7 Things You May (or May Not) Know About Me

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Steve tagged me with the “7 Things You May (or May Not) Know About Me” meme. The rules:

  • Link to your original tagger(s) and list these rules in your post.
  • Share seven facts about yourself in the post.
  • Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
  • Let them know they’ve been tagged.

Like Steve, I’ve blogged for years, and I’m not sure how many little-known personal facts I can dig up. And there’s a further problem: two years ago (almost exactly) I was tagged with the “5 things” meme. I don’t want to repeat myself, so I’ll have to think up some new things. Here goes:

  1. I’m addicted to the British glucose-based drink Lucozade. When I was about six, I was hospitalized with severe whooping cough, and for some time Lucozade was the only thing I could keep down. I prefer it at room temperature, just as it was in hospital.
  2. You never forget that ghostly blue light. During the summer of 1971, I had a job in the Theoretical Physics group at AERE Harwell. My “office” was a prefabricated shed, erected in the old aircraft hangar that housed the LIDO “swimming pool” reactor. When I worked late (which I did quite often, the only illumination was my desk lamp and the blue glow from the ÄŒerenkov radiation. (And yes, there were life preservers hanging everywhere, just in case someone fell in.)
  3. If it were not for a British TV docu-drama, I would probably not be living in the US today. Back in 1980 I had decided to boost my income by taking a programming job with a petrochemical company in Saudi Arabia. It was a typical expat deal: I was going to live in a company hostel, with my (tax-free) salary paid into a numbered Swiss bank account, and meeting my family for vacations twice a year in Greece or Cyprus. But a few days before I was due to leave, the film Death of a Princess was shown on ATV. Immediately anyone with a British passport became persona non grata in Saudi Arabia. When it became clear that the ban was likely to last for a while, I started looking for alternative jobs, and was recruited by Raytheon Data Systems in Massachusetts.
  4. Why am I a Mac user? During 1996 there were rumours that Sun was trying to buy Apple. While any talk of acquisition soon fizzled, contact continued. For most of that year, I was part of a secret team working to integrate the Sun and Apple technology portfolios. Sun was to give up making desktop computers, Apple would abandon its minuscule server business, Solaris would be used as the basis for OS X, and sales and channel strategies would be coordinated. I spent much of my time that year at Apple, working on the networking aspects of the deal. It all unravelled when Steve Jobs returned to Apple at the beginning of 1997; with the NeXT OS technology he had no need for Solaris. Shortly afterwards, Eric Schmidt left Sun to join Novell, before moving to Google a few years later. All I got was a T-shirt, and a PowerBook – but that was enough.
  5. Out of the mouths of babes and… In 1982 I was working for Raytheon Data Systems (RDS), a company whose main business was supplying IBM-compatible terminal systems to airlines. One day I was invited to join a meeting that included various VPs and corporate lawyers from IBM and RDS, who were haggling over the licensing terms for an IBM specification. After several hours of fruitless discussion, I said, “Oh, come on. Just give us the spec and we’ll implement it.” All the IBM lawyers promptly got in a huddle. “Are you formally requesting that we turn over the document to you?” they asked. “Well, yes,” I replied, rather surprised. “In that case, we are required by the terms of our consent decree to comply,” they said. And they did. Apparently nobody had thought to simply ask for it.
  6. I have been to Buckingham Palace once – for my mother’s OBE investiture. Unfortunately I didn’t take a camera. (This was before digital photography and camera phones.)
  7. Me and Ronnie. [Reprinted from an entry in my Sun blog, dated June 11, 2004] While everybody seems to be waxing lyrical (or apoplectic) about Ronald Reagan (and I did like Steve Bell’s cartoon in the Guardian), I was reminded of a personal piece of synchronicity. We had just moved from the UK to the USA (for “just a few years,” we thought – hah!), and it was my first day on the job, at Raytheon Data Systems in Mansfield, Massachusetts. I was joining the team to work on the OS for Raytheon’s next generation minicomputer. It was March 30, 1981, and around 2:30pm, right in the middle of a meeting to get to know the rest of the team, everything stopped: Reagan had just been shot. From my perspective, as an outsider who viewed America as a pathologically gun-obsessed culture, it was an odd moment… what had I let myself in for?

So that’s seven more-or-less new things about me. Now I have to tag seven people. That’s tough. I tagged several people the last time around, and so this time I’m going to pass. Sorry.