Groom to be

Richard Douglas Macmurchie was born on March 6th 1972 in Victoria, BC.

I guess I should write something about myself here...

I've lived in Victoria all of my life, and unlike a lot of the people that went to school with me, I have no desire to leave. Why leave when you already live in one of the most beautiful cities in the world.

I went to elementary school (Grades 1-7) at Strawberry Vale school, a nice small school with a few amazing teachers that made a real difference trying to help me. In grade 4 or 5 (I can't remember which) one of my teachers arranged for me to go to another school that had a (then rare) computer and learn to program in a language called Logo.

Shoreline Community School was my junior-high school (Grades 8-10) I spent a fair amount of time in the computer lab, which rather conveniently was my home room.

My last two years of school (Grades 11 & 12) were at Spectrum. I took a lot of business related courses as well as art and computer courses.

Before I finished grade 12 I had started working part time at G.H. Business Machines, (then) a small computer and typewriter store on Douglas Street. After graduation I started working full time at GH and continued working there for a number of years.

I left GH to take a job the was supposed to be better at Paradon Computers. After about 6 months at Paradon I had had enough of working there and decided to start a computer consulting business with one of the other technicians from Paradon. That business (Technophobia) didn't last long before the two of us decided that we didn't have compatible ideas about how to run the business, so we went our separate ways and I continued to work on my own consulting business, going back to a business name I had been using for my computer programming 'company' Great White North Technologies.

By this time I was living with my grandmother Sylvia Macmurchie, in a loft over her garage. The low rent allowed me to build my own business without running up a huge debt, but business built up slowly, taking quite a few years to build to what I would call a full-time job.

I made good use of my spare time though, I taught myself to play the guitar, something that I had failed miserably at as a teen. I also started to try singing. With the help and encouragement of some friends that were professional musicians, Braden Carbol, Shai Thompson, Scott Cook, Scott Ramsay and Paul Pigat among others I actually made some progress as a guitar player and a singer. Eventually I got good enough that Braden and Scott Cook let me join them on stage occasionally to play a song or two with them. Scott Ramsay eventually hired me to do sound mixing a the 'Golden Bear' at the Sidney Travel Lodge every Friday and Saturday for a year or two.

Working with musicians as a sound tech. was quite a bit of fun, and eventually led to some home-studio recording work and a Duo Band of my own. As the M&Ms Robert Mitchell and I played old Rock and Roll songs in Legions around the Victoria area about once a month.

When I first got my high-speed internet connection on Shaw cable, my brother (Chris) got me to load an instant messaging program called ICQ. ICQ allowed Chris and I to send messages to each other over the internet whenever we wanted to, making it much easier to keep in touch with each other than using the telephone (we could always tell if the other person was home and at their computer).

ICQ happened to have a feature that let you put some information about yourself in a directory that other ICQ users could search. I ended up talking to a few people from all over the world, and even meeting a few from Victoria.

One of the ICQ users that I chatted with went by the online name Victoria. We started chatting just after Christmas 1999 and ended up meeting in person just after the Millennium on January 9th 2000.

'Victoria' ended up being Debby Meed and since you are here on our wedding page, I guess you can figure out how that meeting turned out.

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