(Editorial comment: This is way too long and very self-indulgent - the worst sort of writing. But what the heck I don't feel much like editing it and no one is forcing you to read it...)

Due to popular demand I've provided the second installment and begun to install hyperlinks to enhance your reading pleasure. OK, that's a lie no one asked for this stuff - but then again no one told me to drop dead either.

Born October 2nd 1969 in [Hitchin, Hertfordshire], England, United Kingdom of [Great Britain] and Northern Ireland, Europe - that's not the US - I added the whole spiel becuase you Yanks never know your geography ;-) Great Britain is made up of Scotland, England, Wales and some other small islands that I can never remember the name of (Isle of Wight, Guernsey and lots of others).

The youngest of 4 boys - the earliest memories I have were after my family moved to a small village in North Wales (called [Horseman's Green] - I lived by the post office marked with a P on this map!) when I was three. My folks still live in the same house - but it's been modified yet again as it has throughout it's life. When we moved in to "The Cottage" it was actually 3 old (1600s?) worker's cottages combined into one house (I think that's the main reason we ended up where we did - you could get a large house for not much cash). About 3 or 4 years later we bought the next door neighbors house and my Dad did various alterations to increase the size of "The Cottage" once again (the next door house had caught fire and I vaguely remember standing in the driveway in my PJs while firemen put the fire out - so we probably got to buy it at a bargain price!). That's pretty much how it stayed for the 15 or so years that I lived there. 10 years or so ago my parent's split the house in two (but along entirely different lines) and for a while they rented one of the cottages living in the other. They've now sold it. But anyway this is supposed to be a bio about me not my house!

Editorial comment: I just read this and this actually appears to be my bio as it pertains to computers and cars! (but there's some other stuff too)

Growing up in HG was not exactly exciting. The village was small and seeing as I was always the last one picked for a game of football (soccer) it wasn't exactly my scene (although of course I didn't know that at the time) I read a fair amount - but nothing notable. I played board games - but nothing notable. I played on the computer - a lot! I remember when I found out we were getting our first computer for a Christmas present from a rich uncle (who is still (very) rich and is the reason I'm currently driving a 1994 BMW 325i Convertible!). I was about 10 years old and I cried. (To myself in my room - so don't tell anyone, OK?) I wanted a games table - I was already being teased at school about being "too brainy" and I didn't think being the first kid on the block to own a computer would help with the street cred! The computer was the [Sinclair ZX-81] - it was not much bigger than a magazine and had a god awful "keyboard" made up of those flat buttons that you get on the front of a microwave oven. It had 1K of memory and of course Basic. I can remember writing my first programs - variations on: 10 PRINTAT X, Y "John" 20 X = X + 1 30 Y = Y + 1 40 GOTO 10 Remeber I was only 10 (or 11) - and my only instructor was my oldest brother (probably 16 or 17 at the time). The computer was really funky - you didn't even type the keywords in yourself - each of the keywords were assigned to a key on the keyboard and you'd press the "FUNCTION" key and the key that you wanted. Whacky! We (my brothers and I) would religously type in listings from a computer magazine and play games - all in 1K! I was hooked. We expanded up to 16K with an external memory pack that plugged into an expansion port in the back and would come loose causing all your work to be lost. Permanent storage was done via an external connection to a cassette player - boy it was finicky to get that to work. I was soon buying games on cassettes - the first I remember was "3D Maze" - you ran around a 3D maze (in first person) trying to keep away from a T-Rex.

Next up was the [Sinclair ZX-Spectrum] it came in a 16K and 48K version. We had the 16K one but later we did our own upgrade to 48K - woo hoo we were power users now! The Speccy also had a lousy keyboard - but had progressed to those little rubber buttons you get on calculators. Same deal with a built-in basic (but color and sound were now included as well as the ability to address the screen at the pixel level). Those extras made it a gamer's delight. I bought a ton of games for that 'puter (all on cassette tape) - the classic was called [Manic Miner] (a side on platform game that played "In the Halls of the Mountain King" incessantly in the background). You can play the original games on-line via a Java based emulator called [Jasper]

One summer my Mum (hey, you do the translation!) brought home a [BBC Model-B] (called a Beeb) computer from school (she was a Maths teacher). This had a real keyboard, you typed in whole words and (gasp!) it had a DISK DRIVE (5.25" floppy, natch). But all that is mere background for the most important computing event of that summer - the original Elite had just been launched (it came out on the Beeb first) and I had a hacked copy that I played all summer long. This was the first time I'd actually heard of adults playing a computer game (because the Beeb's were the computer's that schools used I heard my teachers discussing playing Elite). Computers were at last getting some street cred and I remember going over to a friends house to teach him how to dock (a rookie Elite player's nightmare).

Among other things I took a Computer Science 'O'-Level at school (you generally took about 10 Ordinary-Level exams at age 16 (studying for them from 14 to 16) and then you did three Advanced-Level exams at 18 before going on to University). It was the first time it had been offered and I think I taught the teacher about the same amount that he tought me - obnoxious and precocious (me, not the teacher) - it's amazing that I turned out into the smooth, sophisticated, well-balanced geek that I am today (of course I'm still obnoxious but a little less precocious today). I remember using my first mouse - with the obligatary painting program - in a Comp Sci lab at school.

At school I was still getting picked last for all the football and cricket games - as for rugby I tended to run, not walk in the opposite direction from that particular form of torture. My phys. ed. teacher was no help - one lesson I remember him pointing to a bunch of us underachievers and told us to get lost while the rest of them played a real game. Ah, the joys of adolesence. I was in the boy scouts - at which of course, I sucked! - but it introduced me to smoking and drinking. Smoking made me puke (I turned green first). Drinking made me feel good and then made me puke. I stuck with drinking - as a vice it served me well (?) all the way through college and into adulthood - nowdays if I have more than a couple of beers I feel it - back then a couple of beers was merely the first half hour of a night out. By 16 I had a regular pub (along with my buddies) - even though the legal drinking age was 18 - I'm still not sure how that worked but I remember playing pool in that pub a lot.

By 17 I was driving. By 17 and a half I had my first major car crash - in my mum's car (an MG Metro - which was a luke-warm sporting version of a small car). That cost me a large chunk of change (the deductible on the insurance was high). But, before you mock, that has been my only major car accident (although I have one to notch up on motorbikes as well). My first car I bought with some of the winnigs from being on a national TV quiz show for teenagers - called Blockbusters (yes I have the video tape somewhere, no you most definitely cannot see it!). I paid about $500 for it to my Chemistry teacher at school. I was the first in my group of friends to have my own car - so even though it sucked (it was a rusty old Fiat Strada) - I was popular (for a little while anyway!). The car blew the bottom out of the coolant system while I was cruising down the motorway. Siezed engine. No more car. Ironically my destination when the car blew was to Silverstone (that's the premiere car racing circuit in the UK). Another part of my prize from Blockbusters was a racing driving course. Boy was that fun! I got told off towards the end of the course because I ended up passing a couple of slow pokes in front of me during a practice session ;-)

Then came university. I was sponsored through uni by Ford Motor Company. That meant they paid me a bursary of about $1000 bucks a year and I worked for them in the summers and for one year out in the middle of my course - I then worked for them after uni. University really was some of the best time of my life - I found some kindred spirits at last. I studied Comp Sci (of course) - the scary thing is at one point I thought about doing Accounting (EEK!). The first year of university in the UK is pretty easy - they're just trying to bring everyone up to the same level. I partied. Hard. Luckily for me - no drugs - but a lot of alchohol. The second year I continued to party hard - the course was easy, right? Wrong! The second year they opened the flood gates and the work poured through. I was blissfully unaware until I started to cram for my exams - I was seeing stuff for the first time. I squeaked by at the end of the year with an "upper second honors" (in the UK the degree scoring goes like this "first class with honors", "upper second class with honors", "lower second class with honors", "third class with honors", "ordinary degree", "failed!" - about the top 5% get a first). The third year I spent working for Ford and earning real money for the first time in my life. I partied. I bought a fast motorbike. I rode the bike with my brothers and their wives down to the south of France. Riding along the coast of the Mediteranean Sea was one of my best driving/riding experiences. While we were there we went to the practice session of the Monnaco Grand Prix (Frank will appreciate how cool that was). We rode through downtown Cannes while the famous film festival was in full swing. That bike got stolen (the cops actually talked to me because they had chased the guy who stole the bike but lost him and they wanted to check I hadn't reported it stolen to save my butt). I borrowed my brother's race-prepped bike. Major accident #2! I got into a "tank-slapper" at about 110 mph (a tank slapper is when the front wheel starts oscillating from side to side and the handle bars start "slapping" the tank). It's like towing a trailer - you're supposed to accelerate through it - well the damn bike only did 120 and I wasn't about to accelerate at that speed. I managed to slow down to about 40 before I got dumped over the front. All this happened on one of the busiest motorways in the UK (the notorious M25 - Chris Rea wrote a song about it - "The Road to Hell"). I was lucky - I ran right and the large truck following me went left. 'Nuff said! The final year of uni was a breeze after working for a year - I suddenly had a work ethic and could get my course work done and still find time to goof off. At last I bought an IBM compatible (a 386DX) - in case you care (not!) I'd had a couple of more home PCs since the Spectrum days - something called an Amstrad CPC464 which used the CP/M OS (remember that?) and an Acorn Archemedes 3000 (one of the first 'puters to use a RISC processor). I finally finished my Comp Sci degree with an upper second - I was just half a percentage point shy of a first (if only I hadn't goofed off so much in the second year ...)

Part Two

I worked for Ford in Essex - I started work immediately after college (I had to start paying down those debts!) I was riding a CBR-600 at the time. One year on a trip home to Wales for Christmas I swear I nearly got frost bite! While at Essex I shared houses with various car and bike nuts. It was during this time that I got my beloved Westfield which is a Lotus 7 replica (you may recognize the Lotus 7 from the Prisoner TV show (I am not a number I am a free man!)). That car was great! Closest thing to a go-cart on the road. Not much power by today's standards but you could hang the tail out around roundabouts and laugh as horrified grown up motorists looked on. A few of my friends had Westfields and other kit cars (including a Caterham and a Cobra replica) - one friend had a V8 Westfield - very quick (but he was a bit more of a conservative driver than some of us). It will amaze you to hear that I wasn't the wildest driver of the bunch - although I held my own of course! One of my friends (who currently lives in Ann Arbor) was nicknamed "Car Crash Kenny" - a name that to this day he is still trying to shake! The best trip with all the kit cars was to the Le Mans 24 hour race in France. Coming back was even better - driving in procession through small French villages with people at the edge of the roads watching all the cars and waving at us. Every car nut in Europe drives to Le Mans and so the locals know that they'll get a free car show on Sunday (or is it Monday?) when the race is over and people are driving back home. To be honest the 24 hour endurance race itself was kind of boring (but boy you should have seen the side shows at the fair!)

During this time I also experienced my first and only roll over in a car - a "friend" was driving me back on the "morning after" a very boozy night out. In all likelihood he was still over the driving limit from the night before. He clipped the inside of a corner and we gracefully rolled over onto the roof of the car. That sure woke me up! Neither of us were hurt and the driver even escaped any prosecution due to quickly arranging another friend to come and pick us up. Despite how it might seem normally the people I hung out with were very responsible when it came to not mixing alchohol and cars. This was a different group of friends than the "drivers" - it was with this other group that I went to Amsterdam for the weekend. We all survived. Barely.

I was still sharing rented houses and moving regularly - this was starting to get old and so me and another friend decided to go shares and buy a house together (having to explain that we weren't gay - while listening to the hoots of laughter from other friends). Buying the house meant selling the Westfield - and there's a story there too! (Gosh isn't this just so exciting?) The guy who came to consider buying the Westie was a friend of a friend. I took him out for a fast drive on roads that I knew that were just drying up after a rain shower. He was wavering and I was keen to sell. I suggested that he drove back (he also had a Westie but a less powerful one). The first corner worried me - he wasn't at all smooth - but we made it around the corner and I figured he was just getting use to the different throttle, brake and clutch feel of my car. Next corner approaches fast, he brakes too late, too much speed in the corner, lifts off - THE JERK! Woosh we go sliding sideways off the side of the road and through a hedge. Again I was "lucky" - I was on the side that went through the hedge first and we just missed a large wooden telegraph pole that would have easily won the battle with the flimsy side of the car that offered me scant protection. After getting towed home by a passing motorist we parted ways. I told my friend that he should tell his friend that he was damn well going to buy the car and I named the price. The jerk bitched (to his friend) but complied and I never saw him again (I heard that he rebuilt the car by using his as a donor and then sold his for parts - the most prized part of my car was it's Lotus Twin Cam engine (which was the same age as me being from a '69 Lotus Cortina)).

Ford being Ford offered me the chance to come to the US six months after buying the house (if they'd told me 6 months earlier I could have saved myself a lot of hassle!). I'd been supporting some proprietary software (called VDAS) and hardware (called the RCON) that was an in-vehicle data acquisition system that engineers hooked up to the engine management system. Like most internal software or hardware it was rushed, it wasn't "productized" and it was buggy. Supporting that kept me busy (about 400 users in Europe). Writing scripts to automate some of the engineers jobs made me mildly "infamous". I caught the attention of the US Ford engineers that were responsible for the VDAS/RCON replacement and they asked me if I wanted to be involved. I jumped at the chance and in April '95 (after a very long and drawn out beuraucratic process) I arrived in the US. So started another "university like" cycle in my life - lots of fun (if not very sustainable).

• even more to come -