About

The short version? I’m a 30-something guy from Vancouver, living in Victoria 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 a beautiful lady named Brandi, and I have two wonderful kids named Ben and Savanna. I spent the formative years of my life in the town of Maple Ridge, just east of Vancouver, BC. I attended Westview Junior Secondary, back when it was a junior secondary school, and then graduated 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 nearly a decade, even though I ended up disliking it a great deal.

After growing up and getting married, I realized I could no longer keep a job I hated just for the money. So, 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, 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.

We moved to Edmonton for a few years while Brandi studied at the University of Alberta, and are now back in BC so she can do graduate work at the University of Victoria.

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.