Hi, I’m Ross.
I live in Lanarkshire, Scotland, and I’ve spent over 20 years working with data. I design and build data warehouses and business intelligence systems, mostly in banking and finance. I’m a business analyst by trade, and I also run my own small BI consultancy, Vivid Grey.
Away from work, my main hobby is photography. Most days that means my Google Pixel 8, but I usually have my Olympus Pen-F with me as well. For something less predictable there’s the Olympus OM-1 or a Lomography Sprocket Rocket. I lean towards black and white, and I like architecture, the Scottish coastline and the odd bit of street photography. A lot of what I shoot ends up on Flickr.
I also tinker. A Raspberry Pi under my desk runs my home server: a dashboard, home automation, a train departures feed for my commute, a small LED display, and an ever-growing set of scripts that automate the dull parts of life. When I’ve built something that worked (or failed in an interesting way), it’ll probably turn up here.
For many years I was a Run Director at Strathclyde Park parkrun, and some of the older posts here come from those Saturday mornings.
You’ll also find motorbike trips (currently on a Triumph Street Triple), road trips around the North Coast 500 and the Hebrides, the odd wristwatch, and whatever else caught my eye.
This blog has been going in one form or another since the mid-2000s. Some older posts, especially those auto-posted from Instagram, may still be missing images while I work my way through fixing them.