I live in South West London with Janice and Andrew, surrounded by the middle class sprawl of greater London and a great pack of friends - they know who they are which is enough for me and hopefully them.
For a living I work for Perot Systems as a Senior Subject Matter Expert (Active Directory) within our European Consulting team.
After school I went on to study for a law degree at Glasgow University. Never did get the degree, loosing the heart to keep going when I found out that law does not in actual fact equal justice, I know naive not to have thought about this one when at school but then it all seemed so easy for Perry Mason and Co, and anyway I did fail the odd exam too which never helps.
Well what do you do when you leave university with much of the education but no bit of paper? Me, I bumbled around doing odd bits of bar work and working with various computer people on Atari's and Commodore's doing some coding and graphics for a while. Paid the bills and I still remember it as one of the best bits of my life.
It was during this period that I discovered science fiction conventions through ALBACON, the Glasgow SF convention, and the friends of Kilgore Trout a one time science fiction meeting & drinking club in Glasgow. It was at the conventions and pub meets that I met Janice who we will come back to later.
Anyway I decided that it might be an idea to actually do something with my life rather than program these home computers which I was sure would have little future - brilliant choice or what? So I chose to go to St. Andrews University and do a degree in 'real computing'. Failed to get the degree at St. Andrews too, this time illness in the form of Glandular Fever managed a three way tie with the degree system and me - contributing the lack of the necessary Protestant work ethic. When reliving that time I always like to say thank you to Dr. 'deleted on legal advise' for the late diagnosis of that one, it makes me forget for a moment my equal contribution to the situation.
Earlier I mentioned Janice, well after being friends for years - I once dated her best friend, we finally hit it off during the summer between my first and second years at university and have been together ever since. Janice moved to St. Andrews a couple of years later after finishing her degree as we had both fallen in love with the town.
Since leaving university I spent many years working as an IT contractor for the like of Scottish Power, the Royal Bank of Scotland, Lloyds TSB, Guinness, The Bank of Scotland, Tayside Council and United Distillers. It was a not bad life but to be honest the >40,000 miles a year was beginning to be a bit draining so a several years ago I moved to London to work for Amerada Hess Gas a part of the Hess Oil Group who were a great company to work for and I stayed with them as Infrastructure Consultant for two years including some work in New York on the global SMS deployment and design.
After Hess and I worked as IT Manager (Network Systems) for the SThree group and travelled all around the UK installing Railtracks new server infrastructure before spending three and a half years at HSBC first in Desktop Management for Investment Banking in London and then as part of the Global Active Directory Team.
Born in the west of Scotland November 1965 to Bob and Helen I was brought up south of Glasgow in a suburb called Newton Mearns with a brother Murdo, 3 years my junior, a menagerie of animals - dog, budgie and gerbils. Dad was a research scientist - heavy computer maths, now retired, working for the civil service and mum a nurse who gave it all up for a family and the middle class dream.