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53V3N 7H1NG5

I thought I might dodge this newest 1337 meme striking our community, but now I've finally been tagged by marcoos, and I need to share seven things you may (not) know about me. You have been warned.

The rules:
  1. Link to your original tagger(s) and list these rules in your post.
  2. Share seven facts about yourself in the post.
  3. Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
  4. Let them know they’ve been tagged.

The 53V3N 7H1NG5 you may (or may not) know about me:
  1. The first computer I worked on was an Olivetti 8086 with 12 MHz, 640K of RAM, a 20 MB harddisk drive and MS-DOS 3.2 installed, back in the late 1980s (I was in primary school back then). It was some time back then that I got DOS and GW-BASIC reference books as a birthday or Christmas present and started writing my first small programs in that language. Yes, I still remember LIST and RENUM commands - and what fantastic news it was when MS-DOS 5.0 was released with QBASIC included.
  2. When it comes to "home", I feel like having two hearts pounding in my chest: One beating strong for my actual home in Austria, or to be more exact, Steyr, a town right in the middle between Salzburg and Vienna - the other one is beating about as strong for the southern US (I don't manage to locate it more specifically). For a European, I probably have an unusually deep appreciation and fondness for "downhome Dixie". That ain't no joke, y'all.
  3. Some time in the early 1990s, when I was in secondary school, I started writing song lyrics and even complete songs, even though I didn't play an instrument. Because of that, I made my fingers hurt by taking a chords manual and my daddy's western guitar and teach myself some basics on how to play it. Meanwhile, I have my own guitar, which I'm touching way too rarely and can play way too badly, and I've written about 280 songs, none published, but most lyrics are available online.
  4. I've been involved in politics since I realized in school that talking to others to change stuff that multiple people want differently can actually achieve something, esp. if you get to know the right people and perhaps are even in the right committees or such bodies. I call myself a "progressive conservative", being deeply rooted in string values but always seeking to explore new frontiers, believing that constant evolution is the only way nature shows to keep good things well. And I found that working for the common good is a tremendously effective contribution to the glorified vision I have of a possible future. 'nuff said, I guess you see what I mean.
  5. Only after starting to study physics next to chemistry I grew strongly attached to Star Trek, and both science fiction as well as space exploration in general. I had some interest in space vehicles and science, esp. those from NASA, starting in primary school, but it's never been as strong as in this last decade - nowadays I'm following every single Space Shuttle mission as well as some ISS and other coverage on NASA TV streams and I've seen every minute of Star Trek series and movies expect the animated classic series. I always liked the original series (with Kirk and Spock) least due to less thought-through science and characters - but then, this grew easier to do with more money and newer technology.
  6. I started localizing Mozilla back in 1999 due to my fascination with that technology that gave me the power to understand the construction of the UI with my HTML, CSS and slight JS knowledge I had through creating some web pages. It was simply cool that I could change the strings in those .dtd files to German ones and have that reflected in the UI of this experimental application. When I asked in the newsgroup how to preserve this fun test work for others, I was informed I had been added as the first contributor for German Mozilla, and so I released a complete L10n of Mozilla M12 on January 1st of 2000. The rest is history.
  7. I'm not much interested in Soccer, the football I watch is NFL. I haven't settled for any team I strongly support yet, I just like good, interesting games, including defense battles (the recent divisional playoff game of Eagles vs. Giants was a good example) - one of my best friends is a strong Dolphins fan and I'm usually with him when I come around to watch Sunday afternoon/night football (whatever one should call it, depending on "their" vs. "our" timezone). I also enjoy watching the NBA, supporting the Spurs (at least since visiting San Antonio and seeing the Alamo Dome where they still played back then) even though I loved the legendary Bulls trio of Pippen, Jordan and Rodman back when I was younger and my even younger brother played Basketball in a national league here in Austria. And while we're on Sports and Austria, of course I also like skiing and ski jumping, I even had the privilege of both being there at a ski flying competition day at the "Kulm" in Bad Mitterndorf as well as standing up on the jump there (with shoes, not skis) on a non-competition day, looking and later walking/slipping down the landing area.

The poor souls that I'm tagging and need to continue this meme:
  1. Justin Wood (Callek), who just created his blog and need to really start blogging (and a reason the file a bug to get onto planet) anyway.
  2. Mark Banner (Standard8), our SeaMonkey "export" to Mozilla Messaging - I hope the suite hasn't yet lost this great guy yet. ;-)
  3. Joshua Cranmer, for being a young genius who dares touching mailnews code people have avoided for ages.
  4. Mitchell Baker, the awesome woman who has been leading the Mozilla project as Chief Lizard Wrangler since even before it officially started (I know, Tristan tagged you already but I wanted to do so even before reading his post).
  5. Simon Paquet, long-time L10n coordinator for calendar and recently also Thunderbird
  6. Wolfgang Rosenauer, for making SUSE the first Linux distribution to ship with SeaMonkey and now preparing SeaMonkey 2 prereleases in the openSUSE Build Service - and probably now infecting Planet SUSE with this meme.
  7. J. Paul Reed, who took me and one of my best friends (yes, the Dolphins fan) on an amazing plane tour over the San Francisco Bay area last year.

Beitrag geschrieben von KaiRo und gepostet am 14. Jänner 2009 04:31 | Tags: meme | 2 Kommentare | TrackBack

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Tony Mechelynck

aus Brussels, Belgium

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S3v3и 7н1иGS
Normally I file chain-letters (including "tag your friends" letters) in the wastebasket but this time, maybe because I wasn't tagged, I'll answer.

1. My first computer programs were exercises in FORTRAN for an IBM-7040 while I was a college freshman. The first computer I owned was an 8086 with 640K of RAM, two diskette drives and no hard disk; I don't remember if it ran DOS 2 or DOS 3. That's unless you count a handheld HP-71 calculator as a computer, it had the same processor as Hewlett-Packard desktops of the time, and thanks to "bugs" which its user community treated as "undocumented features", it could be programmed not only in RPN but even in binary; I wrote a couple LEX (language extension) files for it.
2. Thanks to the international language Esperanto, I regard the whole world as my home and all humans as my brethren (the latter is not always easy to live with), even though I never went out of Europe except once, for a one-week World Congress of Esperanto which happened, that year, in Tel-Aviv.
3. I've tried playing a number of music instruments but never achieved much with them. One reason may be that my parents decided to stop the piano lessons when they found out that I hid under the teacher's grand piano when it was time to go back home. (It was because I liked piano so much that I wanted to stay longer at the teacher's but they thought instead that I wasn't interested.)
4. I've always been interested in languages, maybe because, even before I entered grade school, my (French-speaking) parents hired a governess-maid whose father, mayor of a neighbouring borough and elected on a Flemish-nationalistic list, forbid her to speak anything but Dutch at her workplace. (My hometown, Brussels, lies astride the French-Dutch language border, and German and English are spoken a few hundred kilometers away, not to mention Lëtzebuergesch.) Also, my parents spoke English when they didn't want the children to understand, and my father left "Spanish without Toil" and "Russian without Toil" (or rather, I should say, "L'espagnol sans peine" and "Le russe sans peine") laying about in the house. Nowadays my homepage welcomes the visitor in more languages than I speak fluently.
5. My liking for science fiction started in the early seventies, when a colleague (another COBOL programmer, as I was at the time) started lending me works by Asimov and several others. Later I went regularly to the English library (W.H.Smith and Sons, at the time) where I was most interestted in the F&SF section. I've found out that Asimov wrote also non-fiction; two of his non-F books which I like particularly are "Asimov's Guide to Science" and "Asimov's Guide to the Bible" (each in two volumes, so you could call them four books).
6. I came to Mozilla via Netscape, after I found out that this competitor of Microsoft, so much talked about in the news of the time, could be downloaded for free, when I found where it was to be had from. (That was Netscape 4.72 but later I installed 4.75, 4.77, 6.0 and 7.0.) Later I installed Firefox and Thunderbird, around the time when their version 1.0 was released; but at that time, the Mozilla suite looked like something of which only the "nightlies" were interesting, and as far as I could tell, they were an unfinished, bug-full product, not really usable for someone like me. It's only when I discoverd SeaMonkey that I came back to the Suite and even (after going over to Suiterunner as soon as its Linux version went online) started contributing a little of my free time to triaging its bugs.
7. The other software product I'm interested in is the Vim editor. I don't contribute C code to it but I'm active on its mutual-help mailing list and, after finding out that I could compile it (with every new bugfix) without much trouble, I added HowTo pages about it (for Windows and Unix/Linux) on my site.

Chain letters are still contrary to my philosophical opinions, so I won't tag anyone in particular. If you feel like responding, go ahead. Either on this blog if you think you may do so without abusing KaiRo's patience, or by private mail to me (or both). Even if this blog garbles my email address, you'll find it again at the bottom of my homepage. No spam please (no advertisements for lotteries, degrees-withoout-studying, cheap medicine or penis extenders, no request for help in getting your late Nigerian grandfather's 100.000.000 Swiss francs out of the bank, and so on and so forth) — any of these will be reported through SpamCop to the abuse desk of the sender's ISP. Also nothing in languages using a non-Latin script because, even though my homepage welcomes visitors in three of these, actually I don't understand them, and if, even after "View Source", I can't tell that some message isn't spam, I treat it as if it were.
14.01.2009 08:03

KaiRo

Webmaster

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I just dug the Intarwebs to find what exact model that PC we had was, and I now can say it was an Olivetti M240, just like shown on this picture. Apparently, they had several differing models even back then, ours had a 20MB harddisk, a single 2.25" (360K) floppy drive, a CGA graphics card and a yellow monochrome display, very much like in this page with photos (but that one has a dual-floppy-no-harddisk model).
14.01.2009 16:39

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