⇥ 7 things you probably don’t know about me (Oh noes, I have been tagged!)
It appears that I have been tagged by Matthew, Wez and Davey. That means that I am supposed to tell you seven things about me that you probably don’t know—and maybe didn’t want to, either.
Too late—here we go (in no particular order):
- I once worked 33 hours straight on your typical death-march project, trying to meet an impossible deadline. At the end, product shipped, I simply curled up under my desk and slept until my wife called to see if I was dead. Going home was out of the question—the purple elephant in the corner office across the hall was threatening to kill me if I did.
- I don’t like being touched, or, more appropriately, I detest being touched. I had a massage once, and it was the worst twenty minutes of my life—bar none.
- I was a finalist in the Italian math olympics, and they flew me to Rimini for the finals. I can’t tell you how I did in the finals, because I was too busy loafing at the beach while the others were trying to solve puzzles of questionable practical use. In case you’re wondering, my IQ is 143—well, it was when I was 18, at least. After fifteen years of programming work, I’m probably down to amoeba-level by now.
- When I was 16, I ran up a $2,000 phone bill (in Liras) calling BBSs in the States. Thanks to a lucky combination of vacation time and late evenings, I managed to artfully evade my parents for two weeks before they confronted me with the enormity of what I had done. My dad made me pay the bill—every single cent. And I deserved it, too.
- I am of noble blood. Both on my dad’s and my mom’s side, I can trace my ancestry back to illegitimate children of Italian nobility. One such noble actually wanted to recognize my great-great-grandfather, who refused—the idiot.
- My first computer was a Texas Instrument TI 99/4A, which, incidentally, was also Eli‘s first computer. My dad got one second-hand from a friend who no longer knew what to do with it. From there, I moved on to an Apple ][+ which my dad found at the dump and repaired, and stayed with the Fruit Company until they decided that I had to buy a Mac, and I decided that I had to make a living with a PC.
- My first article was published when I was 13 in a now-defunct magazine called Nibble. It wasn’t really an article—rather, it was one of those “neat tricks” that made the border of the screen change colour at defined intervals. I think it’s agreed among experts that the event marked the general decline from which the technical publishing industry has yet to recover.
I now have to tag seven more people (revenge is sweet). They are:
- Sean Coates—who will probably never recover from editing php|architect for almost a year.
- Lukas Smith—the only person I know who can deal with internals without going insane.
- Andi Gutmans—who still owes me an answer to an e-mail I sent a month ago.
- Zak Greant—A man of insight and knowledge whose opinion I always appreciate.
- Matthew Weier O’Phinney—who has the coolest initials in the PHP community (but I claim the best anagram—the letters in my name can be rearranged to spell “atomic brain”).
- Stefan Esser—because I know that deep down there’s a smile lurking behind that Teutonic façade.
- Helgi Þormar Þorbjörnsson—whose name gave me a reason to switch all our systems to UTF-8.
Comments
Wait… since I already was tagged and wrote my post, does this mean I have to do it again. Ah, crap….