About

The blog takes its name and spiritual inspiration from my favourite Dr. Seuss book “Oh, the Places You Will Go.” Originally, this blog was meant to replace emailed updates during my 1999 round-the-world trip and detail my further nomadic wanderings. Over the the years though, it’s morphed into something more monstrous and sublime and continues to defy any other description than that it’s mine.

Like any good geek, my paw prints are all over the internet. I try not to use too many social sites, but these are definitely the ones I’ve personally found the most useful and use actively :

•   Facebook (networking – fb status updates feed to blog)
•   Twitter (updates – posts to fb status)
• Flickr (photos – feed to blog)
•  Del.icio.us (bookmarking)
• Github (development)

I’ve lived in Toronto, Paris, Amsterdam, Vancouver, London and currently reside in Sydney, Australia (as of Sept 2009).

Anyone who knows me will tell you I’ve had a rather interesting career. Starting out as an economist after University I ended up rather quickly moving into the commercial sector and being a senior quantitative analytics and business intelligence boffin and manager taking large datasets and trying to extract useful strategic and actionable information from them. I walked headlong into the dot com boom and ended up doing IT and project management for a very successful dot com in the financial sector where a rather fortuitous set of events after the dot com was acquired had me leaving the company and setting off on a round-the-world trip which had me come to rest in Paris and becoming the Director Technique/CTO for one of France’s top ten private M&A investment banks. After that, I went and spent a year doing penance working with Greenpeace International while working on my MSc before returning to Canada to establish and build the Business Intelligence and Analytics group for a large entertainment company in Vancouver.

But… I decided a few years back that I wanted to work for a charity whose work I respected, with global impact and whose cause was closely aligned with my personal convictions, so I pulled stakes from the lovely ocean side city of Vancouver and took an opportunity (I’d been chasing for 3 years) to move to London to be Director of Information Technology for Amnesty International. Amnesty has its issues though (big ones) and when the chance came to work with a smaller, more focused and campaigning oriented organization, I jumped at the chance, and so pulled stakes again and flew all the way to the Southern Hemisphere to work with GetUp! in Australia.

What comes next for me ? To be honest, I’m not completely sure… though for me, the next most logical step is making the leap from “IT guy” and “Analytics/Strategy guy” to heading up a cause whose work I feel strongly about and is closely aligned with my personal convictions (and is hopefully located somewhere interesting). I’m still working on honing my skills in fundraising and strategic finance heading in this direction, but they’re coming along very nicely, thanks.

A pdf rendition of my CV/resume is available with only mildly outrageous embroidering if you’re interested in a gander. I am available for consulting engagements and pro bono work if the cause is just and the quarrel honourable.

If none of the aforementioned sites is good for you, the best way to get a hold of me is generally by email :

daryls underscore blog [at] wakatara dot com

If you need to communicate securely with me I suggest encrypting to

• my gpg/pgp public key linked here

and the email address it is linked to.

Failing that, I’m easy to find on most instant messaging services by my full name. I use a multiprotocol messenger, so take your pick for contacting me. Send me an email warning me you’re adding me and a vague why and I’ll add you to the buddy list.