Family Tree

I have recently started tracing my Family Tree. I've had pretty good success early on and have been helped greatly by certificates and other information given to me by my uncle and aunts. One such certificate (the death certificate of my great-grandfather) lead me to an address in South Wales which I then visited to see if I could find out any more information about the Informant. I was surprised to find the person's daughter still living at the address and it turned out that she was my father's cousin (which neither he nor his brother and sisters knew about).

I will update my progress on a separate site here.

Town Planning

As somebody who did a Town Planning degree but never really had any interest in it, this film struck a nerve!

Are You Dave Thomas?

I was looking through the photos on my mobile phone earlier today and found this one of a jeweller's shop in Belfast I took a few weeks ago.

It got me thinking about how many other people must have my name and this in turn got me thinking about comedian Dave Gorman's excellent book, Are You Dave Gorman? In the book, his mate (Danny Wallace) set him a challenge to find and meet 54 other Dave Gormans (or Dave Gormen). It took Gorman around 6 months to meet 54 others and he has now received notice of thousands of others (and no longer travels to meet them as the challenge is over).

I wondered how quickly, using the internet I could find 54 Dave Thomases (is that the correct pluralisation of Thomas?) although I have no intention of meeting them.

My first stop was Friends Reunited. There are 256 registered Dave Thomases and exactly 400 David Thomases in just UK & Ireland. That took about 30 seconds, making Dave Gorman look like an amateur. There is a further 1 David Thomas registered with their New Zealand site and 9 Dave Thomases and 80 David Thomases on their Australian site. That's a total of 746 Dave Thomases on friends reunited alone (although I'm one of them, so make that 745 new Dave Thomases).

I work for one of the biggest companies in the UK - BT has 104,400 employees. According to the internal telephone directory 10 of them are called Dave Thomas and 19 are called David Thomas. When I take myself out of the equation that's 28 new Dave Thomases!

One of my previous employers, Telewest, used to have a further 2 Dave Thomases and at one stage one of them was my boss, which got pretty confusing at times.

Using the Internet Movie Database which lists cast and crew for all TV and Films, I found another 20 Dave Thomases and 32 David Thomases (see photo, left promoting The Dave Thomas Comedy Show).

Before I even start a general google search for my name I thought I'd summarise where I am so far:

1. Dave Thomas - Me
2 - 746. Registered Dave/David Thomas Friends Reunited Users
747 - 774. Dave/David Thomas BT employees
775 - 776. Dave Thomas Telewest employees.
777 - 828. Dave/David Thomas TV & Film Actors & Crew

Now moving on to a general google search I found several other Dave Thomases. I will update this section as and when I get a chance:

829. Dave Thomas - Author of a series of books called The Pragmatic Programmer (pictured left).

830. Dave Thomas - A golf course designer (pictured right).

831. Dave Thomas - A Professor of Geography at Hertford College, Oxford (left).





832. Dave Thomas - The founder of the US fast food chain, Wendy's (right). Quite a few Americans have pointed this out to me in the past.



833. Dave Thomas - Singer and guitarist in the Dave Thomas Band (left).







834. Dave Thomas - An Irish singer/songwriter (see tee-shirt, right).



845. Dave Thomas - Photographer . Coincidentally, this guy is a tutor on The Open College of The Arts Photography course that I am undertaking.

846. Dave Thomas - Ran for American political office (left).

847. David Thomas - singer with Pere Ubu.






More to come...

My Photography

I have recently enrolled on a course entitled The Art Of Photography with The Open College of the Arts (OCA). The ultimate aim is to complete a BA Hons (Creative Arts) Degree although this will take some years!

I have uploaded a few photos to Flickr and also joined the OCA Group in order to get some support and feedback on by photos. Please feel free to leave comments on any pictures.

As part of the assessment I am required to keep a "logbook" - I thought that another blog would be the ideal way of keeping this log.

My Music

I've really got into Last.fm!!! My profile page shows the music I have recently been playing on my computer (there is a client installed on your PC that takes the info from your music player - in my case iTunes) and then allows me to find "musical neighbours" - other users with a similar tastes in music. I can also listen to a Neighbour Radio station - it's a great way of hearing new music that you might like!!! I've also created a Good Question Derek section (see below) containing most of the songs that we ever recorded.

Check this out, here's a list of my 10 most recently played tracks...

Good Question Derek

I used to play bass in a band called Good Question Derek (that's me second from the left). We recently reunited for a one-off gig to celebrate Midge's (the guitarist) 40th Birthday. It was the first time that we'd played together in 9 years!

Anyway, the resurgence in interest spurred me into converting most of the old songs that we recorded into mp3 and then uploading them to Last.fm. I also created Flickr space to upload some photos and I've also created a GQD Blog.

Let me know what you think of the songs or if you ever saw us play!

Online coincidence

I recently started reading Martin Roach's Eight Legged Atomic Dustbin Will Eat Itself and was part-way through the first chapter (about Pop Will Eat Itself when I sold some ceiling lamps on eBay to an Adam Mole of Stourbridge. When I asked the buyer whether they has anything to do with Adam from PWEI they confirmed that it was in fact Adam's wife! Isn't it a small world-wide-web!!

In the beginning...

I've been using the Internet since 1995 and although I've dabbled at creating things on line (e.g http://www.davidmthomas.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/dave/daytona/) I've never really had much call for it. However, now that the web has got to a stage where it's really useful (as opposed to just a novelty) and I use it every day, I thought I should have a central place to organise my onlife life. I've recently noticed that increasingly, every aspect of my life seems to have an associated web site. This blog will be a place to store new links with comments together with photos and general ramblings!