User:Ant

I was born in Harrogate (then in the West Riding of Yorkshire, now North Yorkshire), UK, on 21 January 1961. This makes me a Yorkshireman – and therefore English and British – an Aquarian, and a Metal Rat.

You might know of Harrogate as a spa town, or as a conference centre, or for Betty’s Café Tea Rooms, or for Taylor’s Teas (and coffees!), or as where Dustin Hoffman found Vanessa Redgrave in Agatha (1979; dir. Michael Apted).

Harrogate is not a typical Yorkshire town; and I’m even less a typical Yorkshireman. For a start, although my father’s family lived in Harrogate for many generations, my mother was born (in Harrogate) to a Belgian (Walloon, i.e., French-speaking) mother and a Dutch (Friesian) father.

I guess that might throw doubt on how English and British I am…

I lived in Harrogate, excepting the time I was at university, until August 1998, when I moved to Lincoln.

I went to Bilton Grange CP School and to Harrogate High School (later Harrogate Granby High School), before going on to the University of Durham to study physics (1979-1982) and to do postgraduate research in theoretical particle physics (1982-1986): my Ph.D. thesis was “Signatures of new particles at high-energy colliders”… but I didn’t actually discover any!

In 1986 the commercial world beckoned, and in July I joined General Accident Life Assurance (GA Life) in York as a computer programmer. After about 15 months working in maintaining and developing financial applications for the mainframe, I moved to IT Standards & Training. About that time I met my future wife, who I married in York one year later (to the day!).

In February 1991 our twin sons were born. And the following month, I joined the IT Security team, later Information Security Management, where I stayed until I left GA Life in July 1998 (shortly before it became CGU Life).

From July 1998 to August 2000 I worked for Software Europe as a Technical Consultant in the Security Solutions Team.

In August 2000 I started work as a research director for a leading international research and advisory company, specialising in information security.

More here: http://homepage.mac.com/antallan/