Jacqui Caren
Jacqui Caren
I will add something when I get a chance :-)
Who
Jacqui Caren
Where
Camberley, Surrey originally from Sunderland, Tyne and Wear MA
When
Mind your own business!
Why (I got hooked on science)
I was brought up in an extended family home, Me+two sisters+mun+dad+grandfather. Grandfather was a compulsize DIYer (and VERY good at it) but we kids would always be underfoot asking "what you doing granda", "what's this granda?". Eventually he got sick of us and gave us a block of wood with a siz inch nail and a veyr small hammer each and told us we had to hammer the nail into the wood. I think I spent the entire day hammering that nail in :-)
From then on Lisa and I were hooked on DIY and science in general. Contrary to family belief, Lisa is the clever one, but she has a disabled son and gave up any chance of a degree (and what would have been a brilliant career in computer science!) to look after him.
How (I got hooked on CompSci? and IT)
Back to me, I studied a Joint science OND of which Physics and Art were the fun bits then went of to do a Combined science degree in Physics, Maths and CompSci?. (Comp sci was thrown in - I loved Physics and Maths at the time.) I fell in love with CompSci? (because of the subject and the way it was taught).
I looked for jobs in my local area but at the time, there only jobs for the boys and I did not even get rejection letters from most of the companies I applied for.
I applied for six jobs in the south and had moved and started work in just under two weeks for Genrad in Fareham.
This lasted four years and the company having been taken over by a US Giant prior to my joining "resized".
I joined Cray Research and stayed there until they went under.
I joined IG and have been there since (I stopped counted at 10 years!).
What (do I do)
Work - mainly web database integration but I get to do fun stuff like build template engines that run within the database itself and roll javascript/XMLRPC frameworks in perl that do NOT suck eggs performance wise.
I use openvz quite a bit and having spent a long time working with Oracle have been persuaded to migrate to Postgres by Oracle's completely incompetent support. There are a coupld of gotcha's with Pg but overall I *love* it - Ok it is not Oracle but it is the closest thing and beats it hands down for reliability, support and scalbility.
Fun - I still love operating systems and programming languages
Dogs - German Shepherd Dogs are a part of my Pauls family life and over 15 years ago we got Deiter - a german import.
http://bagsd.ddns.info/all-pics/dogs/gsd/dieter_puppy/dieter7-100.PNG
After two years we got Lacey (his girlfriend) and as Deets got older and less playfull, Duke to keep Lacey occupied :-)
We lost Deets and Lacey a few years ago (seems like yesterday) and now take only Duke to out local GSD-only dog club.
DIY - Paul is into DIY in a big way. You name the tool and he is very likely to have one somewhere. Finding it and using it is a completely different ball game :-)
Camping - Some years ago we bought a US RV but have never used it (it only does 4 to 8 mpg!). A caravan and then a tent and folding caravan were added. We now have a LDV ex-minibus which has become the dog show wagon and part time RV/builder van.
Fishing - I do not fish but Paul does this a LOT and I have to keep moving organising and packing his fishing stuff.
Piccies - I bought a cheapo bridge camera (Fuji S9500) and take pictures of GSD's at dog club and people and LUGs etc. I am nowhere near as incompetent as I used to be - only half of my pictures are blurred these days :-)