The roads I take...

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.