Born in July 1939. This makes me an old geezer - none of this "politically correct" rubbish - I am an decrepit old-aged pensioner! But I love computers and moved over to Ubuntu after testing a load of distros in "Google Trends" and found that whilst interest in a whole lot of others was waning, interest in Ubuntu was increasing at a rapid pace.

And anyway, Mark Shuttleworth comes from the same country as me - even if Welkom in the Free State is not a patch on Stellenbosch in the Cape!

Educated in Sith Ifrica (that's how we pronounce South Africa) I came to England at fifteen and worked as a cub reporter on a local newspaper. Then after a year went to work as a reporter in the USA in the heyday of the start of rock 'n' roll (Bill Haley, Platters, Inkspots) for three years.

After a spell of four years in the British Army (ending up in Paris in NATO in security) I worked for a brief spell as a private investigator. I then spent a decade or two in sales and marketing, eventually managing a team of twenty-seven. Returned to Journalism in the late seventies and, after a while had my own column, I worked as an editor of two magazines, and then started up my own North London newspaper.

Now at 70, I am starting up a community electronic paper for 10,000 households in Finchley N3.

Those that know about reporting, policing and sales will know that underneath all the differences there is a certain similarity of hacking at a problem until you find a solution. Which is, in a way, the same with computers.

My nickname came about when I ran a BBS in the eighties and signed my name as &roo - For some reason all the members of the BBS hated writing an Ampersand sign, so referred to, and called, me "Ampers" and it stuck.

Ampers of Finchley (ampers on Skype) mobile 0794-162 2401
Blog at ampers.blogspot.com; web at ampers.co.uk; newspaper at groups.google.com/group/finchley-n3