CR Linefeed

I’ve been tagged by Adrian, until recently one of my fellow Oxtremists, to divulge five things you may not know about me. This is part of the meme that threatens to destroy the interweb whereby each person gives 5 interesting, or not so interesting facts about themselves and then tags 5 other people to do the same. Like a pyramid scheme but without any money changing hands.

So here are some things about me that I may not have bored you with yet:

1. I was born in Canada. In Kingston, Ontario to be precise. This small town was briefly the capital of the “Unified Canadas”. I left when I was 2 years old, but being born there gives me citizenship, so I have 2 passports.
2. I grew up in Newcastle in the north-east of England. This comes as a surprise to people due to my lack of a Geordie accent. The explanation for this is that I grew up in a middle class suburb and neither of my parents are from the area. Contrary to the assumption of some, I went to an ordinary state school, which has been knocked down and rebuilt since I was there…
3. I have studied 3 different foreign languages (French, Russian and Portuguese) to high school standard. I have the certificates to prove it. This makes me jack-of-all-languages and master of none.
4. My wedding service was bilingual although my language skills didn’t come in very handy, as it was in Welsh and English. That’s because my lovely wife Beth is from Swansea. Apparently as a baby she spoke Welsh before English, but they encouraged her to speak English because it was ‘cute’. I don’t think her Welsh is quite so fluent any more.
5. I got interested in agile software development via a very non-standard route – Oracle PL/SQL programming. I helped with the development of Steven Feuerstein’s utPLSQL testing framework and from there I got interested in XP and all things agile.

I’m going to tag Al, Graeme, Jay, Joakim and Steven.