Seiko Champion

This meme has been around for a while now, and although I’ve avoided it for the first few months of blogging, I’ve been tagged by Eaon Pritchard on his “never get out of the boat” blog. The rules are:

1. Link to your tagger and post these rules
2. List EIGHT random facts about yourself
3. Tag EIGHT people at the end of your post and list their names
4. Let them know they’ve been tagged

So here goes…

1. In high school I played football. I wasn’t that great, but despite my geek tendencies I made the team, and played 2 years as offensive guard.



2. When I very young, vacationing at our uncle Nick’s cottage (yes, that side of the family is Greek), any time the dog was called I would answer … hence I got the dog’s name as my nickname in those early years. Unfortunately the dog’s name was Butch.

3. My youth was spent in snowy Atlantic Canada, and therefore loved hockey. With no local NHL teams of our own, as a result I grew up a Boston Bruins fan.



4. My father’s family passed down first names, as the first-born son’s middle name. I’m the oldest, so that’s how I got my middle name – Harry Trueman Bishop. Nothing to do with the US president, even spelled differently, it was my dad’s name.

5. Some of the software I remember writing includes real-time assembler programs on a Radio Shack TRS-80 for tracking radioactive isotope movement through crop samples, and very large data matrix processing programs using APL (which used a special keyboard with both English and Greek symbols to code all the special one-character operators) for organic chemistry lab results.

6. I was accepted to med school. Despite acceptance and a scholarship, I decided I’d had enough of school (and not getting paid), plus I had this silly thought that you had to be special to want to be a doctor. Yes, I’ve learnt better since. I’m still not sure if it was the right decision or not. (Doctor Harry?)



7. Most of my early job choices were completely unplanned by me. My first ever job was offered to me out of the blue – school janitor. It paid really well, but I quickly learnt how few primary school children are truly toilet trained! I first got into computers as a seasonal job as a punch card operator that I took so I could stay at university over the summer – by the time I graduated I was a systems analyst for the university. When looking for my first “real” job after graduating, I had a choice between a career in an insurance firm, or a programming job with an ERP firm – I didn’t have a clue, so asked the headhunter who’d I was talking to, he told me to take the ERP job because I’d be bored at the other one.

8. I included a recipe for Cherry Cheesecake in the appendices of my thesis. Only one person read that far and noticed!




Okay, who to tag? It actually becomes difficult because so many people I know who blog in the advertising world are already tagged. So instead I’ll start a different tact, and tag the authors of other watch blogs who I’ve read and communicated with recently…

1. Paul Hubbard of fnord (phfactor.net)
2. Ernie Romers of Watchuseek
3. Ariel Adams of ablogtoread
4. Andy Coulter of TheTimeZone
5. Todd (PepsiDiver) of Open Seiko Watch Forum
6. Richard Askham of The Watch Spot
7. Alon Ben Joseph of WatchFreaks
8. Harry Tan of Watching Horology