My name is Chris Applegate. I was born in 1981, at the London Hospital.

I’ve spent most of my life living in Plaistow, East London. Deemed to be a ‘gifted child’, I was sent to the reasonably posh City of London School to spend my secondary education, where I spent much of my time doing homework in the mornings and looking across the river at the Tate Modern. This introduction to the meritocracy proceeded quite smoothly, with eight very undistinguished years of earning qualifications, interspersed with being bad at sport.

Once all that was over and I got some certificates to hang on the wall, I decided to do a gap year - for both the experience of the real world, and to earn some cold, hard cash. I worked for a year in an industrial placement at Alcatel Submarine Networks, under the
Year In Industry scheme. This earned me lots of money, as well as the chance to earn a Business Studies certificate at Pershore & Hindlip College.

After that I went hob-nobbing with the cream of the nation at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge to study Computer Science. Here I also indulged in student journalism, student politics and student frivolity in various, but mostly geeky, capacities.

I graduated in June 2002, and for two years I worked for Cambridge University at CARET, as part of the University’s Aspiration-Raising project.

I then moved to Edinburgh to study an MSc in Science & Technology Studies at the University of Edinburgh, which concerns how science and technology are shaped by society, and how they in turn shape society themselves.

I finished my MSc in August 2005 and after stints doing web development at Jamkit and London Metropolitan University, I switched trades and I am now a marketing wonk for Outside Line, a digital marketing agency based in London, specialising in Web 2.0, blog marketing and all that.

Me & myself

So what am I actually like? Well, I stand at 5′7”(ish). I am half Chinese and half English. My hair is black. I wear glasses. I speak with a fairly middle-class accent that belies my claims to Cockneyness. I read Private Eye, The Guardian and The New Statesman on a regular basis.

My interests roughly go as follows: Arsenal, going to the pub, cryptic crosswords, socialism, indie music, modern architecture, playing with computers, good novels, trashy novels, privacy rights, cooking good food, plotting the downfall of the Blair government and cryptography.

Oh, and if you want to know what I look like, I look like this (only not so cartoony):

Contacting me

I used to have a mail form here but it got abused by the spammers too much. If you wish to contact me, as my name is Chris and the domain I own is qwghlm.co.uk, you can probably work out for yourself what my email address actually is. If you are of the cryptographic persuasion, you can use my PGP key when getting in touch.