Hi, I'm Vernon. I work as a manager for a tour company in Namibia.

Sandcurves is my personal blog, but I'm not going to talk (much) about me on the blog - that sucks.  I'll rather talk about my passions.  I'm a bit geeky.  When I was guiding in the desert, I was learning that stuff with a passion.  As a teenager, it was fitness.  Lately it's been Django, HTML, Python, C, blogging, Linux - stuff like that. 

This site is where I write about all the stuff that I've always wanted to, but wasn't appropriate for my other websites.  As a long time tour guide and passionate naturalist, I've been writing about nature and travel for a long time.  So Sandcurves is my chance to chat about other interests. 

A little about what Sandcurves.com is all about. 

On Sandcurves.com I'll discuss things that I've got experience with or stuff I'm learning myself.  I love teaching, be it about nature, computers… whatever.  On Sandcurves.com it'll mostly be about computers and blogging but it's still my personal website.  There's sometimes other stuff slipping in here and there. 

Sandcurves.com is my blog, but it is also more than a blog.  Some things lend themselves to blogs, but others are better as a regular web page or even as a PDF file.  Specifically things that are more tutorial like will be done as a separate section to the site. 

I'm always frustrated when some blog runs a really nice series of tutorials of stuff I want to learn, and you have to dig through a bunch of blog posts to find it.  I'll always try to present the stuff in the way I think is the best fit. 

It's a personal website, but I care a lot about making the stuff I put out useful to those who want it. 

In the main blog, I try to follow a theme, primarily so that you can follow along if you wish.  At the moment I'm mostly keen to write about Linux and open source. 

The longer I work on this site, the more it's becoming a serious passion of mine in itself.  I'm always trying stuff - some of it ends up changing on the blog, some of it crashes the site from time to time. 

A Brief Bio

I've had a fascinating life - I think so anyway.  Here's a brief bio. 

  • I was born in Johannesburg, South Africa, and lived in a few places in South Africa as a younger kid.  When I was really young, my parents were running a rather wild drug rehab home in the center of Johannesburg, and while they were out on the streets with addicts in the home were either going through the pains of cold chicken from heroin or babysitting me - my interesting life started before I know it. 
  • In 1980 my parents moved to Kenya where they started working with the Rendile People.  As a linguists my parents had computers at home from an early time, and there was certainly a budding interest there.  I also started to develop a life long passion for nature.  At the time this mostly revolved around catching scorpions to scare my mom. 
  • For a while I did home schooling, which was a disaster.  My parents were still coming to grip with language learning and dealing with hundreds of people at their doorstep almost on a daily basis.  My brother and I were making the switch from Afrikaans to English and fell far behind at a critical time on our education.  We never actually learned how to write in English - something I'm still working on. 
  • After some fumbling around with home schooling, we went off to boarding school.  In primary school, because of our poor start, we were put in remedial classes and subtly told we were not so clever.  I fell in love with BASIC programming and maths - two areas where my poor education didn't matter. 
  • High school was different - actually, it was awesome.  A teacher, who taught us both English and Biology changed my life forever.  As a painfully shy kid, he told me that despite my terrible spelling, I could write well.  He also made the connection in my mind between our running around in the bushes and proper biology.  I developed a new interest - keeping in shape and became a serious fitness fanatic. 
  • In 1992 after finishing school I moved to South Africa to start studying.  I creatively spent (by failing often) my parents money at various study institutions and learned a little sports science, some nature conservation, and a lot about friendships and fun. 
  • I started birding as a somewhat serious hobby, and also started cycling a lot, including doing a couple cycling trips from George to Cape Town - a long way.  We were interested in cycling through Africa at that time, and I think if someone had given us the money back then, we'd have done it. 
  • In 1998, still two subjects short of my nature conservation diploma, I set off to Namibia to become a tour guide. I thought I'd do it for a year or so, but I'm still here more than 12 years later. 
  • Part of my career in tourism took me to the desert for just short of seven years. While working there I got married and we had our two boys.  Soon, though, the boys were growing to big and we had to move to town.  We moved first to Swakopmund where I continued to work as a freelance guide, and then to Windhoek.  I decided that I wanted to spend more time at home, and have been working on creating an online career, doing some website work for various people and teaching myself to blog, to write and how to program. 
  • At the end of 2010, having spent much of our savings trying to get my own stuff running, I decided to give up before we'd be in big dept.  I thought of working part time at a gym, but just when I starte asking around a friend phoned and offered me a fantastic job - to run the Windhoek Ground Handling office for andbeyond.

My Vision For Sandcurves.com

I'm going to continue working through themes and building up a big resource of things that I have learned that others might also be interested in learning. 

I plan to have fun building it - to never take myself to seriously.  But I do take you, the readers, very seriously and would always love to hear about what you have to say. 

You can get in touch with me: Contact me from the website or send me a Tweet. 

I also take pictures - check them out at Flickr - www.flickr.com/photos/namibnat/ and leave me a comment. 

Family Pic Swimming Guiding after good rains Boldering in the desert
 

Thank you for visiting

This is my personal blog, but I try to write things that you may find interesting or useful.  I'm currently working on a six month long project digging into the elements that make a blog meaningful. For more on that, visit MEANINGFUL BLOG PROJECT page. 

You may want to know a little about me personally, so start at the about page. 

If you find some of what is here interesting, or you want to follow the project through, why not subscribe.

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