fashionable chain of high street tea shops to bring back a healthy lifestyle and introduce local trade, art, fashion, and live music to the Starbucks market never got any further than registering a domain name… oh well.  Perhaps I shall one day write a blog post about the concept which was amazing.
Your Wedding Captured: the wedding photography collaborative, still in development

Mat-frequented sites:

Click to view profile on: Facebook, Myspace, Last.FM
Mat’s Flickr: shared photos
Dollorama: private community site for serious doll collectors

Mat-somehow-involved-sites:

DCHS: a degree of site design, branding, and site specification
[Edit 10 years after writing this: many more websites…]

Notes

1 eg. if a word ends in an ‘S’ but is not a plural, one naturally adds an ‘apostrophe-S’ after the initial ‘S’.  For example, St James’s Park.  If you disagree with me, I don’t want to know you, you’re horrid and wrong.  I don’t care that St Thomas’ Hospital in London is spelt that way, that’s because, as writes Dr H.R., “it may help you to know how St. Thomas’ Hospital (its official name) in London justifies its use of just one ‘s’. They say it is because it is named after two people called St. Thomas – St. Thomas the apostle, and St. Thomas of Canterbury.”
Incidentally, the above was shamelessly lifted (and not verified) from this page, frankly it doesn’t need verification because the writer Martin Dace speaks so much truth and goodness in this page alone I would lend him my granny for a day.  I’d also like to say at this point, I wholeheartedly agree with everything he says on the aforementioned page, and was relieved to see his intuitive pseudo-rebuttal of Lynn Truss, which saves me a long ranting blog post on the matter, thank God.
Wow, I was carried away again. My life is more than grammar rants.