Me (in natural pose - beer in hand) on a family holiday to
sunny Crete in early summer 2005
Hello, and welcome to the site. Over the years I've had a lot of email exchanges with site visitors, and for some reason many of them want to know about me, why I'm involved with the website, and for some unknown reason what I look like - can't figure that one out myself! So, I've decided to put up a couple of pictures and give a little information about me, and my involvement with the site / newsgroup. You can read my personal vasectomy story here.
I suppose that the first thing I'd say is that I live in the south of England. At the time of updating this page (October 2007) I've just turned 47. I'm married with two kids currently aged 12 and 10. I've also just celebrated the tenth anniversary of my vasectomy. My hobbies (apart from computing) include digital photography, cycling and genealogy. I'm getting to be pretty good at using Photoshop to enhance our existing digital photo's, and will be getting a digital SLR camera for Christmas this year. I got into genealogy through my wife. She's traced her tree many years ago, and when we started looking into my history, we found that we are actually 6th cousins! I think that makes the kids both brother/sister and 7th cousins or something.
I also enjoy travel. Before I was married I used to go skiing a lot. My favourite place is Cervinia on the Italian/Swiss border. Since getting married and having kids, we've had most of our holidays in the UK. But now they are a little older, and easier to travel with we've been going further afield. We've been to northern France a couple of times, and went to Crete in summer 2005 (picture opposite). That started the kids on the travel bug, and since then we've been to Corfu, Disneyland Paris (and Paris itself), the south of France and the area surrounding Barcelona.
So how did I get involved with vasectomy? By chance I guess. I had my vasectomy just after my son was born in 1997. Just after that, I was a regular visitor to one of those techie newsgroups for programming computers. One guy asked a vasectomy question on the basis that it was mostly men in the forum, and someone would surely have had one and be willing to talk. We emailed regularly, and after he had had his vasectomy we decided that there really should be a dedicated vasectomy forum where men could discuss it. So out of that, the newsgroup alt.support.vasectomy eventually joined the Usenet community in May 1999.
The website came about as a natural progression from the newsgroup. Our first website was on a freebie server, and maintained by the guy I met in the techie newsgroup. Later on it moved to another freebie server with me as webmaster. Eventually I decided to register a domain and have a proper website.
I've been involved with the newsgroup and website since 1988. One of the things I have learned in that time is that vasectomy has to be a decision that's properly thought through. Both men and their wife/partner need to take the time to consider and fully discuss all aspects of this life-changing procedure. Both partners should do plenty of research, and take plenty of time to consider if it's right for them or not. Vasectomy is not suitable for everyone.
The reason we started the newsgroup was so that men could discuss all the issues and get information on the procedure in order to make an informed decision. The object was to help people to get the information they need, and to support people in whatever decision they made.
I am concerned about the quality of health advice on the internet. It has to be said that it's not all as accurate as it might be. In the case of the anti-vasectomy sites available, the motives of personal financial gain in the form of self published books for sale and religious fanaticism are rather evident. In fact, there is a connection between the two. I think that "dis-information" would be a better description! The good thing is that there is evidence that the vast majority of internet users become very quickly aware that the internet has it's share of cranks, and that surfers are very able to categorise sites based on what they perceive as the quality and accuracy of the site. That's also very evident from the newsgroup posts, and the comments and questions I've received.
As I'm concerned about accuracy, I do not re-write, or summarise other's work - I would rather visitors read the original. Hence the fact that I will always put a link in to the original and encourage people to use it. I am keen on supporting any quality initiatives. We are a member of the Health on the Net foundation. I'd advise anybody looking for health information to look out for accreditation to one of the various internet health advice quality schemes such as the health on the net foundation.
I know that people researching vasectomy will visit a variety of sites. This is something I would advise people to do, and this site does have a lot of links to other sites. As well as being the "Collective wisdom" of the newsgroup, my goal is to make this site the most comprehensive vasectomy site available.
Anyway, I hope you enjoy your visit to the site, and find it useful. If you have any questions, please feel free to email me. Please understand that whilst I can provide links to resources and answer many of your questions, I am not medically qualified and am unable to offer medical advice.
For my daughter's 10th birthday outing we took her, and a
friend to an assault course in a local forest. I'm togged
up with all the safety gear prior to doing the safety
training. It was the hottest day of the year, so wearing a
sweatshirt for protection against abrasions wasn't a good
idea. Taken in June 2005.