About Me

My name is Steve England, and I am a 31 year old software engineer from Southampton, England. (That’s the bottom bit of Great Britain for anyone who doesn’t know.) I’ve been a long time Firefox fan since Firebird 0.6 and since then I’ve been following the project and helping out where I can. I spend my Firefox-related time triaging bugs in bugzilla (the bug-tracking database Mozilla uses), providing end-user support on irc.mozilla.org #firefox (”stevee”), testing nightly and hourly builds, filing bugs, finding regression ranges and a bit of QA thrown in too. (I should really do more QA, damnit!)

In my spare time I read the odd book (usually Science Fiction  as long as it’s done right, ie: Arthur C Clarke) and some Stephen King (but in at least half of his books there’s always something that I think is stupid and depreciates the book.) I’m a big fan of down-tempo ambient electronica when it comes to music (think Aphex Twin, Autechre, Biosphere, Bola, Future Sound of London, Global Communication, Higher Intelligence Agency, Lustmord, Orbital, Sounds From The Ground; to name a few of the more well-known groups) and I play some silly computer games too: Unreal Tournament 2004 and Live For Speed.

I’ve got a degree in Physics & Electronics and I like to try and keep up in this area by reading New Scientist, which I think is great. They cover lots of stuff I’m interested in like particle physics, evolution, astronomy and space-related shenanigans, quantum physics and some pretty interesting mathematics too.

As far as drinking goes, I enjoy a couple of beers but my real love is a good single malt whiskey like Bowmore’s or Glenlivet. Kendermanns do a cracking organic white wine too, which is well worth sniffing out.

To cover my childish side, I also read Viz, an adult comic full of knob jokes and gags about shitting. But it can be quite intelligent sometimes, so it’s definitely worth a read. The top-tip page always makes me smile (”Banging two pistachio nuts-shells together gives the impression that a very small horse is approaching”, “Keep an empty bottle of milk in your fridge in case someone wants black coffee or even tea”, etc). Check out their Profanisaurus too, the biggest swearing dictionary ever published!

Top 3 Films: Shawshank Redemption, Tremors and Point Break

Top 3 Books: Arthur C Clarke’s ‘Rama’ tetralogy, Gene Wolfe’s ‘Book of The New Sun’ tetralogy and Stephen King’s ‘The Last Gunslinger’  heptalogy.