Category: Blogosphere

Oh bugger, I thought I'd dodged this one

I just noticed an incoming link from Julian: Having fulfilled my blog duty, I hereby tag fellow ex-pat Brit and PSB fan Geoff Arnold. Yes, it’s the “Five Things You (Probably) Didn’t Know About Me, But Were Afraid To Ask” meme. It’s late: I shall have to be brief. What the hell can I come up with?

  1. Although everybody that knows me knows I’m an uncompromising atheist, as a teenager I kept going to (Catholic) church for several years after I realized it was all hokum. The reason: I had a reasonable high tenor after my voice broke, and they needed an alto in the church choir. I can still run through the Latin Gloria and Credo in my head, pretty much note-perfect.
  2. The first serious job I had after grad school was writing a complete hierarchical DBMS, complete with its application programming language. The system was called Maestro, and the language was… Music. [groan]
  3. I got a job in the US in 1980, but I wasn’t able to take it up for over 6 months. The reason was that my father was American, so there was a possibility that I might have a claim to US Citizenship, and apparently it’s illegal (and seriously so) to grant a US Citizen a visa to enter the USA on another passport. I finally got here (“just for a few years”) in March 1981.
  4. When I was a teenager, I was an avid (crazy, obsessive) bridge player, and after finding a few equally-crazed school-friends I decided to put together a team to compete in the Schools Championship. However it was against the rules to have playing cards on the school grounds, and so we had great difficulty in organizing training sessions; I remember at least one detention and stern talking-to from the headmaster. In our first year, we didn’t make it past the regional heats, but the next year we got to the finals and came second after the tie was broken in the other team’s favour. Funnily enough the headmaster then became our greatest supporter, and talked up our success at every opportunity!
  5. In 1982, I spent a few months working as Manager of PC Software at Raytheon Data Systems. Raytheon sold a range of word processing systems under the Lexitron brand, and customers could buy a “PC Software Option” consisting of a copy of CP/M together with Microsoft Basic (on 8 inch floppy disks!). We negotiated a reasonably good deal with Microsoft, and sold quite a few copies. Eventually we decided that the grey boxy Lexitron was looking a bit stale, and we came up with a new streamlined white plastic enclosure. Same electronics, same software, just a couple of bucks worth of injection moulded ABS. The Microsoft salesman promptly turned up, announced that these were brand new systems not covered by our existing contract, and that the price had gone up… 400%! Instead of getting bogged down in contract negotiations, I really should have paid attention and bought MSFT at that point….. (OK, I just noticed the anachronism – Microsoft didn’t go public until 1986. Oh well….)

Having done my duty, I now tag Chris, GeneBob, and Paul.

National Delurking Week, 2007

Via PZ and Janet, I see that this is National Delurking Week. Why it should be “National” beats me; isn’t blogging a quintessentially trans-national medium? Anyway, if you read my blog but you don’t normally comment here, why don’t you “delurk” by adding a brief comment to let me know you’re out there? (And not just this blog – do it for all the other blogs you read.)
National Delurking Week button
(Of course this could be a very sobering experience… maybe all my readers are just bots….)