About

Hi, I’m Malcolm Dow, and in this website I plan to document some of the features of my life and work.

I was born in Williamstown, Victoria, Australia, in 1949. Actually I was born in Melbourne, where the maternity hospital is, but my parents were living in Williamstown, which is a suburb of Melbourne on the shores of Port Phillip Bay. Originally Williamstown was to be the capital of Victoria, which is why it is named after the English king of the time. However a lack of fresh water caused the capital to be moved to Melbourne, who was only the prime minister. I will write in more detail about such things on another page, but for now will proceed to a quick summary of my life.

Family:

  • Father: Jim, born in Scotland – Engineer, Lay Preacher, Sunday School Superintendent.
  • Mother: Mavis, born in Victoria, Australia.
  • Siblings: Pamela, Barbara, Lorraine, Jennifer, Trevor.
  • Wife: Diana, born England – Librarian, Pastor, Prayer Counsellor.
  • Son: David, adopted 1975 when aged 11.

Education:

As you can see, I am a professional student – once I began school it took me 45 years to leave! Of course, this does not include the ministry courses Diana and I have completed during this time:

Employment:

I spent 13 years as a design draftsman with the Commonwealth Department of Civil Aviation – now the Department of Transport and Regional Services, where I helped to build and commission Tullamarine Airport and worked on projects such as the Autophon Information System and the Interscan Automatic Landing System.

Then I went as a technical officer researching robotics and vision systems at Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) Division of Manufacturing Technology. This is now CSIRO Complex Systems Integration (CCSI). Apart from being part of the small team that developed Australia’s first flexible manufacturing cell – integrating several industrial robots, a CNC milling machine and an Automatix vision processing system into a cell capable of multi tasking and rapid changeover of jobs, I also had some involvement in the Bionic Ear Project and a camera and vision system for the Australia Telescope.

Next I became a lecturer in Electrical and Electronic Engineering and Computer technology at Victoria University, teaching computer programming, microprocessor technology, computer aided design and artificial intelligence. My research specialisation was in artificial intelligence, expert systems and speech recognition systems.

In 1997 I left the university , and my wife Diana and I became the pastors of Williamstown Baptist Church. I also started a small business: The Roaring Mouse, doing website design, construction and hosting, video, print and Internet publishing, electronic research and construction, and lifestyle consultation and counselling. The name is inspired by Leonard Wibberly’s book and the wonderful Peter Sellers’ film The Mouse that Roared. Roaring Mouse has now expanded into Roaring Mouse Counselling, Roaring Mouse Electronics and Roaring Mouse Publishing.

Williamstown Baptist Church has a prayer ministry centre called Beth Tephillah Ministry Centre, of which Diana and I are the directors. With a staff of 20 trained volunteers from many different churches and denominations we provide healing prayer ministry by appointment. We also run training courses for the body of Christ. Present courses are Hearing God’s Voice, Intercession and Spiritual Warfare, Intimacy with God, and Healing Prayer Counselling.

Beth Tephillah Ministry Centre is a member of the Prayer Ministries Network of which I am the webservant. Williamstown Baptist Church is a constituted church of the Baptist Union of Victoria, and is a member of Hobsons Bay Churches, a network of churches committed to sharing God’s lovein the City of Hobsons Bay. It is also part of a wider church network called Awakening West.

Relaxation:

My main means of relaxation, apart from reading, writing, and music (I’m a keyboard player), is the hobby of ham radio. I have held an Amateur Radio Operator’s Licence for over 40 years, and held the callsign VK3ZDD for most of that time. Now I am VK3HL. I’m a member of the Wireless Institute of Australia- Victorian Division, the Radio Society of Great Britain, and the American Radio Relay League.

My Websites

Websites about Malcolm Dow:

Apart from my own websites, listed in the blogroll, here are some other places where you can find information about me:

  • Malcolm Dow at AboutUs, the World Wide Wiki about people.
  • Malcolm Dow as an associate at Amazon.com, the world’s largest bookshop.
  • Malcolm Dow at BlinkList, where you can save websites for reference, research, or fun, and make lists to share with others, or keep them private.
  • Malcolm Dow at BlogCatalog, social blog directory and search engine.
  • Malcolm Dow at Blogger, a very popular, easy to use, and free blogging platform.
  • Malcolm Dow at Bloglines, a great blog and news aggregator.
  • Malcolm Dow at the Delicious social bookmarking site, where you can keep and share links to websites and blogs, and access them from any computer on the web.
  • Malcolm Dow’s profile at Google, provider of the world’s most popular search engine, and Google Groups, Google Earth, and many other tools for bloggers and webmasters.
  • Malcolm Dow as a member of Hobeez.com, social media network for hobbies.
  • Malcolm Dow as an editor of the popular JoeAnt volunteer human-edited website directory.
  • Malcolm Dow at MySpace Australia, a place for friends.
  • Malcolm Dow as an editor of The Open Directory,  the largest, most comprehensive human-edited directory of the Web.
  • Malcolm Dow as a member of OptusHome, cable broadband Internet Service Provider.
  • Malcolm Dow as a member of Stumbleupon, a great way to discover new websites.
  • Malcolm Dow at Technorati, which tracks links across the blogosphere, ranking sites for authority.
  • Malcolm Dow’s profile at Yahoo! provider of email groups, directory and a great search engine.

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