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Enter The Vortex

Picture of a Vortex

(The Homepage of Nick Burch)


Welcome to the home of much of my collected online works. Well, the home of things I do online that aren't with others at any rate. Oh, and the things that don't go on Mastodon or Twitter or my old Blog. That mostly just leaves speaking and talks that I've given, my writings, my notes on various computing things, or something else entirely. Chances are, if you haven't found it anywhere else, then it might well be here!

On your left you'll find a navigation bar. This handy thing will guide you around the main parts of the site. In modern browsers (i.e. those that understand the css directive "position:fixed"), it should float about in a friendly yet disconcerting manner. In old browsers, it will remain fixed, but hopefully somewhere sensible on the left hand side. Text mode browsers, screen readers and the like will probably find it at the bottom of the page. Otherwise, it could be anywhere.... Hopefully it will guide you to wherever you wanted to be.


Me

As it so helpfully says above, this is the homepage of Nick Burch. Now, rumour has it that there may be several people of that name in existence, which is just plain inconvenient. Some of them have even been know to email me about this very fact. So, which of the many instances of Nick Burch around the world am I?

For the time being, I'm living in Oxford. I work for FLEC, a Software-as-a-Service Business focused on Logistics. We are trying to help the Logistics Industry to make life better for their temporary / Agency workers, whilst also saving money through efficiencies. Think something like Uber or Task Rabbit, only obeying all the laws and regulations! I'm the Director of Engineering at FLEC, and also look after all things AI / ML there.

Before that, I was with Quanticate, a CRO with a strong focus on Biostatistics, Clinical Programming, Clinical Data Management, PV and Medical Writing. At Quanticate, I was the CTO, and also head of the AI + Operational Development team, making use of things like Open Source and Open Standards, to both improve efficiency and offer new services. There was a lot of Content Management and Workflow in that, AI and ML came in towards the end, along with Open Source, which should be no surprise given my background!

Continuing with the open source theme, I'm a member of the Apache Software Foundation, and a big believer in open source and open development, so I'm often to be found contributing to other open projects too.

Before Quanticate, I spent three years with Alfresco in Maidenhead, having a great time being paid to develop open source software, build communities, mentor people on open development, and other such things! Before my time with Alfresco, I worked for nearly 7 years Torchbox, a web / java / python / django / xml / etc firm just north of Oxford. There I architected and developed software and systems for a variety of non-profit and environmental firms. Towards the end of my time at Torchbox, I was also CTO of CarbonHero, the Green Tech startup behind the CarbonDiem, though I have now passed that mantle on.
Before all that, I attended Magdalen College, which is what drew me up to Oxford in the first place. There I spent my 4th year as a Computational Chemist in the Madden Group, at the end of which he wrote this Masters Thesis.

For general information on what I'm up to at the moment, your best bet used to be to look at either my my LiveJournal, or my Facebook Profile (permission required to view most of it though). I've yet to dabble much with Twitter, though that may change in future... However, all three of those are generally much more up-to-date than here!

My email address is   My email address - nick at this domain. Information on my new PGP/GPG key is detailed here.

Places To Go

If the links on the side aren't enough for you, there are a few others that might be of relevance:

Info on using various Series-60 phones I've owned (such as the Nokia N95) with Linux, and in general, is here. (Also covers the Nokia 6630, 6600 and 3650, which are the phones I had before)

Some information on the whole Gagravarr and Vortex thing can be found here.

My Livejournal blog type thingy can be found here.

GS Summer Tech Interns (2002) probably want to be here.

Info on playing with Wireless in Iffley is here.

Information on my 4th year research project, including my thesis, can be found here.


Shiny Swirly Image

The Vortex Image at the start of the page is from http://members.tripod.com/BenBrandt/DigitalArt/, in case you were wondering.

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