In my (snorts derisively) spare time I:

• Play golf quite badly (18 hcp)
• Learn Spanish verrrry slowly (inside joke for those like me struggling with the trilled R)
• Watch movies
• read a lot of books (majoring in evolutionary biology, computing, psychology, finance and history though I have been reading a lot of Richard Morgan sci-fi in recent years). I usually manage 6-7 books a month. If I ever get on Desert Island Discs, when they ask me to name a luxury item I'll specify a library.
• Drink wine¹. I used to drink beer, but my choice is sadly restricted by gluten-intolerance.
• Worry about my weight ².
• Pootle around in my garden (limited now due to problems with my back, which is probably something to do with sitting in front of a computer too much, at least that's what the physiotherapist told me).

Gosh, what a thrilling life I lead. 

I readily admit to being a nerd. This means I have powers of concentration which border on the scary, a pernickety eye for detail, a certain lack of patience with civilians and the willfully ignorant, and if I was any more self-centred I'd be a gyroscope.

I recently retired from the software industry. I got a new boss who made some organisational changes I really didn't like. Also, progressive arthritis in my hands has made a life of continued code-cutting rather unattractive, and the company had been rather badly managed for some years, so I decided to call it a day. My last employer manufactured home alarm systems to protect the elderly, the sick, victims of domestic violence and those on witness protection programs.   The outfield units rang into control centres via the telephone network, and my primary job was to design the software systems for those control centres, which were based on Windows. This isn't quite as simple as it sounds, because we not only supported our own units, but our control centres had to support the equipment from dozens of other manufacturers worldwide. We sold into many countries, including Germany, Spain, Belgium, Luxembourg, Holland, Denmark, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Hong Kong, the USA, old uncle Tom Cobbley and all.

For the record, building life-critical real-time distributed systems that run on Windows isn't impossible. It's just very, very hard. We had a world-class team, and it still wasn't easy. My record for a piece of my server-side software running continuously on a Windows server machine was... wait for it... 6.8 years. Which also means that the administrators never patched the server operating system in all those years, which is somewhat less impressive.

I've spotted a couple of trends on the web of late - pictures of offices and that whole "five things you didn't know about me" business. Well I'm not falling for the latter, but if you're nosy enough you can have a look at my home office setup should that interest you. Contrary to popular belief, I am not a contractor. Nor have I ever worked at Microsoft, despite being offered an interview. And I'm not even half as smug as I usually look. It's just the way my face hangs. Sorry. I held Microsoft MVP (Most Valuable Professional) status on the Microsoft newsgroups for around 8 years, beginning in the Compuserve days back in 1996.  To see some other MVP web sites, visit our hub site www.mvps.org , run by the ever ebullient duo of Felix Kasza and Karl Peterson. To find out more about my computing history see the My History with Computers page. My CV (resumé) was removed in an attempt to thwart recruitment agents, who had been badgering me relentlessly for over a year until I did this. I had no idea there were so many of them.