A new blog: who am I, and what am doing here?

If you want demographic information: I'm English, male, married (2 small children), born in the 1960s and university educated. I prefer cricket to football and Formula one to either of them (27 years a Williams fan). My main interests outside work and home are Scuba diving and photography. I hope to cover some things to do with digital photography here, I might even talk about things IT can learn from accident-prevention in Scuba.

Career history: I’ve spent my working life in the computer industry; today is my first day as an IT pro evangelist in Microsoft, after 6 years for Microsoft Consulting Services. Before that I ran a Microsoft Certified Technical Education Centre, and prior to that I worked for a computer manufacturer. So I’ve had a number of views of Microsoft, and seen its positives and negatives. I hope to talk about both, we can be reticent about some of the good we do; and if you spend long enough in a big company you see stuff that looks like it came from Dilbert. There are limits to what one can say in a company sponsored blog, but I hope to shed the occasional ray of light on what Microsoft is like from the inside.

I've worked mainly round Networking, Operating Systems and different kinds of Messaging. In my new job I’m concentrating on the Windows Platform, Virtualization and Real Time Collaboration, so all of those will get covered here in the future. I’m sure I will stray into some other areas, like Office, RSS and Mobility even some coding.

I've got an interest in how we communicate – and how sometimes we say a lot without getting a message across, so I might ridicule the occasional bit of gobbledegook here. I hope to be readable and worth reading. To adapt something Hilare Belloc said: When I am dead, I hope it may be said: "His sins were scarlet, but his blog was read"

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