About
The short version? I’m a 30-something guy from Vancouver, living in Edmonton with his wife and two children. I work in IT, and enjoy camping and road trips.
The long version? I’ll rehash my old web site once again:
My name’s Mike Newton; I was born on 11 June 197-something, I’m married to Brandi, and I have two wonderful kids named Ben and Savanna. I spent the formative 25 years of my life in the town of Maple Ridge, just east of Vancouver, BC in Canada. I attended Westview Junior Secondary, back when it was a junior secondary school, and then graduated in 1992 from Maple Ridge Senior Secondary.
After graduating, I got a job at AirCare testing cars for pollution, a job which gave me money and fulfilled my latent environmentalist desires. It was a good first job, but unfortunately it got unionized and I started making (to my teenage mind) huge sums of money. So I ended up staying there for nine years, even though I ended up disliking it a great deal – due mainly to a series of bad managers. During this time, I got my first car, took many road trips, was briefly infatuated with a few girls, and then grew up (having been acting like a 16 year old for the last 8 or 9 years) and got married.
With my new adult outlook on life, I realized I could no longer keep a job I hated just for the money. So in 2001, Brandi and I decided to move to Ireland, where we lived in Sutton, which is a little suburb in north Dublin. After many hard weeks looking for work and a place to live, I got a job as a software support and development engineer for a company called Money Point.
We returned to Vancouver after a couple of years so we could have Ben without paying a couple of thousand euro in hospital bills. When we got back, I worked for a time doing tech support for a crappy little ISP called Lightspeed, until I was (fortunately) laid off. Now I am manager of information systems at a small company called Point of Presence Technologies; we manage public access internet systems at hundreds of locations across Canada, mostly hotels and student residences.
I recently moved to Edmonton; management had expressed an interest in having an Alberta office, and Brandi had expressed an interest in the University of Alberta, so it seemed like a good idea for a few years. Eventually we’d like to end up on Vancouver Island, we can’t take too many more of these sub-arctic winters.
Brandi and I spend most of our time working, sleeping, or looking after kids. But we love camping and the outdoors, and get out whenever we can – that should be easier as the kids get older. We both love travelling, although I’d be happy driving a car around North America, while she wants to see every country in the world. Ask me in 20 years which one we end up doing more of.
