Tyler thoughtfully tagged me in the “7 random facts” meme.
 
<sarcasm>Thanks mate, really appreciate it</sarcasm>
 
The rules are thus:
  • link to the person who tagged you (check)
  • post the rules here (check)
  • share seven random or weird facts about yourself
  • tag seven random people at the end of the post, linking to them
  • leave a comment on their blog so they know they’ve been tagged
So, here goes, in no specific order of weirdness:
  1. I enjoy writing code.  You probably guessed that from the title of this posting.  I got my first computer in 1984, it was an Atari 600XL and I was bitterly disappointed when I got it home and it didn’t answer questions like computers did in the movies.  It had a tape drive and since I couldn’t afford to buy cartridges for the thing, I managed to get a book of source code for games.  Which I typed in.  40-odd pages of code and you’re going to make a mistake somewhere along the way.  So we actually just ended up playing games on my friends brothers’ ZX-Spectrum.  That same year I did a programming course and wrote my first lines of (working) code.
  2. I wasn’t in Enter the Dragon or Pretty Woman, but some other guy with my name was.  In 2002 he played himself in “Playboy: Inside the Playboy Mansion”.  I’m detecting a trend here.  Downwards.
  3. I’ve co-authored 11 books, all of them on techie type stuff.  If you Google for me you’ll find them all mixed with links to our actor friend.  Writing books doesn’t pay very well at all, but at least my mom has something to show her friends.
  4. I do my best thinking when I’m driving.  I’ve been meaning to get some kind of dictaphone type thing to use in the car because the middle of the steering wheel makes a really crap desk.  If I didn’t hate my phone so much I’m sure I could work out how to do it on that.
  5. I can still remember the IP number from my first real job when I worked at the University of Cape Town.  I do an nslookup on it every now and again – UCT still give descriptive names in their DNS.  When I was there it was akent.its.uct.ac.za.  Going by its current name my IP is being used for an ethernet switch now.  Unfortunately, archive.org doesn’t have anything of the web site I ran off it back in 1995.  It contained a diary type page that I updated about three times a week (dare I say blog?) and a mirror of unix documentation for people in the office to access.  It was optimized for NCSA Mosaic.
  6. I now live in the same neighborhood that I grew up in.  It’s kinda cool being able to walk around and point out old friends’ houses and what happened there in your childhood. 80′s nostalgia.  Thankfully there are no photos, as the 80′s were not a good time for fashion.  There’s a lot on that list I was guilty of, and no I won’t list them, but I will fess up to a pink tank top.  I wish I could go back in time and slap myself.  I still have my black mesh tie.  But I don’t wear it.
  7. Even though archive.org has lost my website, Google still has my first ever posting to Usenet.  4 June 1992, using a friends VAX account.
So that’s the seven facts out of the way.  Now to pass on the misery:
  1. Bruce Lawson.  Accessibility bore and proud owner o the redhotanalsluts.co.uk domain. Go read his blog – you’ll learn a crapload about web standards and accessibility and have a good laugh while doing so.  Incidentally, Bruce was editor on a number of my books, so if you think they’re crap, you can blame him :)
  2. Uwe Gutschow.  Thought you could slip away over there to LA?  Uwe was my boss at Saatchi AtPlay before he deserted us.
  3. WhiskeyKitten.  I’ve only known her for about 22 years.  That’s what you get for growing up with her brother.  Go check the site for photo’s of horses.  Millions of them.  Here’s another fact about me:  I don’t like horses.  But she does. 
  4. Faris Yakob.  He was the keynote speaker at a conference where I got to ramble away behind a lecturn for an hour.  His talk was inspirational and I’ve been a religious reader of his blog since then.
  5. Leon Jacobs.  Was Creative Director at Saatchi Cape Town and is now regional CD for Saatchi in Asia.  He likes funny french cars and cats.  He also enjoys singing while playing Wii golf.
  6. Dave Duarte.  I would have expected Dave to have been tagged with this a long time ago, but a quick search on his site for “random” or “seven” didn’t turn up anything.  So consider yourself tagged.  Dave, for those of you who only just turned on the internets and don’t know, is Cape Town’s celebrity marketing geek.  I can’t recall ever spending time with Dave when he hasn’t had something interesting or clever to say, so let’s see what random gems he can deliver.  No pressure.
  7. Ash.  While spending waaaaay too much time on IRC in the 90′s, I bumped into Ash and her husband.  Her blog is all about books and living in Amsterdam.   
So that’s it.  Now to go give people the good news.