The Old Public Area

Content dating back to the 1990s

This is the part of the site that has most of the fixed content. You get what you pay for, so if you don't like this site, there are plenty of other pages on the internet. Click on the topics to the right to access the content. Note that the newer content will be going on the blog (click above).

  • My first job was as a "work experience kid" at Auburn International (now called Auburn FilterSense). In retrospect, my job there helped to shape my future career vis-à-vis my interests in business and technology. Probably the most useful hard skill I learned at Auburn was soldering. The job also provided me with the fundamentals of electronic circuit design which has been invaluable in my hobbies. Since Auburn, I have yet to work at another firm with its own machine shop - a perk that I sometimes miss :)
  • Early in my career I worked extensively in electricity regulation as a consultant at Putnam, Hayes & Bartlett (now subsumed via a cascade of acquisitions into CSC) both in Cambridge, Massachusetts and Wellington, New Zealand.
  • I then spent two amazing years getting my MBA at The Tuck School of Business in Hanover, New Hampshire. I liked it so much, that I now run the Class of 2000 alumni website at https://www.tuck2000.com.
  • After graduation, I spent 5 years at Booz, Allen & Hamilton as a globe-trotting consultant focusing on Financial Services strategy, specifically in the area of mortgages and housing affordability.
  • After racking up over a million frequent flyer miles (and probably several lifetimes worth of carbon footprint) consulting across 5 continents, I joined Perpetual Limited, one of Australia's oldest providers of financial services dating back to 1884.
  • I held several roles at Perpetual, including Head of Wealth Management Strategy as well as Project Director of the largest organisational change program ever attempted at Perpetual - the consolidation and modernisation of their core back-office systems. I was also General Manager of Perpetual's Operations Initiatives - essentially in charge of the great team of Project Managers, Business Analysts, Process Analysts and Product Implementaiton Specialists that drove initiatives from idea to production.
  • In 2012 I took a jump into the public sector with a role as General Manager, Business Change & Solution Delivery at Transport for NSW. This role evolved into ever larger roles over 6 years although the most interesting parts were operating at the intersection of disruptive (sometimes illegal) business models and government policy. An obvious example here is Uber which operated illegally for several years before it became a very popular and completely legal point-to-point transport option. Some non-transport examples of the same principle include downloadable music which was pioneered by Napster, but they never got it right - it took iTunes and its early competitors to make it viable and then Spotify to turn it into a dominant way to listen to music.
  • This interest in disruptive business models led me to my current employer, Ecofibre Limited which is a publicly listed business operating in the cannabis industry. The work is quite interesting since delivering technology to run this business has unique challenges given the industry we operate in. For exmaple, a high reliance on cloud technologies is risky when cloud providors are shy to provide services to our industry.
  • As I wrote on the main page of this site, I am keeping this thing running just as a repository of old content that still seems to draw over 1000 hits / day. For example this page about my former Alfa Romeo 147 GTA which I had to sell when we needed something more "practical." At least got to keep the Ducati Monster).
  • Many years ago, I had a personal web page at http://world.std.com/bor. This page was first put up around 1994. During a cleanup of my hard drive, I found some of the old hand-coded HTML pages. Although some of the pages have been updated as recently as a few years ago, you can access the oldest versions I found at http://www.ambor.com/world/index.html. Keep in mind that there are tons of broken links since many of the sites I referenced are long gone.
  • As a hobby I used to do a bit of tinkering with VoIP and set up a "home PABX" using Asterisk.
  • Probably the biggest group of visitors to this site are looking for my Free Harvey Balls Font.
  • I have always enjoyed a bit of plane spotting.
  • I recently discovered some old (1920s) recordings of my great uncle and decided to convert the 78rpm shellac records to CD / MP3. I found it very interesting to mix 1920s technology with 2000s technology to revive these old sounds.
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