I live in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. I'm a mechanical engineer, educated at Queen's University, and the University of British Columbia.

I'm a marathon cyclist with the BC Randonneurs Cycling Club and in 2003 I became an ancien of Paris-Brest-Paris. I was event director for the 2004 Rocky Mtn 1200 and I rode the Rocky in 2008.

I work for Nordion where I manage projects, do mechanical design, model radio-isotope production processes using SciPy, and create database-driven web applications for monitoring and analyzing production process data. I started out using PHP for those projects, but more recently have been using Python and a succession of web frameworks (TurboGears, Pylons, Pyramid, ...). My current project is a radio-isotope production process model integrated with a process data logging system to predict theoretical isotope activity for yield calculations based on actual irradiation conditions. Please have a look at my projects page for more detailed descriptions of that project and others.

In 2006 I spent 6 months on sabbatical with my physicist/mathematician/oceanographer wife, Dr. Susan Allen, living in St-Renan, near Brest in France. We worked on Susan's biophysical model of the Strait of Georgia, cycled lots, and really enjoyed living in Brittany. We blogged about the experience at sadahome.ca/blogs/paradocs.php.

These days, I blog about technical stuff (mostly Python-related) on this site, and about food and life in general at sadahome.ca/blogs/adventures.php. I also try to photograph beautiful and interesting things, as well as keeping an image record of our travels. I post the images at flickr.com/photos/sada_images/.

At home, I manage our network of OpenBSD and Mac computers, try to stay on top of maintenance and wheelbuilding for our fleet of bicycles, and cook (a lot more frequently since we renovated our kitchen). I also hack on a variety of personal projects in Python 'cause it's so much fun and so elegant.

Other things the might be of interest on this site (and beyond):

  • Some details about the software projects, both open-source and proprietary that I have authored and contributed to.
  • Slides from some talks that I have given.

You can contact me by email using djl douglatornell and ca, with the appropriate punctuation. On Twiter I'm @dlatornell and I also use Google+.