Travels

I was born in France in 1987, in Avignon. When I was six months old, my family moved to Brive, and at the age of two, to Liverdun. Two years later, we moved to Oakland, New Jersey, in the United States, where we stayed for another four years. My family then moved to the United Kingdom, to a town called Tamworth, in Staffordshire. Whilst there, I attended a private school in nearby Ashby. After three years, it was time to move again, this time to Warsaw, in Poland, where I attended the British School of Warsaw. We moved to Moscow, Russia, two years later. I completed my GCSEs and my International Baccalaureate at the British International School of Moscow, which taught people from over fifty different countries. After Moscow, I returned to the UK to start university.

Hobbies

I love the mountains in winter, and am an avid snowboarder. I ride a freecarve board, which has a more traditional shape than modern snowboards, and is practically impossible to get ahold of these days, much like the older, nonparabolic skis. These snowboads are fantastic for carving out big, sigmoidal turns on wide, flat slopes, maintaining great acceleration but with controlled speeds. The sensations during this kind of riding are incomparable. I've recently started skiing as well, which is also fun, though I remain relatively slow, compared to when on a snowboard.

I have dived in some truly beautiful places, such as in the Red Sea and the Caribbean, and am a great fan of scuba-diving. I have over sixty hours of dives in my logbook, including night, drift and cave dives. One of my favourite dives was the wreckage of the SS Thistlegorm, a British navy ship sunk in Ras Mohammed, in the Red Sea. At about 30 m below sea level, the wreck can be entered through a large gash in its side where it was sunk by bombers. It still contains motorcycles and trucks, engine parts and aeroplane wings and tails, all visible as you enter directly into the cargo holds.

Photography is one of my hobbies. I maintain a portfolio with some of my photos on my personal website.

I enjoy computers and technology. This extends to gaming, generally on my Xbox, but also to programming and graphic manipulation. If you're interested in some aspects of imaging, take a look at this basic challenge. The optimal solution, in terms of source code, can be found in one line of Matlab ( after importing the image ) containing 32 characters.