You’ve reached the blog of Greig Sheridan. I’m a “late 50s” gay guy living in Newcastle, Australia (to the north of Sydney) with my partner Rocky, and we’re both being held hostage by a pair of Tonkinese cats. SEND HELP!

I was born into a farming family in country NSW, but grazing sheep and farming wheat weren’t for me – I was always into the tech stuff. (I’m reliably informed that my first foray into tech was plugging a set of keys into a power point at age two…)

My heritage is telephony. I spent my entire working life involved in business communications. I left school straight into an apprenticeship with (then) Telecom Australia and I chose PABX Maintenance as my specialisation at the end of my first year of training.

The Nortel SL-1 PABX family became my bread-and-butter for almost two decades, and it was Nortel’s “Innovative Communications Alliance” with Microsoft that introduced me to “UC” and presented me an obvious career move when the good ship Nortel sank in 2008/2009. (You can read some more of my reminiscing in “From Telecom Apprentice to Lync MVP in 30 Short Years”).

The Microsoft component of my career spanned roughly twelve ten years, with stints at two leading Microsoft partners. My enthusiasm for the technology saw me honoured as a Microsoft MVP, and in my final position I was the Practice Lead for the Unified Communications component of the business.

I followed Rocky into retirement at the tail-end of the Covid pandemic, selling up in Sydney and relocating ourselves a little to the north in the old steel town of Newcastle, although I regularly return to Sydney for social events and the odd trade show. I’m still “greiginsydney” because at planet-scale, Newcastle’s still more or less Sydney.

My mouthful of sweet teeth led me to Newcastle’s amazing catering TAFE (college) in Hamilton, where I’m learning all about baking and patisserie, which you might see here in recipes and food-related posts on an otherwise technical blog.

When I’m not at TAFE, adding more home automation to the house, pandering to the cats or building or debugging tech stuff, I’m still coding. This will be in PowerShell (see all the tools here), as well as C# (e.g. bounSky), Python, Arduino (C++), with random bits of HTML, CSS & Javascript. I’m no good at any of them, but with help from Stack Overflow and Hey Scripting Guy (and many others) I get by. Check out my repos on GitHub for more of what’s going on there.

The opinions, tips, recipes and other content on this site are not necessarily the opinion of, or endorsed by any employer. All recipes are low-fat (promise!) and do not use genetically modified ingredients.

Enjoy.

– Greig.