Five things

Nick tagged me. Thanks Nick. Turns out you are still here. Hmm… Five things about me you might not know.

1/ I’m a Christian (and proud of it). I have been all my life, and don’t remember not ever being a Christian. I actually come from a long line of Christians, and ‘minister’ is one of the more common career choices in my ancestry.

2/ My grandfather is a personal hero of mine – he’s a past-president of the Royal Aeronautical Society, and was Engineer of the Year in 1984, I think partly because of a few helpful passing comments he made to NASA regarding some of the problems they were having with the shuttle.

3/ Most of my high-school years were spent at a school called Habs just north of London (I figure most people know I’m actually English and that doesn’t qualify as something you don’t know), where Matt Lucas was in my year and Sacha Baron-Cohen was a couple of years ahead. It was my father’s high-school too, but he died when I turned ten and never saw me go there. Neither of us appear on the Wikipedia entry about the school.

4/ I only have one GCSE, an A in Maths. Most people have lots, but I only have one, because of the timing of our emigration to Australia. But I do have three bachelor’s degrees, which mainly comes from starting with a double degree and then doing honours in something else.

5/ The last few years have been somewhat hospital-centric for my family. I had a back injury in 2003 and spent a while in hospital learning to walk again, and in 2004 my son Samuel (who was seven at the time) got Kawasaki Disease. In many ways, both experiences shaped us more than we would have liked, but we’re both still here and doing well.

Now I need to pick five other people to tag (who haven’t already been tagged by others). In no particular order…

Geoff Orr (good friend in Sydney, knows SQL), Brian Madsen (ASP.Net MVP in Perth, runs the SQL UG there), Glenn Block (works for Microsoft Learning in Redmond), David Gardiner (member of my SQL UG in Adelaide) and Joel K. Furr (the inventor of the word ‘spam’ – lives in the US state of Vermont).