About Me

My name is Yang Pei and I confess that I am a technology geek. I’m currently living in London working as a C# Asp.net Web developer in the East End.

Although that is what I do, it is not necessarily who I am, which is where this blog comes in.

I grew up in Germany and have had a keen interest in Computers and Photography from an early age, although programming only really started during High School when my parents got a job in Beijing working for a large Pharmaceutical company. Back then, the contrast between Germany and China was pretty large, a quiet city life in Mannheim, compared to the pollution and mainly language problems in Beijing (>10 million people back then in 1997).

During my time at an international school, I’ve met many great friends from different cultural backgrounds, with parents working for embassies and technology companies such as Nokia. I remember during my final year, that I was really into case modding and overclocking and literally burnt through 12 AMD Athlons in the span of 6 months.

Now, I am a bit more careful with my IT purchases and have also helped my dad’s company recycle and reduce power consumption. Four years ago, after graduating from the University of Reading, with a degree in Computer Science, I was lucky enough to find a job at NVIDIA, just 10 minutes from Reading. Well, the fact that I knew all their product specifications inside out certainly made a difference.

The Web team at NVIDIA is great and I certainly miss them after moving to London (although it’s only 30 minutes from Paddington). I would frequently run over to the so-called ‘dark side’ and check out the latest gear, whether it be the SLI GeForce 7950 GX2 sitting in a huge Coolermaster tower or when they demonstrated the new Unified Architecture GeForce 8800 GTX.

Since then, my computer has really been neglected for the the last four years, although I have taken up Photography again after I leased my friend’s Leica MP with Summicron 35 Asph. lens.

You might note that this is still a film camera, which may seem counter-intuitive at first, but film isn’t dead as Steve Huff point out here. In fact, the camera only requires 1 CR1/3N battery and no sensor cleaning, as the film is the sensor (I’ve still got about 30 rolls of Ektar 100, Tri-X and some slide film left).

My aim is for this blog to turn into a random accumulation of real life technology posts, whether hi or low tech. Due to limited financial power, I’ll probably include a Software Development section as well. If you have any hardware review requests or would like me to review a piece of kit, please feel free to contact me @compusential