tenfourty.com

This is the per­sonal web­site of Jeremy Brown, here’s my CV if you want to know all the dry pro­fes­sional things about me; read on for the juicy stuff!

Why ten­fourty? Peo­ple ask me that ques­tion so often I thought I’d answer that first. Ten­fourty is a vari­a­tion on the term “the 10/40 Win­dow”, which describes an area of the globe in the east­ern hemi­sphere located between 10 and 40 degrees north of the equa­tor (see map), an area that in 1990 was pur­ported to have the high­est level of socioe­co­nomic chal­lenges. I was born in this area and have spent most of my life grow­ing up, liv­ing, work­ing and trav­el­ling in this area so it seemed like a pretty good handle/nickname to me in the early 90s when you had to have a “han­dle” on dial up Bul­letin Board Sys­tems I used to visit in pre-Internet days. Nowa­days with the advent of Face­book most peo­ple seem to use their real names, but I still like my delib­er­ately mis­spelt handle.

Hav­ing a pro­fes­sion that only requires a lap­top and an Inter­net con­nec­tion I’ve been able to indulge in my pas­sion of being a global nomad. Though my ori­gins are Irish/Finnish I’ve spent lit­tle time in either coun­try.  Trav­el­ling in West Africa in 2008 I saw the pos­si­bil­i­ties there and I ended up start­ing a com­pany with a few friends in Cameroon. My time in Cameroon ended up being quite an expe­ri­ence, which will require a few blog posts to fully describe it. Hav­ing spent the last three years in Africa I’m now based in Lon­don and work as a JBoss Senior Solu­tion Archi­tect for Red Hat.

I love all sorts of sports and have done a few seri­ously. I learnt to row while at school and rowed com­pet­i­tively while at uni­ver­sity and later on at a local club in Man­ches­ter. It’s allowed me to com­pete at the pres­ti­gious Hen­ley Royal Regatta and I was even a cat­e­gory win­ner of the Head of the River Race in Lon­don along with many other races. When I started trav­el­ling a lot for work I took up fell run­ning and have com­pleted sev­eral marathons and ultra marathons both on and off-road since.

I’ve been rid­ing motor­bikes for years and this pas­sion recently cul­mi­nated in tak­ing a sab­bat­i­cal year, while work­ing at Accen­ture, to ride through Africa on a motor­bike dur­ing 2008. Check out 2wheels2africa.com for more infor­ma­tion on that adventure.

I also enjoy fol­low­ing the other foot­ball team from Man­ches­ter, Man City. I devel­oped a taste for the roller coaster ride that is being a City fan while at Uni­ver­sity in Man­ches­ter when they were yo-yoing between the divisions.