"Who are you? What gives you the right to crawl inside my brains?"
"~My name would be something like 'Grey Area' in your language."
"Excession", Iain M. Banks.

I am James Campbell Andrew of Clan Ross, known to some as 'Grey Area'

I was born in the town of Shifnal in Shropshire, England, on March 24th 1967. That was a Good Friday, you know?

Despite benig born in England I regard myself as being Scottish. My father is Scottish, and he and his family hail from Kilmarnock in Ayrshire. I have a love of good Single Malts, Robert Burns, bagpipe music(!)..

I work for a software company in Cheshire and my primary job there is to take customers data files from foriegn systems and convert them to ours. It's a bit like working at Bletchly Park during World War II, only with fewer bombs.

Feel free to email me - you can click the Mail logo above. You can even, Gods help you, chat with me using the AIM / iChatAV name above. Drop in and say 'Hi'.

Other stuff: I'm a Mac guy, through and through. My own personal computing history started way back in about 1981 with a Tandy TRS80 Model 1. Now that was a proper computer, all silver and black with a green screen monitor. Lovely. Progressed to a BBC Micro, thence to a couple of Acorn Archimedes computers. Then I got my first Mac and that was it - Steve Jobs owned my soul. First an LC475 ("MacGlashen"), then a 6400/200 ("Boris"), then an iMacDV400 ("Merlot" - purple, see?) , as well as an iBook 600 ("Ymir") and a G4 DP1.25 ("Tycho"). All of which are connected via Airport and ethernet to my FreeBSD x86 box ("Odin").

Not much else to say, really. I like good science fiction novels (Greg Bear, Iain M. Banks) and good food of almost any ethnic origin - there's nothing quite like living in Singapore for a year to stretch your multi-cultural muscles.

Musically? Well, if you looked through my CD collection you'd find a lot of Hawkwind, Deep Purple, Pink Floyd, Enya, Clannad and Motorhead. You'd also find bands like The Wicked Tinkers who are frankly amazing.

Happily married to woman who calls herself 'Kato', for reasons that would be understandable if you've ever watched the 'Pink Panther' films with Peter Sellers and Burt Kwouk. She hasn't yet jumped out of a fridge at me but the day is, as they say, young...