Seven Things You Didn’t Know About Me

I’ve been tagged by Laura Thomson!

1. My first programs were written in BASICA, although at some point I think I messed around with Apple languages as well and quickly forgot. I wrote choose-your-own-adventure games at 10 years old. With no formal training at this age, at some point I realized the logic should be separate from the text, so I separated out into my own markup language that held information about color and position within the program.

2. I once cracked the code to the Nintendo game Adventures of Lolo by beating 30 levels and cracking the code with pencil and paper; that was long before I started drinking and lost my capacity for logic.

3. I once ran a large MP3 download site for the band Phish called phishphiles.org on a Red Hat box in my dorm room at UMASS: Amherst in 1999. I was approached by Rolling Stone magazine for download statistics which were subsequently published in the magazine.

4. I left college after one year to create my first PHP shopping cart application to run my business DividedSky.com which sold T-Shirts for jam bands. I ran it for 4 years while living in my office on the floor.

5. I used to have a band in high school called Ambient North. I thought we rocked. I got started in web design building web sites for my band. I used to make a new web site every month. Good practice.

6. I recently bought an electronic drum set and now I’m wondering why I ever wasted so much time writing songs and playing guitar. Go Roland V-Drums! I already pretty good at them since I’ve been visualizing playing them my whole life.

7. I just moved to Boston from the US Virgin Islands and everyone asks my why I did it. I never have a good answer for this question. Did I mention I’m currently freezing my ass off?

Tagees:

Nate Abele – friend and CakePHP Lead Developer
Lukas Karlsson – great friend and Manager of IT at The Broad Institute
Matt Langer – my friend who got me hooked on PHP on now makes fun of me because he’s a Pythonista
Mariano Iglesias – the unstoppable Argentinean
Felix Geisendorfer – the man, the myth, the German
Andy Dawson – fellow CakePHPer

And here are the rules:

• Link your original tagger(s), and list these rules on your blog.
• Share seven facts about yourself in the post—some random, some weird.
• Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
• Let them know they’ve been tagged by leaving a comment on their blogs and/or Twitter.