My home is in a small hot and dusty 'last chance for gas' town in rural ('outback') Australia where I work for the local government ('shire council') mapping and documenting information about our local roads and other assets that the council constructs and maintains.

I am restricted to using Windows XP when I'm at work but I'm an open source and free software advocate and I strongly prefer to use Ubuntu at home or on the road. Officially we are supposed to use Map Info while at work, but so far they have not stopped me from using Quantum GIS instead. I am able to install QGIS in my home computers as well as my work computer so I can practice with it in my spare time for free, which is something I can't do with proprietary software. There is plenty of information about how to work with QGIS published on the internet. Thus I am able consistently able to achieve better results in a shorter time when I am working. The Gnu Image Manipulation Program is another program I use often, mainly for adding road signs to my maps to turn them into MUTCD diagrams. QGIS has improved a lot in the last couple of years it might not be long before I will be able do it all within QGIS.

My modest bash and python programming skills are very useful for getting things done faster when I need to do something that's a little outside the scope of operations the mainstream users GUI programs are designed for. I'm by no means an expert, it takes me some time to get things working the way I want.

I would like to add an big thank you to QGIS developers for all the hard work they do making QGIS such a wonderful application, I love QGIS.