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About Scott Earle
editI was born in Yorkshire in England in 1965, and lived there for the first fourteen years of my life. After that, we moved to the South East of England for two years, and a further year in France. After that I moved to Nottingham for four years. At the age of 21, I started my first job and moved to live in Didcot in Oxfordshire. I got married to Lisa in 1994, and in 1999 moved to the village of Kidlington. We have two children, James (Jim) and Catherine (Katie).
In the course of my job (and in the build-up to being made redundant) I was assigned to go to Reuters' office in Bangkok in January 2004, and while there was offered a contract to train their staff and assist with third-level support.
Lisa and I divorced in 2008, and I remarried at the end of the year (literally - we were the last couple to get married in 2008 in that particular Amphur) to my wife Aeh (Thai: เอ๋), also known as Emmy.
Interests and Hobbies
editComputers
editI am a computer person. I have been using computers since the age of fourteen in 1979, and since then it has been one of my most important hobbies.
In 1979 my mother bought a Commodore PET, and I learned to program Microsoft BASIC on it. When I got fed up with its limitations, I used the PET's advanced (for its day) machine code monitor to enter hand-assembled 6502 machine code.
My first computer was a BBC Micro, which was an amazing machine. It had a built-in assembler, and the operating system had defined entry points meaning that machine code programs could do useful things such as access I/O.
After that I had an Atari ST, which I also used to run Minix.
I learned my first real programming language (BCPL) in 1987 after I got my first job. Afterwards, I learned C and C++.
After having the misfortune of using Microsoft Windows versions 1 to 3.1 at work, I started using Windows NT in 1993 - but at home I was still happy with the Atari ST. After my then-girlfriend (later wife) experimented with a few 486-based PCs starting in 1993, she got thoroughly fed up with DOS and Windows, and in late 1995 bought an Apple Macintosh. The exact machine she got was a Powerbook 5300 - which got a bad rap in its day, but I thought it was a lovely machine. Sure it had issues (mostly, it was slow and seemed underpowered, considering it had a 100MHz CPU - but a lack of L2 cache will do that). After using it for a while, she upgraded to a Power Macintosh G3 Desktop which was so much more powerful. Her next machine was a Power Mac G4 Cube, which was a wonderful machine.
Since I had already moved to using FreeBSD on my PC (and so was enjoying Unix on the desktop already), I finally succumbed and bought a dual-CPU 1.42GHz "Mirror-door Power Mac G4". I loved that machine, and have owned a Mac ever since. I got a dual-CPU Power Mac G5 after moving to Thailand, and replaced it with a 2.4GHz Aluminium iMac at the end of 2007, which I kept until mid-2010. Since then, I have been using a (MacBook Pro) laptop, as well as an iPad.
Amateur Radio
editOne of my other hobbies is amateur radio, and while living in the UK I held an amateur radio licence (class A), with the callsign G0SWG. Additionally, I held a US (Amateur Extra Class) licence with the callsign AA2WX for ten years from 1995 Unfortunately, both licences have now expired.
Sadly, I cannot obtain a licence in Thailand; that privilege is reserved only for Thai nationals. As a result, I have been unable to operate amateur radio for a number of years now.
My particular interests in amateur radio were Morse code, packet radio and contesting. While in the UK, I was able to make contact with people around the world, in over 230 countries.
Work
editBetween 1987 and 2004, I worked for RCP Consultants doing computer-related work for Reuters. I started out doing basic information pages for one of Reuters' products that displayed news items in a similar fashion to Teletext, and moved on to work on Reuters' currency trading software Dealing 2000, which evolved to Dealing 3000. I started out doing testing, then coding, designing and eventually team leader of a team developing a web-based Dealing product called RDL that allowed a thin client to act as a currency trading keystation, and to communicate with the large Dealing 3000 community.
After Reuters decided to move the maintenance and development of Dealing 3000 offshore, I was made redundant (the disadvantage of having 16 years' experience in the same project, I guess), and did some contract work with Reuters' offshore office - helping to train and familiarise the inexperienced developers with the product I had worked on for so long. In 2005, they cancelled my contract, and that December I started working for a company that does software development in Bangkok for companies in the US and Europe. I worked as software engineering manager for Mustang Technologies until the end of January 2009.
After leaving Mustang, I started doing some contract work for Admax Network, and became an employee of that company in September 2009. I left Admax in 2011 to become a manager at Ziios's Thailand office, and in August of 2012 I joined Agoda as a Senior Software Developer.