[updated 11th January 2009]
A little bit about me…
My name is Matt Dodd, and I live in Cambridge in the UK, with my gorgeous fiancée wife Ally. I’m a molecular biologist, and work for a biotech company. I love movies, music (listening, not playing), video games, pubs/bars/beer, books and comic books, playing pool and badminton, and all the usual stuff. I also did WingTsun kung fu for a year, which I still miss…I quit the club just after my 4th grading, due to them changing their prices and syllabus and pulling out of the NWTO-GB. Sounds like they’ve improved a lot since then (they’ve changed things *again*, although it seems for the better), but I think it’s too late now to get back into it, plus it’s still expensive (and, well, I’m a lame-arse).
I’m a Moderator at Cable Forum (& an occasional CF news writer) and Sky User, plus regularly frequent BritXBox, Digital Spy, and the forums at the NTHW PC/XBL Clan.
I can be found on Xbox LIVE as Tezcatlipoca, and the PlayStation Network as Mister_Tez.
I also finally joined Twitter in January 2009, and my twitterings can be followed @MJDodd.
And this is my site…
A little bit about the site…
The (now-defunct) main index pages were originally made using the very old, yet friendly and usable, Namo WebEditor v2, simply because it came free on the Digital Photography Made Easy issue 25 cover CD. I used it initially for the 1st photo gallery, following a “walk-through” in DPME 25, and then used it for the rest of the pages.
My blog is powered by the brilliant WordPress, and uses the “K2” theme. It used to reside in “/blog”, but now powers the root of my site, replacing the old index pages.
My original rather simple Namo-created photo gallery has long since been replaced by the excellent Coppermine Photo Gallery, to which I’ve added a port by Billy Bullock of the K2 theme, so it fits (mostly!) with my blog.
There is some Javascript on some pages, courtesy of December14.net.
My hosting is courtesy of the excellent folks at Ghoti Web Hosting.
So…..”Smoking Mirror”. Why the name?
The origin of the name goes like this…………
1) I used to play an excellent PC game by Lionhead Studios called “Black & White“. In it, you played a god, and you had to go around different islands doing godly things to try and gain more believers, and battle other gods. You could be good…or you could be evil.
My god character was evil (more fun 
), and I called it “Tezcatlipoca”. Why that name? Because Tezcatlipoca is the name of an Aztec god, and I have always been interested in mythology, and thought it would be a good name for my god.
2) Fast-forward to November 2002, and the start of the “Test Drive” phase of Microsoft’s “Xbox LIVE” online gaming service. The first thing you do when you sign-up to Xbox LIVE (XBL) is to choose a “Gamertag” for yourself. This is a unique name which is used as your online identity for all the different Xbox games that you can play using XBox Live.
Stumped for something to choose, I decided to go with “Tezcatlipoca“, after my old B&W god name. [side note: after eventually also getting myself a PS3 to go with my Xbox 360 and my Wii, some five years after first starting out on XBL on my original Xbox, I wanted to have the same name for my PSN ID as I had long since had for my Gamertag... but annoyingly it was taken 
hence using Mister_Tez instead]
3) Then, in Spring 2004, I decided to get my own domain name & web hosting, to allow me to expand upon the online photo gallery I had previously started creating using my free (but limited) NTL webspace.
Of course, I needed to choose a name for the domain…I wanted to register my own name, but the .co.uk was taken. The next thing that popped into my head was Tezcatlipoca, after my XBL Tag. But it turned out someone else had already registered that name as a dot com, and also, at the time, the .co.uk. Rather than just reg it as a dot org or something else, I decided to think of what else I could use instead. [Although I have since registered www.tezcatlipoca.co.uk and www.tezcatlipoca.me.uk - each just re-directs to a basic "Gaming" page on my WP site]
Anyway, I went to the etymology of “Tezcatlipoca” – it comes from “Smoking Mirror”.
From the Encyclopedia Mythica:
“Tezcatlipoca ….carried a magic mirror that gave off smoke and killed enemies, and so he was called ‘god of smoking mirror.’ …….”
So I settled on “Smoking Mirror”, giving www.smokingmirror.co.uk
I have also since registered www.mattdodd.me.uk (someone else still has the .co.uk ), which just points to the main site.
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