I was born on 28th July 1966 to Patricia and David Tribble who were living in Northwood Hills in north London at the time. I am the second son of three, the others being James (the elder) and Matthew (the younger) who are both uglier than I am.
In 1975 the family moved to Upper Gravenhurst in Bedfordshire, as my fathers job took him to work by the old airship hangers at Cardington. He was a meteorologist, an SSO for the Met. Office, and made many experimental instruments for the study of weather, attracting international attention. My father built me one of the first kit computers (a cosmac elf) when I was fifteen, which he expanded to a beast over the years. I learnt to code in machine language and wrote an operating system for it.
We barely survived childhood and I went to the local comprehensive Samual Whitbread, then on to the University of East Anglia in Norwich to study Physics and Electronics - mainly because I couldn't make my mind up what I wanted to do. I made a few friends here, studied a little but had a lot of fun and ended up with a proud 2nd class Honours degree. During the summer breaks my father sweet talked the British Antarctic Survey to take me on for general programming roles (he had been to Antarctica in 1957 and retained some contacts). They liked me so much I was allowed back for four summers to write software for their data collection procedures both at the bases and at head office.
Never to study physics again I took my fledgling skills in computing and slipped into a programming support role in my first job in 1989 at a company called Trend in High Wycombe. They kicked me out after 8 months when they discovered my incompetence, or rather it was last in first out in a company squeeze, and I was immediately offered some work with a local chap back in Gravenhurst named John Anderson.
John was getting busy supplying retail systems to expanding drinks distribution companies around London and wanted a hand. I was there, in his garage, for the next eight years plotting my escape. Actually it was a little too comfortable and near the cooked dinners of home where I lived for a while before buying a flat in Milton Keynes. There were a few memorable installations during this period; underneath the arches at Kings Cross, a whole summer spent at Honiton in Devon, a new system for the Gibbs Mew brewery in Salisbury.
I had learnt to ring church bells at an early age and took it up again in MK meeting many new friends and eventually my wife Christina, the daughter of local farmers Rachel and David Jones (see turkey links). We had a grand wedding in June 2000 at St. Andrews in Bedford and have settled into our little house in the Bradwell Village suburb.
In 1998 John and I parted company as work thinned out and I found a helpdesk role in Milton Keynes at a company called Radius Retail, then Transatlantic, then Applied Digital Retail as it struggled through various disguises before collapsing in April 2002, uncannily exactly 4 years after I had joined. Out of the ashes has grown BGM where I now do much the same things of tribbleshooting customer problems, bug fixing and writing new stuff , although with six others we all have a go at doing everything.
My father died in 1993 and my mother has now moved to Abercrombie in Scotland, nearby where James and his wife Joyce live (see Toft Terrace). The move is another exhausting story in itself, however I managed to rescue my fathers old car from its long term garage storage and took it back to Bradwell for restoration (see Jupiter pictures).
I continue to go bell ringing, haven't played squash or cycled around the country much lately but intend getting back into both, and until then I am playing around with this new toy of a web site, a technology I haven't tried before. It exists mainly for my education, but has a side use of letting others see how I and my relatives are getting on with their lives.