About Us.

I created Lookatbowen.com about six years ago partly because I wanted to create a web site that offered something useful for me to work on and because it was a great way to display photographs and post messages to family and friends back home. It has since become a major part of our lives and is now a full time project in which I have learnt a great deal from.

Why Lookatbowen.com? I guess because it’s catchy and easy to remember and we want people to look at Bowen, but truthfully, BowenArrow.com, the name I wanted to use has been taken by some jerk who doesn’t even have a web page. The site has changed considerably over the years. It use to be a static web site, meaning everything on it, was hardcoded. I used a program called Macromedia Homesite to write the pages using a web language called HTML. It use to take me hours to put all our photographs and news on the main pages and photo albums. Every bit of text had to be formatted and edited and so everything was very time consuming. The old LookatBowen site runs through a Content Management System called PHPNuke. PHPNuke is Free Software released under the GNU/GPL license. Broadband 512K paved the way for me to host the web site from home. I have a dedicated server at home running Apache web server. I prefer Apache over IIS because it is a lot more stable, and offers better security and has a many more features. It is installed on a simple Windows XP box. PHP-Nuke is made up of PHP scripts, HTML, Java scripts and I also use MySQL to store everything in a database. I use a program called Macromedia Dreamweaver to edit the content before it appears on Lookatbowen.com. Our latest site is build on the WordPress 2.x engine. The advantages of using WordPress is that it is a stable system, it makes use of style sheets, which should load a lot faster as it doesn’t make use of tables. Editing and making changes to the site is a lot easier thanks to the built in editor. I don’t even use Dreamweaver anymore. A simple notepad is all that is needed.

A little history about Mike and Jo Bowen.
I met Jo back in 1997 while working as a network administrator at Rance Timber in Stutterheim, South Africa. In fact, I worked with Jo’s Mom (Jennie) and it’s definitely thanks to Jennie that Jo and I got together.

When I started at Rance Timber, internet and email was non-existant and it was my job to get the company into the 20th Century. At first, we only had one machine connected to the internet (mine of course), and so all incoming & outgoing email had to pass through my computer. I was the email postman as such delivering messages to everyone in the company. I soon discovered that Jennie had a daughter studying Veterinary Nursing at Onderstepoort, a fairly huge university campus outside of Pretoria. One thing led to another and soon Jo and I were communicating via email. This lasted for about four months when I finally met her in person, (Our first introduction and I had a large hamburger in my mouth… Talk about 1st impressions, I can only wonder what Jo thought.. Ha Ha!).

Jo had just graduated and decided to move to Port Elizabeth where she had been offered a job, so we continued to email and chat on the phone whenever we could, but it soon dawned on me that my future was in Port Elizabeth, so I bid farewell to Rance Timber and moved to PE. I got a job working for Q-Data as a consultant doing AS400 COBOL programming. Well, that’s a bit of a lie, because by that stage I had completed forgotten everything that I had learnt in programming at PE Technikon, and my programming diploma was pretty worthless to me. But it didn’t stop me getting quite a cushy job doing “context help” for a major record publishing company call Counterpoint Systems. So life was very comfortable in PE. Jo’s sister Jackie lived there as well, and one of my best friends from technikon was just down the road. We had a great time in Port Elizabeth.

After a year in Port Elizabeth I decided to make use of my ancestral visa and told Jo I wanted to vist the UK to work and travel. Jo was keen to do this as well. So we started planning our trip.

Then in 1999 my Dad died after a long battle with cancer. It didn’t come as a complete shock because we had seen him slowly struggle through all the pain. I had quit my job at Counterpoint a couple of months before hand to be with Mom though the difficult time.

Starting life in England
In July ‘99 I came over to the UK. For me it was a way of closure from all the pain and suffering I had seen in the last few months of my Dad’s life. Jo followed a month later and so we started our lives in England. My first job was working as a contractor in Swindon in a massive blue chip company called Zurich Financial Services. I worked on a year 2000 project, and our main goal was to check and make sure each PC in the company (all 5000 of them) were year 2000 compliant. It was an awesome job. I worked from 9pm to 9am and only worked on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays. So basically I had a long weekend every weekend. Jo got a job as a veterinary nurse in Swindon which was great experience for her. On the weekends we hired cars and drove all over England visiting castles and historic sites. We became members of the English Heritage, which gave us massive discounts into all the popular sites like Stonehenge, Dover Castle, Kenilworth castle, Balmoral, and basically anything famous. We had an excellent time. We spent Xmas of ‘99 in the Lake District. What a beautiful part of the English countryside.

We watched in total amazement at the biggest fireworks display, London had ever seen as we said “goodbye to the twentieth century” and welcomed in the Year 2000. We were standing on Embankment in a two million strong crowd. It was the most awesome moment ever. We will never forget it.

It was rather disappointing in a way that the year 2000 bug didn’t cause havoc as most analysts were predicting. It would have created a lot more jobs for the I.T. market.

In January 2000, I moved to London. Jo had been living and working in Twickenham near the famous grounds at a vet practice. I had finished my Swindon contract and was desperately looking for a job in London. It wasn’t long before I found a three month contract working for the London Borough of Tower Hamlets as a Desktop Support Analyst.

Life in England - Part 1
In 2000, Jo started work at All Bar One (Butlers Wharf). We moved into a South African house share in Lewisham

In the Summer of 2001 we visited Scotland and did a ten day drive/B&B around the country visiting many castles, did Ben Nevis, saw all the lochs including Loch Ness (did not see Nessie though).

Jo started work at the Ochre, a pub in the city (somewhere near St Pauls). I was still working for London Borough of Tower Hamlets. We moved into a house share on Greenland Dock, Canada Water.

On the 1st of May 2001, Jo and I tied the knot and got married in London and had our honeymoon in Paris. We moved into a studio flat over looking South Dock in Surrey Quays.
In the summer of 2003 we visited the Dominican Republic. That has been our best holiday so far together.
Jo started working for MLS Business Centres as Centre Manager. (somewhere near Edgware road). We moved into a two bed 2nd floor flat over looking the Thames Barriers.
March 2004, this year we spent a week in Courcheval learning to snowboard. Another awesome holiday although it was quite painful, very frustrating and tiring. It doesn’t feel like we had a holiday this year.
Jo started working for Your Space, another business centre type role.
October 2004, I am still working for Tower Hamlets and looking forward to the XP rollout, which is happening in December. Jo is back at MLS Business Centre and working in Canary Wharf across the road from where I work.
In August of 2004 we decided to buy our first house. We looked at one house at the estate agent and knew the minute we saw it, that it would be the house for us. We made an offer and it was accepted and the whole legal process took just two months to go through. We were very lucky.
We moved into our first home on the 24th October 2004.
If all goes well we will soon be starting a family (not the screaming, dirty nappies, no sleep for the next two years type of family)… Ha Ha Ha!, there is plenty of time for them. - No, we mean, we are adopting two pedigree cats and will hopefully have them in the first week of December.
April 2005 - We bought our first motor car, a Skoda Fabia Vrs 1.8 Turbo Diesel.
October 2005 - Where did the year go? We’ve been in our house for just over a year now. Still got to do some home improvements, Have had our two cats Tamsin and Magic that long as well.
December 2005 - Have finally past the last hurdle in our attempt to get English Passports. In the new year we will be applying for British Naturalization/Citizenship.

Life in England - Part 2

January 2006 - We have sent off our application to become British Citizens. Apparently it can take up to 6 months.
February 2006 - Quite a milestone has been reached this month. I have been contracting at Tower Hamlets for six years. I wonder if they have got the hint yet?
March 2006 - Magic, one of our Tonkinese cats passed away from a short and sudden illness.
April 2006 - Whiskey, a tiny Tonkinese kitten joins the Bowen household. (little terror).
July 4th 2006 - After waiting almost six months, Jo and I officially become British Citizens. We’ve waited almost 7 years for this. Let the world travel begin.
July 14th 2006 - My luck starts to change for the better and I finally land a fantastic permanent job in the city (sadly not with Tower Hamlets).
July 24th 2006 - I start my new job at CMA Vision.
July 24th 2007 - Where did they year go?
February 2008 - Two week holiday to Mexico.
July 2008 - Jo resigns from MLS Business Centres and starts a new career at LiquidIT.
August 2008 - Jo spends two weeks in Nice, France to learn French.