The 5 Things Meme
Saturday, February 3, 2007
Ok, I don't usually do this sort of thing; however, I've been tagged by one of my favorite bloggers so I'll play along. Here are five things you might not know about me:
- People sometimes ask about my accent - well, although I was born in the US, I have lived most of my life in other countries (I have citizenship in 2 countries and "permanent resident" status in 2 others) and I'm fluent in two languages (and can swear in serveral others!). So, there are probably a mish-mash of different influences on my accent.
- When I was drafted into the army, they gave everyone an IQ test. Afterwards, I was told that I had scored highest in my intake group. "Wow", I thought, "I wonder what interesting job the army will find for me" - I was made an infantry squad gunner!
- During my "mis-spent hippie youth", I travelled overland from Istanbul, Turkey to Varanasi, India (via Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan) using just local transport. Total transportation costs were $50. Most of my 20's were spent bumming around Europe and the Middle East.
- I helped Wade Doak record wild dolphin sounds and am mentioned in a number of his books. At the time, we were trying to identify patterns in dolphin sounds and I would programmatically capture and play back the sounds to the dolphins (sometimes mixed with human sounds or music). In one encounter, the dolphins stayed next to our anchored boat for about 4 hours exchanging sounds with us.
- Just to make certain that I won't completely bore those of you who
read my blog for the lisp content: I have written
program-writing programs in a number of different
languages over the years. Here are some of them:
- In the early 80's, I wrote a BASIC/Z-80 Assembler self-modifying program that dynamically generated new code to display a graphical representation of different machine activity in a dairy produce manufacturing plant.
- In the late 80's, I wrote an RPG program that wrote program specifications to a table (to be subsequently "executed" as maintenance and report programs).
- In the early 90's, I taught myself C by writing a program generator to create maintenance and report programs based on database schema definitions.
- In the late 90's, I prototyped extensible metadata in Lisp for an ERP company (dynamically generating custom classes based on different vertical-industry-specific requirements).
