DrJon

So this is me: if you’ve got this far, you’ll know that I was born on Bastille Day, 1950; yeah, that’s right, I’m OLD!

Almost my entire, self employed, working life has been in technology, data comms, comms (with my own registered PTO license), et al, and when I was forced to retire in 2011, I was running my own successful business, specialising in forensic data recovery, retrieval and analysis. Sometimes fun, sometimes distinctly unpleasant.

I’ve been into bikes - proper ones, with engines and stuff - since I was a kid, and raced them on and off until I was interviewed by a local radio journalist at Snetterton because he said he thought I was probably the oldest bloke still racing in the UK. He was wrong actually, but it did make me think, especially as I crashed at that circuit and broke two vertebrae. A brief two year career racing tin-tops followed, but you need sponsors with deep pockets if you want to be up there with the big boys.

The crash at Snetterton contributed to a sudden and unexpected health crisis in 2011 which rendered me disabled when I was finally discharged from hospital and therefore unable to ride again, much less race.

So, I have a lot of free time on my hands, and the release of Android came pretty much at the right time for me. I have an office at home which still has a variety of hardware running various versions of Windoze, OS X, Linux and some proprietary stuff which I play with from time to time. But getting my first Android phone brightened my otherwise deep, dark mood, and took my mind off the relentless pain I now live with (in spite of ever increasing doses of morphine and eight other meds which are supposed to help!) and I began to explore this new OS.

Once I’d talked Vodafone into upgrading my phone a while back to a Samsung GT-I9100, I began to play…..

I’ve always been a gamer, even running my own Team Fortress/Half Life CTF server under Windoze and Linux for a long time (‘killing’ a few, mostly American, teenagers at the end of the day is great therapy, not to mention, great fun!). So once I’d modded my phone out to the max, I built a live Android boot disk on a 32GB USB flash drive, and was able to boot my Asus laptop into Android, and created a new boot partition on its HDD so it can boot Microsucks 7 and 8, as well as Android!

Next stop, I bought a Nexus 7 and am loving it! However, almost all the games I like to play make it virtually impossible to progress without spending a shedload of dosh on the in-app purchases which really flies in the face of the Open Source/GNU philosophy of free being free. Android is essentially an Open Source OS after all. I have no problem with purchasing a game, but when a dev offers a ‘free’ game, it should be entirely free and not force you to buy progress through the game with real money; I don’t mind ad supported games as long as I know beforehand - everyone’s got to earn a living after all.

So this is me; you’ll know why I’m here.