Looks like I got tagged by Jonvon for the 5-things...uh...thing (I don't like the "meme" meme). Here it is, in no particular order...
I went to speech therapy classes in school because a teacher thought I had a problem speaking. I don't know if it helped any, but the classes gave me a fascination about how languages sound and how others speak. I learned Esperanto in school around that time. Now I listen to a Klingon-language podcast (though I don't speak or read the language), and watched Sabado Gigante before I had a TiVo. Whenever I'm talking to someone, at some level I still pay a lot of attention to stuff like regional accents, how they're forming their words, stuff like that.
I can't swim. For some reason, I don't float. I get the mechanics fine, and I can swim underwater with no trouble. My first swimming lessons were in the summer between Kindergarden and First grade and I have had help on and off since then. On my honeymoon, I went snorkeling for the first time and thought I was going to drown even with the floatation belt...ended up spending the swim time on the zodiac. Almost drowned myself in the surf after a hurricane once too....boogie board in hand, I got dragged out and pummeled. I lasted long enough to get out past the breakers to rest and decide how I'm going to get back to the sand.
I learned to solder and stuff circuit boards by watching my mother as a kid. My first "real" job after high school was on the assembly floor building networking and comm gear (frame relay boxes and ISDN modems at the time mostly) and learning Vietnamese from the people I worked with. It's not on my resume anymore because sysadmins don't need to solder anymore. I did use the one of my overtime-beefy paychecks to buy my first real computer (a nice-for-the-time custom-built first-rev 486) which was probably what got me good enough at computers to get my first admin/support job (which, oddly enough was all Macs).
In high school I was on the It's Academic team. I didn't want to be on TV so I stopped when I started my Junior year. I did some intramural events while I was in though. I thought I was pretty good, though I don't have any stats to back that up. I can hang pretty well in Jeopardy at home still.
Coming out of high school, I wanted to be a programmer. I did some college work towards a Computer Science degree. Coursework included computer architecture (circuit design mostly), programming in ANSI C and x86 Assembler. At home, I was using some of what I was picking up in school to try to do what the demoscene was doing at the time (not nearly so well) and learning how computer viruses worked (which were almost all written in assembler at the time). Then my first job in IT was a sysadmin for a small network of Macs and I've been in similar support roles since.
By the time things like this get to me (Technorati rank 620,897 with a bullet!), I think they're already pretty much done with. I think that everyone that I know that hasn't been tagged at this point doesn't have a blog to react to the tagging from. If there's anyone left that sees this, leave a comment and I'll make it official. :D
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