“Try not to become a man of success but rather to become a man of value.”
Albert Einstein
I’m not that William Faulkner…..
I considered breaking the ice with my favourite UDP joke, but you might not get it…
If you’re looking for William Faulkner the somewhat depressing famous American author & my namesake, then you’re on the wrong site.
Who is William Faulkner …?
I’ve spent most of my working life in IT, most of my adult life riding motorcycles, rather too much of the rest listening to loud rock music, and a surprising amount of time wondering how supposedly simple pieces of technology can go so spectacularly wrong.
This website is where some of that ends up.
For many years I worked in senior IT roles, eventually heading up IT for a large UK business. My particular interests have always been infrastructure, networking, servers, virtualisation and security, although over the years I’ve accumulated experience in most areas of IT, whether I particularly wanted it or not.
I became semi-retired in 2026. This has finally removed the daily commute and considerably reduced the number of people able to ring me because a printer has stopped working. It has not, unfortunately, removed my tendency to investigate technical problems simply because they are there.
Motorcycles have been another fairly permanent feature of my life. I spent most of my adult years on two wheels, owning everything from Japanese sports bikes to Triumphs, Harleys and assorted machines that seemed perfectly sensible at the time.
That changed rather abruptly following a serious motorcycle accident in December 2023. Amongst other damage, I lost my lower left leg and spent a considerable period learning to walk again. There is quite a lot about the accident and its aftermath elsewhere on this site, so I won’t repeat it all here.
I did, however, reach the conclusion that losing a leg was an inadequate reason to stop enjoying motorcycles.
These days I ride a solar-yellow Rewaco PUR3 GT trike. It isn’t a motorcycle, it isn’t quite a car and it combines several of the disadvantages of both. I absolutely love it.
Away from computers and engines, I spent many years studying martial arts, remain an unreconstructed old rocker, read an unhealthy quantity of science fiction and occasionally disappear into computer games for considerably longer than originally intended. Authors including Isaac Asimov, E.E. “Doc” Smith, A.E. van Vogt and Philip K. Dick have occupied an unreasonable amount of bookshelf space over the years.
What is williamfaulkner.co.uk?
As for this site, Tales From The IT Side has never really had a business plan, target demographic or coherent editorial policy. This is probably why I still enjoy it.
It contains technical articles, motorcycle stuff, travel, photographs, occasional humour, things I’ve learned, things I’ve broken, things other people have broken and subjects upon which I have developed an opinion sufficiently irritating that writing it down seemed preferable to explaining it repeatedly.
Some of the articles go back a very long way. Consequently, you may occasionally encounter obsolete technology, extinct companies, dead hyperlinks, motorcycles I no longer own and opinions written by a younger version of me who clearly knew everything.
I’ve deliberately kept most of it.
The older material is part of the history of the site and, to some extent, mine. The Internet has more than enough websites where everything inconveniently old is quietly deleted and replaced by something optimised for Google.
This isn’t one of them.
If something here is useful, interesting or gives you five minutes’ entertainment, excellent.
If not, there are several billion other websites available.
You’ll probably find one eventually.
When…?
My site is updated on an ad-hoc basis whenever I have something worthy of mentioning combined with the time and inclination.
Where is William Faulkner…?
I currently live in the Greater Manchester area (near Chorley) but have provided IT consultation, support & services throughout the North West and often further afield.