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.
Since July of 2013 I have been on leave from Nordion while I work with my physicist/mathematician/oceanographer wife, Prof. Susan Allen, in the Department of Earth, Ocean, and Atmostpheric Sciences at UBC. I'm working with her as a research software engineer on a variety of projects mostly focused on implementing "operational" deployments of computational oceanographic models to do daily predictions and calculations about the circulation and biogeochemistry of the ocean on the west coast of Canada and in the Canadian Arctic.
At Nordion I manage projects, do mechanical design, and model radio-isotope production processes in support of manufacturing medical isotopes for diagnostic imaging and cancer therapy. I use SciPy to model proton bombardment of target materials to produce useful isotope products. I also 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 most recent project was 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 leave with Susan 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.
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 at djl@douglatornell.ca. On Twiter I'm @dlatornell and I also use Google+.