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 Serco as a Technical Architect and have the great joy of working for a Geoff Payne who is head of Architecture. And it continues my long working relationship with the two David's, both are great guys who welcomed me to the Sky contract some four years ago and have been great to work with. Also Richard who was with us then has recently taken a job in the same team so that makes 4 of us back together which with the other very good people should make for a great 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. She now lives with me in Kingston upon Thames and works as the Information Governance Manager for the local Kingston Hospital.
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 back in 1998 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 Railtrack's 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.
I moved from there to Perot Systems which was good for me and for something like three and a half years, Perot was a good company and they introduced me to some great people at Sky TV one of their main contracts where I stayed for some years. But Perot was not doing well and I was lucky to be one of the first to realise it and left to go to Serco.
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. I do not remember those years as happy and to be honest I was happy to leave home for St. Andrews where I met a series of life long friends.