Dave recently pinged me on this little meme that's going around that lets you inflict random factoids about yourself on unsuspecting visitors to your blog.  I'm up for it.  The ground rules are as follows:

  1. Each player starts with eight random facts/habits about themselves.
  2. People who are tagged need to write a post on their own blog (about their eight things) and post these rules.
  3. At the end of your blog, you need to choose eight people to get tagged and list their names.
  4. Don’t forget to leave them a comment telling them they’re tagged, and to read your blog.

Little-known facts about Nigel

  1. I'm half-Maori.  My Dad was from Taranaki, on the west coast of the North Island of New Zealand.  On my mother's side, it's all Scottish and German from the deep south.
  2. I worked on a shearing gang when I was a student.  I was the guy who scraped the dags away from the fleece during shearing, and then gatherered the shorn fleece to be transferred to the classing table.  I always held jealous aspirations of working the wool press, which was the most advanced piece of technology in the shearing shed at the time.
  3. I am addicted to an online world-war-II combat flight simulator called Aces High.  My call-sign is 'whisk' and I'm in a squad called the "Airborne Kitchen Utensil Assault Group", along with several other kitchen implements.  My preferred ride is the Pony.
  4. I once played drums in a progressive country punk power trio called 'The Hyphen-Ears', with Steve Watson and the late Kevin Smith.  Kevin went onto become an actor of some repute, most notably as 'Ares, God of War' on 'Xena, Warrior Princess'.  Kev was an amazing guy, who's sorely missed by all who were lucky enough to have known him.
  5. I studied computer science at the University of Canterbury, in Christchurch.  My undergrad degree was a B.Sc, and my master's degree was (somewhat bizarrely when I think about it) a M.Com.  Really, the post-grad degree thing was all about avoiding getting a job in the real-world.
  6. Most of my work prior to joining Microsoft was on un*x based platforms.  I have worked for Microsoft for 6.5 years now, and I still spend quite a bit of time fiddling with various flavours of Linux.
  7. My partner's name is Princess.  No really, it is.
  8. I'm a cat person, but allergic to cats.  So we have a dog.

So, onto the viral part of the meme - the tagging: