The author is a Lecturer at Northumbria University in the Department of Physics and Electrical Engineering where he has taught Electronics and Computer programming for the last 33 years. He obtained his BSc(H) in Electrical & Electronics in 1978 at the then Newcastle Polythechnic. His PhD was in the investigation of Electrical Power System Distance Protection using Parallel computing which he obtained in 1992. This involved using the programming language occam and the Transputer. His main interests have been in Finite State Machine design using synchrounous and asynchronous technoques, as well as Petri Nets. In addition he has developed microcontroller based system using assembly and C/C++ programming. He has programmed PC's, MAC, and many different microcontrollers in Assembly Language, as well as using C, C++, Pascal and occam programming languages. He lives near Newcastle Upon Tyne with his wife Kathleen and enjoyes Walking, Driving and listerning to Classical and contemory music.