The early years...

My real name is Lorna Robinson and I was born way back in 1979 on a snowy day in January, I've always lived within about 10 miles of where I was born, living mostly in Ilford in East London/Essex in the UK. I've never lived out of London, slowly drifting east to west, ending up in Ealing.

Most of my formative years were spent doing nothing more interesting than going to school, watching TV, playing computer games and reading. I spent a load of time the Redbridge Music School where I played cornet in a number of brass bands, wind bands and even a miserable spell in an orchestra.

My infamous bossiness manifested itself at Woodford County High, my secondary school. I was sixth form committee chair for a year, which meant I had over 100 people I could boss around. None of them listened of course, so nothing has changed. I also spent a few years running the Science Fiction Society (we called it Club 42, witty huh?) putting on classic (cough) videos, holding in depth discussion ("Mulder is much better looking than Riker..." etc) and holding high quality events (Gazpacho Soup day was a huge hit!). Again... nothing changes.

College Life...

I for some reason decided Physics was the subject for me (everybody is allowed one mistake) and trundled to Imperial College in South Kensington, London. I hated it at first, but soon sussed out how things worked and settled in, both in college and halls finding what most people find at university - that there are people just as weird as you are ;0)

I tentatively introduced myself to the science fiction society (icsf) by hiding in a corner, being quiet and hoping no one would notice me. It didn't seem to worked. Having been noticed, I proceeded on my usual course of action upon finding a new group of people - i tried to organise them (well first I tried sorting out the filing cabinet and worked my way up). Falling into my apparently life time role of sorting, organising and archiving (both my parents were librarians, I think it's their fault) I was ChairEntity for a year and secretary for two. I've also had a bit of a hand in organising the society convention, publishing a fanzine and writing the society webpages. icsf pretty much became the central element of my time at college as I lost interest in my course, gave me a place, a purpose and a group of friends that still grows (isn't that poetic).

I eventually graduated with a 2:1 after 4 years battle with equations, reluctant lab equipment and a lot of cramming. I decided I'd had enough of physics for a bit, but not of college. I spent a year studying for an MSc in History of Science, Technology and Medicine at the London Centre for said subjects. (mouthfull huh? It just means that it was partly at Imperial and partly at UCL). I briefly got some stick from all the other scientists and engineers at Imperial for being a humanities student. However after a couple of threats, demonstrating that I could wire a plug, assemble a pc, calculate the wavefunctions of a quantum well and still couldn't spell there was no need for unpleasantness. I think it was the threats that did it. I loved the subject, absolutely adored attending lectures and seminars and learning and feeling intelligent, unfortunately I wasn't as enamoured with the writing of essays. My dissertation on Dennis Gabor (inventor of holography) was interesting to research (I'll resist the urge to tell you all about his interesting middle ground between physicist and engineer) but not so rivetting with the writing bit.

Work Stuff...

Finally leaving college meant finding a job and in the process working out what it was that I want to do with my life. I managed one of the two. I was hired as a web developer by Macrospace, a company based in Kensington that developed and distributed mobile phone games. I managed front end services, including both their own corporate site and associated extranets, intranets and web tools and sites we developed for other companies to distribute games. I developed and managed front ends for about 50 sites around the world including things like Mobu which was designed as a templating system and Cartoon Network Mobile which is available in multiple languages. I also managed a collection of WAP and xhtml sites for phones and rapidly found myself to be something of an expert - mostly due to the fact that very few other people actually want to go near these horrific platforms.

After a couple of years in this position I was given the opportunity to move to the marketing team and my full time job became development and management of their corporate websites. By this time Macrospace had been bought up by a US company and the combined entity became known as Glu Mobile. In the marketing team I was given much more opportunity to develop a broader range of skills outside of coding and become more involved with wider product marketing projects. I became increasingly interested in web strategy and site usability including running usability tests. At the very end of 2005 Glu and I parted company as they restructured the international teams.

There followed a couple of relatively brief jobs which were great experience with different companies and systems. My next position was as E-Communications Officer for the Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists. Isn't that a glorious title?! I worked in the customer relations department, basically responsible for managing the website and web services. This lasted about six months, at which point I was offered a new opportunity as Web Project Manager at the Royal Television Society giving me the chance to work in a field I find interesting and on a more challenging project, developing and launching RTS Futures. Once the site was launched I moved on again, taking my experience setting up and running websites to an agency to do so for other people. So now I work for Stickee out in High Wycombe as a Producer, meaning I oversee the developers working on our projects ranging from html newsletters, to campaign microsites and larger CMS driven sites.

Other stuff...

My spare time at the moment seems to be taken up with watching tv and films, my dvd collection is truly a thing of beauty. Other activities usually involve computers, either web designing/maintaining or shooting things (in games you understand, i'm not that violent). I've been trying to make a dent on various reading lists to seem more cultured, but frequently find 'classics' rather dull. I enjoy taking photos as well and this is often accompanied by various sight-seeing and travel.

I'm a big sf and fantasy fan. My first love is tv - Star Trek, Buffy, Blake's 7, Lost in Space, Farscape, SG1, Firefly - I watch pretty much anything that's on. I also read media books, fanfiction and spoilers, all of which get me grumbled at by most of the other sf fans I know. I read mostly hard sf - Arthur C. Clarke, Stephen Baxtor, Greg Bear and the like, however enjoy the occasional fantasy series (Terry Pratchett, Stephen Brust, Juliet E. McKenna) I've managed to read Harry Potter 5 or 6 times through and finally managed to complete Lord of the Rings at the age of 24.