Blog it forward - Chris Paine

Former Member · ‎2012 Aug 22

I was tagged by luke.marson in his Blog It Forward post today. I like the idea, so here goes - as I've just returned from day 2 of the SAUG Summit and InnoJam the two days prior to that, I might not make any sense, you were warned.

That's me (the one with a certain amount less hair than the others in the picture). The photo was taken on Monday at the SAP Innojam Melbourne Australia. Our team had just managed to win the "team with most creativity and energy award for the design thinking challenge" (we also managed to not come in the top 3 out of 5 teams, but we did have a lot of fun doing it :smile: ).

Fun Fact

People often ask me - why "wombling" as my twitter handle, well it's also my domain name - yes you can find my entire family at someone@wombling.com . Years ago I attended a Scout incident hike (this was in UK where I grew up) almost 1000 kids were involved, and with those numbers, they needed computers to manage then (not quite the need for HANA, but probably more than a whiteboard could cope with). Already at age 12 I was very interested in computers (I was the first kid at school to hand in English assignments that were word processed not handwritten, and probably also the first to use the excuse that my hard disk had crashed!), so I noticed that on the 10BASE2 network that each computer running Linux had a hostname corresponding to a Womble. I liked the idea, and so the name of my first Linux install was named "Womble". This tradition continues to the current day with all the PC's in my home network being named after different Wombles. When I finally got fed up of changing my email address with every ISP change I made, I applied for the wombling domain, and have been there ever since. I even had a trademark on the use of the name in ITC HCM applications 🙂

I love living in Australia. I'm a dual nationality British/Australian, having moved here over 10 years ago. I grew up mostly in the UK with 3 years of my childhood in Alberta, Canada. My mother is Dutch and I studied Physics and French for a degree at the University of Nottingham, UK with a year at INSA Toulouse studying in the third year of Genie Physic. I started out from Uni with consulting firm CMG UK, where I learnt the basics of SAP HR, Payroll and ABAP. I've been playing that game ever since, although I take care to avoid payroll as much as possible, and much prefer to play with in "fluffier" SAP HCM space.

Whenever I can I like to head out with my family to my favourite camping spots in the Victorian Alps, I love the remoteness and the beauty of the Aussie wilderness. Nothing de-stresses me better, nor reminds me what is truely important to me in life - you can read some of my other thoughts on that here - Hello I'm Back - A view from outside SAP

It's probably a fair summary to say that as much as I enjoy doing technical things (and I really do love doing the things I do for my job and count my blessings every days that I'm paid for doing stuff that I love to do.) I also love doing much more back to basics stuff, like camping and also woodwork.

If you could do any activity - irrespective of time, commitment or money required – what would it be?

Wow, that's a hard one! One thing that I've often thought about is how valuable for me personally it was to have a few years in Canada when I was a child, it gave me a perspective on being part of a global community that I don't think many of my peers had. I'd like to do the same with my children, so I would certainly consider a "sabbatical" working in China or some other Asian country (not Singapore or KL though!) Would be great to learn another language too, I don't get much opportunity to practice my French in Australia.

I'd like to "Blog it Forward" to:

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joanna.chan

karsten.arold

Here's some questions for you guys:

Name the person who affected you most in your career/ way of thinking and why
If you could be a super hero (or are in your spare time) who would you be (are already, if that doesn't let your secret out).

Feel free to pick up other questions from moshe.naveh 's original blog - Blog It Forward Community Challenge

Blog It Forward Community Challenge

I really like this #BIF idea, it's a chain letter with legs - hope it doesn't get too cliché too soon!

Cheers,

Chris