Five Things You Didn't Know About Me

I'd been seeing this for a while now, the game of Blogtag has been running riot over the internet.  Blog memes are kinda like the blog equivalent of a chain letter or a pyramid marketing scheme but very slightly less dumb and hopefully have more positive consequences.  Goodness know what it does to the Google pagerank algorithm.  Anyway, last night I was tagged by Eric so here goes mine...

1. I used to compete in county cross-country championships for my school
2. I once spent a summer working as "Temporary Brand Marketing Secretary" for Reebok UK, dealing with everything from letters from school kids wanting free posters to sponsored athletes wanting free shoes to directors of football clubs (wanting significantly more) through to making cups of tea and coffee and doing the typing of 5 demanding marketing managers
3. I am a qualified fork lift truck driver
4. I have a bachelors degree in Physics from the world renowned Physics Department of the University of Durham.  My final year research projects included measuring the proper motion of nearby stars using data from my own observations and data from the Hubble Space Telescope.  My final year was also spent designing and building a magnetic field imaging device - after building the hardware and controlling electronics, I wrote the controlling and imaging software in QuickBASIC because Windows 3.1 based development environments (such as Visual Basic) didn't have any good way of directly driving the parallel and serial interfaces of the computer at the time without delving into the device driver level which was (and still is) well beyond my programming skills.  In my spare time, I was the manager of the St Chad's College JCR Bar and also set up the initial versions of the college and JCR web sites that are still used to this day (but have been totally re-written thank goodness).
5. Despite appearances, I do not like pies.

On to the fun part - picking 5 more people to tag.  I choose Rob Caron, Lorenzo Barbieri, Rob Burke, Buck Hodges and James Manning.  Let's see how many of them actually read my blog.

Update:  I was later tagged by Jay Flowers, so I'll allow this post to act as a bridge between two branches of the same meme.  At some point I might map all the links out into a pretty "5 Things" picture, but if I do you'll know I've far too much time on my hands...