About Me
Hi I’m Dave Lodwig a Cyclist, Engineer, Inventor, and Artist and this is my website where i’ve been writing about science, technology, photography, Scouting, cycling, building things and traveling since according to records August 2005.
How Did I Get Here
Born in Gloucestershire in the United Kingdom to an Engineer and a would be admistrative genius I grew up with the green fields of the countryside a Springer Spaniel named Emma and a cat called Jason. Surrounded by both my Grampys and Fathers tool collections and encouragement to tinker and fiddle about with things I developed a healthy intrest in Science and Engineering unfortuatley this came with a healthy disinterest in school.
Given the chance to escape to technical college in 1996 to study Electronics and Communications Engineering provided a chance to finally spend school days working on practical projects rather than reading about them in physics text books. With some encouragement from lecturers and my Parents I took a bold step and packed up my things and moved to Birmingham in 1998 to attend The University of Central in Birmingham (Now called Birmingham City University) to Study a BEng in Software Design for Engineering Systems. I never moved back home.
Earning My Way
In the summer of 2000 I was looking for a work placement for the third year of my University Degree and stumbled into a position as Network Administrator at King Edwards VI Five Ways School. Within about 20 minutes I was in over my head and wondering what on earth I was doing, by the second week I had the hang of things.
By late 2004 I was graduating university after flipping to a part-time course for the final 3 years and working full time at the school and was starting to look to expand my horizons into the software development I’d been studying since 1998. By early 2005 I’d accepted a post at Birmingham City Council as a Technology Development Officer and plunged myself into the world of PHP/MySQL development. Along the way I picked up video conferencing and spent some time doing a spot of AV for departmental conferences.
When the revolutionary Single Status pay package emerged at the Council in 2008, I discovered that the new contract terms left me in a situation I didn’t quite like so I jumped ship to Delcam PLC. where I joined the systems department as an Engineer working on both internal and external customer facing business systems and expanded my range of programming languages to include perl, python, and even asp and asp.net.
Outside The Nine To Five
Secretly I like to tell people I don’t program anything or fiddle with bits and bobs at home but in reality my kitchen table is an makeshift bicycle workbench and I have a desk in my study bigger than most peoples dining tables so I can work on multiple computers and assemble widgets and gadgets without loosing anything.
Along with the technology I also like to shoot film photography, sleep in tents, climb up mountains for no good reason and eat food cooked on a campfire. I’m also a Scout Leader, I joined Beaver Scouts at seven years old and haven’t left yet although I’ve changed groups a couple times. I’m involved directly with the 141st Birmingham Scout Group, The Vanguard Scout Fellowship, Spitfire District Birmingham, Pathfinder Weekend at Kinver Camp, East Birmingham Gangshow, Gloucester Gangshow, Brumventure Badge Weekend I’m also somewhat involved in the website for Spitfire District Birmingham.
Bicycles And All That
Even though a brief obsession with driving after passing my test many years ago I travel everywhere by bicycle. I’m currently riding around on a beautiful orange Brompton folding bicycle. Even when it rains I still love to cycle.