We hope you enjoyed our ‘Meet Your Geek’ series as much as we have. Sadly, all good things come to an end and this is the last blog of the series (although we promise, next time we hire a new Geek, we’ll give them a chance to speak about themselves!).
So…
Meet Sam – one of our 2nd line IT Technicians (a.k.a. Proper Geeks). You might have spoken to him last time something went wrong with your emails or that time you asked us to set up a VPN for you.
We asked Sam about his favourite things from the last 15 years… here’s what he says!
Sam’s FAVOURITES FROM THE LAST 15 YEARS
5 favourite music artists since 2006
- Red Hot Chili Peppers – The first band I ever got into. After hearing ‘By the way’ I then explored their back catalogue with much delight!
- London Grammar – absolutely adore Hannah Ried’s vocals
- Incubus – a band I always come back to and forget how good their Albums are
- GoGo Penguin – A fairly recent find but quickly became a solid favourite
- Miles Davis – The album ‘Kind of Blue’ has been the sound track to many an evening drinking whisky, reading and feeling rather pretentious!
5 favourite movies (seen) in the last 15 years.
- Shawshank Redemption – An absolutely brilliant film
- Alien – I’m a big fan of Ridley Scott films and Alien is one of my favourites. The claustrophobia and tension that he creates is brilliant
- I’m going to be cheeky and lump all the Lord of the Rings films in together – they are just incredible
- Les Misérables – I’m not a fan of musicals but understanding the technical skill and musical ability to record it all live is astonishing
- Eat, Pray, Love – This film always inspires me to focus on what’s important in life and always makes me want to cook more!
Sam’s biggest lifestyle changes since 2006
In 2006 I was a long haired rocker at Sixth Form with some questionable fashion choices! Lot’s has changed in the last 15 years, I have:
- Got married
- Had 2 kids
- Moved to Rugby and back
- Run a marathon
I think the biggest lesson I’ve learned is not to focus on getting to a destination in life but making the most of the journey to get there.
Favourite travel destinations of the last 15 years
My favourite Travel destination is Italy – my love of food, wine and coffee made this an amazing place to visit and somewhere I definitely want to get to again soon. I stayed in Sorrento, famed for its lemons and limoncello and was able to visit Pompeii, climb Mount Vesuvius and spend a few days in Rome.
Greatest culinary achievements
- Baking fresh bread regularly at weekends
- Perfecting my Spaghetti Carbonara
- Cooking a vegetarian lasagne that’s takes 4 hours to cook
- Teaching my eldest son how to cook meatballs
Sam’s favourite career moments in the last 15 years
- Passing my first IT exam – when I got my first job in IT I had no technical qualifications – I was just a geek with a passion to learn. So passing my first qualification felt like a real achievement and gave me a lot more confidence in my ability. Now I’m always looking for the next certificate to study for!
- Bit of a geeky one but setting up Windows Virtual Desktop for a client to virtualise a legacy server! It basically meant setting up a whole computer network in the cloud with a server and client desktops – it was very new tech at the time and a great challenge.
Would you like to know anything more about Sam? Tweet at us (@dialageek) and we may reply (we reserve the right not to, if the questions are too weird/not weird enough).
ALL ARTICLES