This is the blog of Jake Smith. That’s me. Let me tell you a little about myself.

I suppose I’m one half designer, one half programmer. I remember clearly while in Sixth Form art class, our maths tutor, Mr. Knaggs, asked me what on earth I’d do with Maths, Physics and Art A-Levels. The smart answer in hindsight is wait for the internet!

I started as working with the web back in 1996, when a friend I was living with came home from work and showed me this amazing thing called HTML, and it could be written by hand in SimpleText. So began the journey. PageMill, Dreamweaver and GoLive, I tried all the tools for making sites, but keep coming round full circle to hand coding. I enjoy working in CSS/XHTML and producing standards based web pages and mark-up, and applying design knowledge and theory. I like to know what makes things tick, I take stuff apart for fun.

I’m currently a front end developer and director of a digital agency called JP74. The company was formed in 2001 after Pete and I set out on our own after a fantastic five years at a new media agency called Subnet. We worked on some amazing accounts, with talented people such as Brendan Dawes and Julian Watts, with a no fear attitude to everything. In fact we blagged our job there by learning what the hell Macromedia Shockwave was and how to use it the night before our first meeting. Remember, this was ‘96…

During my years, I’ve also learnt a lot about a great number of applications, Director, Flash (we were using it when it was called Future Splash), Premiere, After Effects, Cinema4D, Illustrator & Freehand, Quark & InDesign, bit rates, file types, codecs and colorsync. I’ve got a great aptitude to getting up-to-speed very quicky with an app and understanding enough to see a job through.

Luckily I’ve had the honour of putting this knowledge to good use through various publications. I’ve written chapters on Flash for a few books by Friends of ED, and tech reviewed many books ranging from Flash to PHP to Blogging software. I’ve also had a series of Flash beginners animation pieces run in .net magazine for over a year.

Another passion is video gaming. My first console was a Sega MegaDrive, Asian import around 1990, and I thought it was the dogs bollocks, so much so that I opted to study Japanese for a year at Sixth Form college, so I could read the manuals and on screen text of the games! At one point I had over 32 consoles and a full JAMMA arcade cabinet in the front room at home. Now it’s a little more reasonable, but still…

For a while I worked at Sony Comupter Entertainment Europe in Wavertree, Liverpool in the “Quality Assurance” department. Basically, it was just playtesting, checking nothing crashed, if it did, write down what you did etc. Was fun for beer money, but being told you’re playing Broken Sword II in French, again, wears thin.

So what’s with the wi-fi obsession?

I’ve had wi-fi at home for years. My first experience of wi-fi was an Apple Airport BaseStation and a graphite iBook SE 466. I bought it from MicroAnvika on Tottenham Court Road after a business trip to a client in London, around the end of 2000.

Amazing, I could surf wirelessly through my dial-up internet connection. The speeds were crap, but I was hooked. Every Mac after that had to have an Airport card.

Everything had to be wireless, even my Apple Newton. As speeds got faster, gear got updated. It became the norm, flip open the laptop and you’re online. I’d never seen anyone else’s network in range from my house, and it was rare that other businesses near me had it. It was out there, but not eponymous.

My interest in stumbling came about in the winter ’06. I was in Spain, staying at m mother-in-laws, who didn’t have an internet connection. When I flipped open my PowerBook I could see about 3 networks from the bedroom… Hmm. This is interesting. A walk through the apartment produced a lot more SSIDs. Time to learn more… KisMac was downloaded and I started scanning. I got over 20 SSIDs in as short walk through the apartment. More reading showed how people were logging the co-ordinates of the Access Points (APs) with GPS units (bought one as soon as I got back to the UK), set it all up and went for a drive.

I was hooked.

I’ve no idea what it is that is so appealing to me. Curiosity? Recognition of SSID names?

I am very surprised by the penetration of wi-fi though. Where I live, I wouldn’t have guessed there’d be even a fifth of the networks that I can see from a short drive.

One thing I do not use KisMac for is cracking. Not my scene. Stumbling is a completely non-intrusive hobby, purely just observing networks and logging positions.