So, thankyou Liam, I have been tagged, whatever that really means.

The task being to write 5 things about myself that others may not know.

  1. The most important one for me is that I am most definately a family man.  I am married with 3 kids.  Currently, the eldest is 8, then 3 and a little one at 1 (Who still insists on getting me and the wife up in the middle of the night :-( hence why it seems that I am permanently tired during the day and a bit grumpy).  Immensly proud of my family and they are number 1.
  2. Been a computer games fan since I can remember (Well, late 70's anyway).  I had an Grandstand Pong system which had some "different" games.  As different as rearranging the position of your bat I suppose.  This meant I could play Tennis, Squash, Target Shooting, Hockey against someone else.  Then got an ATARI 2600 console.  This was a real revolution at the time and discarded my Pong machine to a friend at school for a fiver.  Then got a Texas Instruments TI 99-4A.  This had some really cool games such as TI Invaders, Munchman,5 A-Side Soccer.  I can remember spending many hours copying source code from some magazine only to find that I had mistyped something so then spending further hours tediously going over what I had done.  Then some Sega consoles, Nintendo and of course Xbox and most recently Xbox 360 (My gamertag is "Baron Sparky") which I love, especially connected up wirelessly to my Media Centre.
  3. "Used" to play a lot of sports.  Played a lot of cricket and football when I was young, then squash as I got older.  Was in a good side for cricket but the football was not so successful.  I was the captain of our local side and I think we won 1 game in 2 seasons :-(  Also used to do a lot of Judo and a Korean martial art called Tang Soo Do
  4. I have been with Microsoft UK for nearly 9 years now.  Joined from another American company called Digital Equipment Corporation where I used to part of the development team working on email backbones and gateways called MAILbus.
  5. Lifelong Liverpool FC supporter.  I can still remember the heady days of the 70's where no side could touch them.

So, who to "tag" next.  It has to be 5 of my friends and colleagues here at Microsoft UK who I know have blogs.  (Thankfully, most of my friends are not technical apart from those I work with)

Graham Tyler 

Martin Kearn

Mark Bower

Paul Holdaway

Jessica Gruber

I have enourmous respect for these guys!  We all work for Microsoft in the UK and passionate about the products we work with.