Personal interests
Eur Ing Paul J. Parkinson CITP MBCS CEng FIET
My personal interests include the following:
Alpine Hiking
It's probably obvious from the banner images on my website, but I love to go hiking, especially in the European Alps. I have spent many very enjoyable weeks in the Austrian Tyrol, Chamonix-Mt. Blanc in the French Alps, Zermatt and Wengen in Swiss Alps, and the Julian Alps in Slovenia. Zermatt is my favourite alpine destination, closely followed by Chamonix.
Digital Photography
I bought my first digital SLR, a Canon EOS 450D, in 2009, and have enjoyed taking photos of alpine and urban landscapes. I upgraded to a full-frame Canon EOS 5D Mark III in 2014, and some of my recent landscape photos can be viewed on my dedicated photography website www.paulparkinson.photography. Most of the images are in high-resolution format (2800x1800 pixels) and can be downloaded for personal use as screen backgrounds for free. I previously used the excellent Apple Aperture for processing photos on my Apple MacBook Retina Pro, but since Apple replaced Aperture with the technically less-capable Photos, I've migrated to Adobe Lightroom and Aurora HDR.
Greyhounds
I am providing a forever home for my second ex-racing greyhound, which is a real pleasure and I can thoroughly recommend it! Greyhounds are very intelligent, sensitive and gentle dogs and really appreciate kindness and affection after a hard life of racing. They learn house training very quickly, and are easy to keep as they only need a few relatively short walks per day, and are couch potatoes for the rest of the time. For more information, please visit the Retired Greyhound Trust website (UK).
Travel
I enjoy travelling on business and for leisure, and have been fortunate to visit many European countries, the Middle East, Africa and USA. Many landscape, wildlife and urban photos from my travels can be viewed on my dedicated photography website www.paulparkinson.photography.
Website design
In addition to developing this website, I have also maintained several other websites over the last 15+ years. I tend to use free Free CSS / HTML5 templates and customise them for my needs, and use BBEdit for writing HTML on my Mac. I recommend using the W3C XHTML Validation Service for validation, and the W3C RSS Feed Validation Service.