Skip to main content

Seven Things

I was also going to skip over this Seven Things meme. I actually think the idea is a good one—always fun to learn new and often strange things about friends/colleagues—but I lost patience when I opened up my feed reader one morning and Planet PHP was overrun with Seventy Things about ten people I don't know. So, I'm intentionally not tagging this PHP so it doesn't show up in the feed. Call me a grumpy old man if you like. (-:

I'm also going to forgo tagging seven others. Nearly everyone I'd tag has already been pressured.

  • You might know that I'm a bit of a beer aficionado, and that I brew my fair share of malt and hop based beverages (all grain). What you probably don't know is that I never liked beer until I was 22 (legal drinking age in Canada is 19 or 18 depending on province). My gateway libation was Sleeman Honey Brown Lager, which admittedly isn't a great brew, but it still holds a special place in my heart (read: gut).
  • I strongly dislike weddings. Mine was very unconventional for a number of reasons. Two of those reasons: it took place on a Thursday night, and I wore a custom tailored suit... with sandals. (I also dislike socks.)
  • It seems to be all the rage to share one's first computer, so mine was a Tandy Colour Computer III with Extended Colour Basic. We eventually got a 5.25" disk drive, but the storage medium of choice for a couple years was audio cassette tapes. I wrote a whole address book app at the ripe age of 10, complete with telephone line art and "realistic" ringing sounds that we tuned after dozens of calls to my buddy's phone number so we could hear his phone ring.
  • I can read music. I used to be pretty good at it. These days, I can probably still handle treble clef, but bass clef would require some thought, which is a bit ironic since my current instrument of choice is the bass guitar (I'm not terribly good, but not horrible); I play mostly by ear, now. I played trumpet in jr. high, by I didn't like the music teacher at my high school, so I dropped it. I aced the music theory part of my grade 10 music class (100% at mid-term), but ended up with a 79% in the class because the second half of the semester was music history, which is possibly the second most boring subject in existence... right after Canadian history.
  • I studied Multimedia and Design after high school, but I'm far too left-brained to be any good at it. As a result, I have a reasonable idea of which designs are good and which are bad (the design theory part was interesting to me: rule of thirds, colour theory, etc.), but if I sit down with an empty canvas, it's likely to be covered in bad ideas. Good thing we have people for that sort of thing, now. I went into multimedia because I didn't want to get stuck writing database applications for the rest of my life. These days, I write database applications.
  • I believe there is a God. I don't talk about it much in my professional circles, but it's not something I intentionally hide, either. I mostly keep it to myself because most people who maintain this position on an omnipotent creator are jackasses. Organized religion is usually a big crock. I did, however, help plant a church here in Montreal. It's definitely a much different vibe than the conservative church I grew up in, but that was our intent when planting (most churches = serious fale). I have a fairly scientific approach to my beliefs: I do think we were created, but I also think that the method of creation employed evolution, not 7 literal days; I certainly don't have good answers for the common critiques of Christians; Pascal was a pretty smart guy.
  • I moved to Montreal in late 2000 with only two weeks of salary in the bank. I had it in my head to get out of my hometown of Moncton, NB, in pursuit of a real career. This was dotcom boom time, so I interviewed at two places and got two offers. So, I packed all of my stuff into my car (yes, car) and made two trips to good ol' YUL in one week. I told my parents I was moving to another timezone barely two weeks before I left, and I don't think they were terribly surprised. I took one of the offers, and when that company folded in 2001, I took the other offer.

There. Happy? Now leave me alone! (-;