About

Word cloud created using tagxedo.com from tags at delicious.com/globalism

About 'Postings From An Edge'

Find yourself thinking more globally than nationally these days? Consider the Web an essential part of the fabric of your daily life? Active about causes, open to other cultures, dig creativity? Then 'Postings From An Edge' could be a place for you to spend a little more of your precious online time!

As the tag cloud above shows, this site covers a broad range of topics, all loosely linked by the theme of thinking globally. Example posts from the archive include open source African music, how the internet has changed our ways of thinking, and post-Copenhagen calls to action. Read on to find resources you may have missed, perspectives you might want to engage with, or content to pass some time with.

This blog is a personal platform too - for getting ideas out of my head and onto a page, or to share updates with friends and family around the world. I am Dom Pates, an IT teacher at an international college in Brighton. I am also what might be loosely termed as a content creator - a maker of (predominantly digital) stuff that I usually end up putting on the Web somewhere. 'Postings...' is a space for my professional and personal goings on. Well, the publishable, anyway.

I post, on average, at least 3-4 times a month. If you like what you find here, agree or disagree with the content of a post, or simply want to drop by and say hi, please subscribe to this blog or add a comment somewhere - I'd be happy to hear from you. If you share the spirit of the blog and would like to help 'Postings...' to grow, I'm also open to guest authors - get in touch and tell me your ideas.

About Dom Pates

Having written a diary from the age of 14, I've long been used to getting thoughts and observations down on a page. Blogging became a natural extension of that. I began this one in May 2006 in a suburban Tokyo apartment, as my own horizons were becoming much wider than the ones I'd grown up with.

We all fulfil multiple roles in our lives. As mentioned above, I am a teacher on a day-to-day basis. Some of my other roles are: husband, Japanophile, writer, musician, photographer, short film-maker, Creative Commons advocate, (occasional) traveller, peace activist...(that's probably enough for now!)

I've lived in a lot of different places in my time:

Location Duration (months)
Wales (Cardiff) 228
England (Brighton, Lewes, Scarborough) 198
Japan (Tokyo) 54
US (Tampa) 3
Germany (Saarbrücken) 1.5
Tanzania (Tanga) 1

Here are some other lists, for those that would like to know a little more:

My Last.fm Top 10 most listened to artists:
  1. The Beatles
  2. Rhombus
  3. Tom Waits
  4. David Bowie
  5. Spiritualized
  6. The Rolling Stones
  7. Bob Dylan
  8. Miles Davis
  9. Super Furry Animals
  10. James Brown 
I would have thought my tastes were a little broader than that, but that's what the data says! Don't really buy music any more though. For new stuff, I mostly listen to either web radio or Creative Commons-licensed music, like that on ccmixter or the Free Music Archive.

My favourite cities:
  1. Tokyo
  2. Brighton
  3. Barcelona
  4. Naha
  5. Sapporo
  6. Prague
  7. Paris
  8. Buenos Aires
  9. Kathmandu
  10. London 
These are not necessarily in order, other than the top two. One day, entries here may be usurped by the likes of New York, San Francisco, Sydney or Rio, but I've not managed to fit a visit in to any of them yet. One day...
 
10 fiction writers I have liked:
  1. Haruki Murakami
  2. Gabriel Garcia Marquez
  3. Salman Rushdie
  4. Milan Kundera
  5. Graham Greene
  6. Paul Auster
  7. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
  8. George Orwell
  9. Henry Miller
  10. Isabel Allende
I don't tend to read a lot of paper-based fiction these days, but these writers or others like them have had an impact on the way that I approach words on a page, whether on paper or on screen. And probably by extension how I look at life.

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This 'About' page was partly inspired by posts here, here and here - if you have any suggestions for making it better or want to start a conversation on a different topic, please drop by in the comments below or contact me on Twitter.

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