Five things you didn't know about me

Ack, chromatic got me with one of those silly memes. Here you go, then, five things you didn't know about me.

• I've spent a fair chunk of the past month as a research assistant on my mother's garden research project, looking into the life and history of the guy who planted the gardens on top of the Rockefeller Center and The Roof Gardens. I'm not into gardening at all myself, and when I was at school I hated (and dropped) history, but I like research! Genealogy and historical research is basically problem-solving and requires a lot of lateral thought, and it's strangely addictive!
• I wrote Beginning Perl in three months, while holding down a full-time job - in Japan, so Japanese hours. It was hell. I only got into writing the book by accident - I was helping to organise a UKUUG conference and Wrox came along and gave us all review copies of their books. My comment was that they didn't have anything on Perl, so they asked me to write something. When I started writing the book, my Perl programming was actually not that great, but I submitted myself to #perl and they drilled me into shape. I then wrote two more books back to back, and so 2006 was funny because it was the first year for seven years where I haven't had any writing pressure at all. I only have distant plans to write more... theology this time!
• Questions like "where do you come from?" and "where do you live?" confuse me. You should never ask a missionary these questions unless you have ten minutes to spare! I was born in Wigan, grew up in south Wales, went to school in mid Wales, then lived in Oxford for ten years. I don't live anywhere, I just stay places temporarily. I will live in Japan, from March, but right now I stay in Wales and Oxford and Gerrard's Cross.
• I'm very serious about music, although much less so than I used to be. I used to play the cello, badly, and the piano. I can still hack out a tune on a piano and follow along with a song on the guitar. I was tricked into composing music by a great teacher who put me in front of a computer and got me playing around with Notator. I did little else in school, and wrote a new song every week or two. Most of them weren't very good, but the odd one worked out. In return I convinced him to let me do a Music Technology AS level, and despite being completely abysmal as a performer, I got a B! I still compose a little, from time to time. The last thing I wrote was a setting of a psalm in the style of an enka.
• I have, at one point in my life, trained and showed dogs. Yep, really. I had a mate who bred Irish setters, and helped out sometimes, and once got to take one of the dogs to a show and, well, show it. I really enjoy dipping my toe into as many things as I can, learning a little about each, and moving on. Some things, like music, photography and go stick, but most don't, and that's the way I like it.

I'm not going to tag five people, because this meme is growing like Topsy already, so I shall tag three: Henrietta, Dick, Nuno. Your turn!

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