I've been sitting here watching the BIFs go by wondering how long it would take for somebody to tag me. Finally I have gareth.ryan2 to thank for dropping me in it! You can read his BIF here.
Like Ryan Gareth I was born in Liverpool. I lived there for the first 18 years of my life before I came to the University of Warwick to study Computer Science as an undergraduate. After graduating I immediately started work here and have never managed to escape. I've had several different jobs here, all IT related. At the beginning of 1998 I joined the team selecting, and then implementing, what turned out to be SAP. The rest, as they say, is history.
A few months ago I was privileged to be named an SAP Mentor. I wrote a blog at the time describing my reaction to that news - What does it feel like to be named an SAP Mentor?. In that blog I mentioned some work I'd done with a programming language called C++. I spent 5 years, from 1993 to 1998, working on what turned into ISO/IEC 14882:1998 (now superceded, twice). This was an international effort that let me travel to lots of different places around the world - as far east as Japan and as far west as Hawai'i, and many different cities in the US. Sadly, I had to miss the meeting in Australia :sad: . For the majority of the meetings I attended I had the grand title of Principal UK Expert (and yes, that does get abbreviated to PUKE) so I have represented my country at something!
Outside of work I am married and have two children - a daughter of 16 and a son of 13. We also have a cat of 6 and a dog of just 15 months. My wife was also a student at Warwick at the same time I was, but we didn't meet until after we had both graduated. We have been married for 20 years now. We live in Coventry, close enough to the University that I can walk in just about 30 minutes. Coventry isn't a large city, and we live right on the edge of it. Within a few minutes we can be in open countryside, and yet only 15 minutes drive from the city centre. Despite having grown up in a big city, I'm not really a city person. I love being able to easily get to somewhere green and open. Gareth mentioned that Liverpool has two cathedrals. Coventry does too, sort of. It used to have just one, which was bombed in WW2 and is now just four walls. Its replacement was built right next door. You can see them both in this photo:
I'm going to break a little with BIF tradition now. My remaining photos are not of either my home town or of me. Two of my hobbies are astronomy and photography. I especially enjoy combining the two and taking photos of objects in the sky. Here are a few of my favourites, starting with one of my favourite photos of the moon. All these photos were taken from my garden, so they are cool photos from my home town rather than of it!
This next one is a long exposure (70 seconds) shot taken when the International Space Station was passing overhead - that's the long streak in the sky. The bright object at top right is actually the moon, not the sun. It doesn't look it, but this was taken at night!
And speaking of long exposures, I do like trying to make "star trail" photos. As you can see from the previous shot in my part of the world the sky is too light polluted to take exposures long enough. This one is lots of short exposures layered together, but it went wrong and produced dotted rather than solid lines. I quite like the effect, though!
Finally, I've recently been playing with using a webcam with my telescope, and getting results like this:
Gareth asked:
Now I have to choose the next people to join in the BIF chain. That is hard as most people seem to have been BIF'd already. One I see hasn't been is carsten.nitschke, a fellow newbie Mentor. And I'll choose one from the BIF request list - akhilesh.kumar10.
Update: By request, I'm adding a new invite - karen.jhonson !
My questions to you are:
Remember the rules of the game:
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