Eight Erbonomically Correct Items

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I’m going to respond to the invited “self-tagging” of Tateru here, and give you eight pieces of information about the human behind this avatar. Are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin.

1. At one point, I had an extra tooth growing between my two front teeth. It’s called a “supernumerary tooth.” It was extracted when I was quite young, so you’d never know from looking at me today that it was ever there.
2. I was a precocious youngster. I was always taking math classes a grade ahead of me in elementary school…until sixth grade, when I was spending afternoons at a local high school learning algebra, and also taking an electronics course in which I was soldering together various projects…even etching and drilling my own circuit boards. One of my projects even won my elementary school’s science fair.
3. This was kind of mirrored in high school, where, during my senior year, I was in another program where I worked at a local company in the afternoon, doing programming in Pascal on an HP minicomputer.
4. The first computer I ever owned was a Texas Instruments TI-99/4A, for which I had many of the accessories, including the Peripheral Expansion box, disk drive, expanded memory, and Extended BASIC. I wrote a number of game programs on that machine, though, looking back, I wish I’d learned a little more about programming the thing in assembly language, because it had a rather unique architecture.
5. My ex-wife and I both loved the TV series Babylon 5. In fact, our wedding bands had, inscribed on their inner surfaces, a quote from Ambassador Delenn: “Faith manages.” Now, I finally have the entire series on DVD.
6. I have some musical talent; I can play keyboard a little bit, and I also know how to use a MIDI sequencer. One of my hobbies used to be transcribing sheet music for popular songs into MIDI files and filling out their arrangements to sound decent. The first song I ever sequenced like that was “Layla,” by Derek and the Dominos. The one I think I did the best job on was “Another Day In Paradise,” by Phil Collins.
7. I was a frequent chatter for a while on the BIX network’s conferencing system, but wound up being forced away from it when I fell in with “the wrong crowd,” as it were. I think that whole experience kind of soured me on live chat-type technologies, including instant messaging, and only recently have I begun to overcome that. Even now, I rarely turn on an IM program, except to communicate with people I know. And that’s despite the fact that I worked for an IM company at one point…
8. I am terribly bad at flirting (so I never do it, in practice), and I’m also terribly bad at recognizing that I’m being flirted with. Even in the case of the woman I later married, it took a month, and the input of a friend, for me to realize that she had been flirting with me…and an additional several weeks, plus the input of a couple of friends, to decide to do anything about it. I cut it so close that, if I had waited any longer, she would have moved cross-country and I’d never have gotten together with her at all.

And there you have it. As for who I can tag with this…well, it’s been awhile since Danielle has written anything…don’t hate me for this, Danielle!

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