So, in other words, “Who Is Robert?”, and perhaps more intriguingly, “Who Is Sophie?”
Oddly, Robert always thought of himself as having a pretty mundane life, but this appears to be a somewhat one-sided and superficial view. He always considered himself as a shy introvert, but the weight of evidence seems to suggest he’s actually an ambivert, alongside his ambidextrousness.
Precious few people break their first security system at the age of six. But school at that age was not particularly challenging, and the mandatory (warm) milk was disgusting… His first girlfriend was around this time, but she somewhat discombobulated him by suddenly moving to the other side of the planet, a move that seemed a little extreme to him at the time but that he hopes, one day, to come to terms with.
Historically, one has to feel slightly sorry for his teachers; on top of their already difficult job they had to cope with a super-articulate child with a voracious thirst for knowledge, who was so underwhelmingly challenged by the curriculum that he became bored, lazy, and…. well, dangerous. Aged 12, he objected to the age-based-weighting for tests at school, because it applied a multiplication factor to the test score based on age (oldest children in the year age-factor = 1, youngest age-factor = 1.25 or thereabouts) …and thus made it impossible for a child at the older end of the year-group to score as highly as one at the lower end of the year-group if they both got everything correct in a test.
Insisting that this was fundamentally unfair, he successfully convinced the school – suggesting a replacement method, which eventually was accepted. This took the points lost in an exam, and divided those by the age-factor. Thus the adjustment was inversely proportional to how well one did in a test, and the maximum score for anyone was the same: 100%, but that age-adjustment affected lower scores appropriately.
Experiences such as this taught them that system designs are not infallible, that sometimes it is necessary to challenge established systems & wisdom, and that even educated people jump at simplistic & inappropriate answers to problems. Plus ça change!
Some time later, after rejecting Oxford University via UCCA (long story but an excellent coup de grâce to a doomed application), getting an unconditional offer from Sheffield University (aka “two E grades”), they ended up in Manchester for the next sixteen years but utterly failed to be influenced by the local accent, retaining their dulcet BBC tones, even today.
One BSc in Physics, one MSc in Information Systems, being taught briefly by Michael Jackson (this one, not that one!), a couple of years working on a PhD in an Optometry Department which never got written up (had to write all my own code, including 2D-FFT code for image processing – now all available off-the-shelf c’est la vie!), and working in the computer services part of the University for several years, later.
Meanwhile, they ran a delightful Student Hall of Residence as a second job, was a skid pan instructor and a trainer of skid pan instructors, ran one of the first thousand web servers on the Internet, saw far more fresh corpses in person than they had ever wanted to (long and grim tales), discovered a novel route for discussing employment opportunities with MI5 / MI6, and finally they moved out into industry.
Entering this world was interesting and novel. They later discovered that the owner of the company, having watched Robert tear one of his salespeople to shreds with a few simple questions, had declared that he would rather have them “on the inside of the tent pissing out”. They decided to take that as a compliment.
This move into the private sector finally seemed to shake off the unwanted apparent attentions of the IRA. Long story, and probably just a set of highly unlikely co-incidences.
Involved extensively with firewalls and encryption technologies, with a brief accidental stint as an International Arms Dealer (long story), publishing the first ever PGP signature transplant using the original key-types (now deprecated, but an interesting and educational tale), they worked for many years in surprisingly exciting roles within Government and Policing security, learned that nearly all Government IT Projects are either shit or late (or both), found terrifyingly huge unmanaged risks (but got them taken seriously in most cases, especially the ones which ended up on Ministers’ desks), and now spends a lot of time telling customers really basic things and finds this amusing sometimes.
Maintaining a fascination for, and intuitive ability with, many types of computer technology, loving old books of eclectic natures, they once made friends with the Pope’s cat, visited the Sistine Chapel by entering against the relentlessly surging one-way-flow (for good, but complex, reasons) – and thus knows what it feels like for salmon heading upstream – but still insists that this was not their most interesting and unusual visit to the Holy See (a whole different story). They enjoy a good bunker, and will tell you that Ceaușescu’s, in Buchurești, was a particularly interesting example (and recommended – if you can work out how to get to visit it).
Eternally an atheist, they have however spent astonishingly large amounts of time dealing with the upper echelons of religious hierarchy in a variety of denominations (long stories); when asked why, they merely shrug and reply “Irony”.
Surprisingly, maybe, they look pretty good in a dress and heels, but in such attire prefer she/her pronouns. And that’s a whole other set of long stories altogether, and a completely separate blog which you can easily find here and which will properly introduce Sophie.
“DOT the t’s and cross the i’s” ɨs kɨnd of a moṫṭo; never be mundane, never be enṭɨrely predɨcṫable.
TL;DR: To summarise; Very little interesting at all, really.
- Updated 2025-10-23 to openly link to Sophie’s blog, now at sophie.baskerville.net
- Updated 2025-09 to sneak in Sophie’s domain name sophiesometimes.tv in the bold italicised letters on this pages
Gânduri Eclectice - Eclectic Thoughts 