Blog Tag

Well, I got tagged (not the graffiti type) by Steve Wilson. Now it’s my turn to reveal 5 things-you-don't-know-about-me, and then tag 5 more unsuspecting-yet-interesting folks… But first, I had to do a bit of the pedigree/ancestry tracing to see where this tagging all began:

Steve first got tagged by Rich Green (a former colleague; and prior to that, a former colleague); Sin-Yaw Wang tagged Rich; Hal Stern tagged Sin-Yaw; Mary Cay Kosten tagged Hal. Then the trail went cold... Mary Cay’s original tag was from behind Sun’s Firewall, so this was a dead-end.

So I took another track from someone else I know: Jonathan Schwartz was tagged by James Governor (of RedMonk, a cool analyst group I’ve worked with in the past); James was tagged by Jeff Pulver. Ahh. Jeff points to the "Root" of Blog Tag pedigree, 3 orders-of-magnitude better/bigger than mine, residing at Solo SEO ... clearly indicating that some folks have way too much time.

Anyway, here goes the whole point of the thing:

1. I once sailed 1,300 miles from Myrtle Beach SC to Tortola, BVI – with no electronics onboard except a UHF radio and a Timex digital watch. There were 3 of us onboard for 10 days (fortunately two of us knew how to use a sextant). It was one of the most memorable times of my life, being at the mercy of the elements, but having ‘science’ in our back pocket. We made landfall within a mile or so of our target… You gotta read the book “Longitude” to appreciate how important this form of navigation was.
2. I was a product of the Reagan defense-spending era – my first job (just out of engineering school) was working for a defense contractor designing and building hardware-based real-time adaptive optics and wavefront correction systems. Next time you hear about DoD blowing planes out of the sky with lasers, think of me. (I think that’s all I’m allowed to say about that)
3. I’d rather be renovating a bathroom, laying tile, or for that matter, building a house. There’s something intensely gratifying about building something permanent/durable.
4. I wrote a program (circa 1979) in Basic on a Commodore PET with 16k of RAM that played Solitaire. Yes, just 16k. When I finished, there wasn’t enough space to actually execute it. This was perhaps my finest (and final) foray into software. Unless you consider writing FORTRAN batch jobs using punch-cards on a Sperry/Univac.
5. I started building a historically-accurate plank-on-frame scale model of Lord Trafalgar’s flagship, HMS Victory, back when I was in high school. I put 18 months into it and got as far as building the hull. Then life intervened. Once the kid(s) are out of school, I burn-out in High Tech, and I get over that “I’ve gotta build a house” thing, the HMS Victory is how I plan to occupy my remaining time in the Rest Home.

And now, the Tag-You're-It list (which isn't so easy when most of your friends don't yet blog): Ashesh Badani, Rich Sands, James Urquhart, David Gee, and Vinay Pai.