Welcome to my new blog - Being English in New York. I thought I'd kick things off with a small introduction to who I am and what you can expect to find in these pages over the next months.

As you might have guessed, I'm an Englishman living in New York (for more than eight years now). In 1994, I was lucky enough to get a job at Morgan Stanley in London as a senior UNIX systems administrator in their Fixed Income Division and, even luckier in 1996, when they decided that I could make more of a contribution in their UNIX Engineering group in New York - which was redesigning the complete UNIX environment at the time.

	Of course I jumped at the opportunity and headed, excitedly, for the New World and I've never looked back. I lived in Manhattan for the first seven years but when, in February 2003, I resigned from Morgan in order to pursue other interests, I moved to Williamsburg in Brooklyn where I'm working on getting my own software design start-up going.
Given my interest in politics, you'll see much discussion of the issues of the day - both domestically and in the rest of the world (primarily the UK of course) - and I hope I can provide a different perspective having observed so much of life in both Britain and the United States. Just so you know, I am a conservative, though more in the British-style: I am a laissez-fairelibertarian, a defence-hawk (who believes that the military actions in Afghanistan and Iraq were justified), pro-choice (in the manner of most Britons, I'm not religious in any way except towards my football team - The Arsenal!), yet anti-Gay marriage (a position I intend to discuss in the coming days). I tend to agree with most of the sensible moral and ethical positions of the so-called social conservatives in the US though, believing - despite my atheism - that many of the tenets of behaviour in the Judeo-Christian tradition are crucial building blocks for a civil society.
As well as politics, I'll try to provide a taste of life and living in New York City - "The Capital of The World", as its advertising proclaims (as it happens, quite rightly!). You can also expect to see some discussion of technology, book and movie reviews, news from the world of Arsenal FC ("by far the greatest team the world has ever seen") and, of course, the occassional cat-blogging featuring Bunky who is, at least in my opinion, the nicest cat on the planet.

Signing off for the moment, I just like to thank you again for coming and hope that you will, if you visit again, enjoy the way the site develops over the next few months. I'll do my best to keep the site updated regularly and try to provide information and viewpoints of interest. As always, I welcome feedback, especially if it's constructive; if you have anything you'd like discussed or if you have suggestions to improve the site, feel free to call out in the comments.