Sandy and I became close friends in our first year at the University of Strathclyde in 1989. We shared many Computer Science classes and we both stayed in Baird Hall on Sauchiehall Street during the entire four years of our undergraduate lives.

Over the first summer holidays, I went to visit Sandy and his family at Stroneskar Farm in Argyll. By the time I arrived, Sandy, his brother Duncan, and his father Alasdair were up in the hills herding their sheep. So, Sheena kitted me up with wellington boots and jacket and sent me up there to help out. I'm sure that they would have finished their work much faster if I hadn't been there to help! Anyway, for the several days that I stayed at the farm, we ate well (including venison, from the deer that Sandy's father shot the night before), I milked a cow for the first time in my life, and Sandy, Duncan, and I sampled the complete night life offered by the nearby metropolis of Lochgilphead.

After returning to Baird Hall for our second year, Sandy and I shared Room 701 on the top floor. This was a veritable penthouse suite, with the sounds of the Daily Record vendors on the street in the wee hours of the morning and a bird's-eye view of 3-in-1, our regular pizza joint where we would visit Charlie for our chicken, mushroom, and sweetcorn pizzas; often paying in part with the several empty bottles of Irn Bru that we continually collected around our room.

Sandy and I both had Amiga computers, at a time when it was unusual for students to have computers in their room at all. That, in addition to our VHS recorders and large collection of backup movie tapes, made our room quite a popular destination. Also, given Sandy's insatiable desire to tinker with electronics, he hooked up a serial cable to connect our two computers so that we could race together in Stunt Car Racer and fly against each other in F16 Combat Pilot. Perhaps not much of a feat in today's world, but remember that this was 1990.

Speaking of the Amiga, Sandy and I took the 1st-year Pascal Programming course together and we challenged each other to write computer programs. We were frustrated by having to write an English algorithm version of our programs before being allowed to write the actual Pascal code, so Sandy was going to write a program that would take Pascal code and output an English algorithm. My task was to write a general text editor for programmers. Sandy found more interesting things to do, but I spent several years writing and improving the EdWord text editor. So ultimately I won the bet — which was for a whole pint of milk!

In case you get the impression that we were two complete nerds who were permanently tied to our computers, there were many evenings spent down the pub, playing pool at the union, going off to concerts, or just creating havoc around Baird Hall. The latter would occasionally culminate in "Nonsense Nights", where we would don impenetrable disguises (see the picture below for proof) and perform hilariously mature pranks on our fellow inmates. Such nights included activities such as: moving the Baird Hall Christmas tree into the lightwell so that everyone could enjoy its flashing lights, "pennying" the odd poor unsuspecting inhabitants into their rooms (sorry Bryony!), mounting retaliatory water balloon fights against Richard and Keith, and of course adding a bus stop and bus lanes to the corridor for Dave.

Finally, being both pretty social people, the door to Room 701 was practically always open, sometimes even while one of us was asleep. One particular morning I recall waking up with the sideburns on one side of my face shaved off. I never did find out who did that, but I'm pretty sure that Sandy knows who it was!