5 Things about me

A couple of weeks ago Cathal blogged on the 5 things about me "Blog-Tag", and in his Blog he tagged me.

So here goes - 5 things about me.

1. While I live in Canada, I grew up in the UK - the city of Bristol to be precise.  I lived about 1km from Memorial Stadium - (where Bristol Rugby Club plays).  As a teenager, I was an avid Rugby fan and went to most of Bristol's home games - I also saw the Springboks (South Africa) and All Blacks (New Zealand) play when they toured England.  Bristol is one of the "hot-beds" of English Rugby and they are currently leading the "Guiness Premiership" - "Go Bris".  I usually try and see a game whenever I visit my parents.
2. When applying for Oxford University it was a close choice between studying "Chemistry" or "Mathematics" - there were very few Computer Science courses then (usually Masters programmes in the Math department).  I chose Chemistry - and worked in that field until 1998, although I did take my first computer programming course while at University in 1976 (Algol-60 a precursor to Pascal).
3. When I moved to Canada (to attend the University of British Columbia), I joined the "Ballroom Dance Club" where I met my wife, Eileen.  We competed in Latin (ChaCha, Samba, Rumba, Paso Doble, and Jive) both at the provincial and national level (although we didn't really win much).  We "retired" from competing when we started our family.
4. One of my hobbies is researching my "Family Tree".  Ironically, as all my history is in the UK, I didn't get interested until I came to Canada.  Initially that made research difficult, but nowadays a lot of the material has been indexed and digitised for the web.  I believe (about 85% certain) that "John Taylor" a landscape artist and friend of Benjamin Franklin was my ancestor (5-g grandfather) - which if true means that Patrick Gordon, who was Lieutenant-Governor of Pennsylvania during the colonial period was my 6g-grandfather.
5. Last year I turned 50 - which probably makes me one of the "oldest" members on this project.  I was born in 1956 the same year as the "Suez Crisis" and the "Hungarian Uprising".

So thats 5 things about me:  I tag Vicenc, Sebastian, Erik, Phil and Alec.