Profile

I live with my wife in Dublin in our lovely home full of guitars, drums, pianos and bits of electronic equipment that I have collected to play with. I’m a huge fan of punk, metal, rock and/or roll music. I can tolerate old skool pop but I never liked disco or R&B or rap or anything that is described by “beats” unless its industrial. I wouldn’t consider myself a foodie, I just like tasty things like chocolate or interesting things like spices and curries from around the world.

I love sci-fi. My favourite authors are Arthur C Clarke and Isaac Asimov because they were most accessible to me growing up in the middle of the bog. I also like gaming and collect old systems – I’ve every single PAL N64 game and most of the SNES ones.

I grew up on a dairy farm, which is where I learned to love hard work and fixing things. Becoming an engineer seemed like a natural progression from here. I’ve 3 brothers and 4 sisters and a ton of nieces and nephews. Almost all of my family work in teaching or science (apart from one brother who became an accountant – he hates himself really).

I am many things in my job:

I lead a team of 2 to 9 people (depending on the day/week/month).

We are developing and testing systems for the new electricity market for the whole island of Ireland.

I also work in connecting new generators (wind farms, solar plant, batteries, etc.) and demand sites (factories, data centres etc.) to the power system.

I occasionally work in the National Control Centre for electricity and keep the lights on. I do this when one of the normal staff there is sick or away on holidays.

My day runs something like this:

07:30 get up/dressed/catch up on news and check on my fantasy football and cryptocurrency

08:15 cycle to work

08:30 start work by reading and responding to 10 – 20 emails from overnight

08:45 till noon: test systems, resource planning, discuss work with team and millions of meetings

12:00 – 13:00 eat, chat with colleagues, walk around the block

13:00 – 17:00 usually 19:00, more meetings and more system testing.

end of day: cycle home

19:30 make dinner, eat, drink, be merry, watch TV, chat with the missus, play guitar, play computer games, play with electronics, go out, do stuff

00:00 (usually a lot later) go to bed, try to sleep, fail and end up thinking about everything still on the to-do list