My first chain blog [sic]

I usually delete emails that have anything to do with "being tagged", forward to x number of buddies and family members, etc. Irregardless of who they are from, I just marked them as spam and forget about them. So I get this email from Dan Norris and my finger is hovering over the kill button when I start to read a little of the preview. Hmm... a blog tag. Still, I am not overly excited, but it is from Dan, so I open it up and read it. Then I read the links (to his blog and his buddy Jake), then I keep reading more links. Interesting stuff.

Ok, so just this once I will indulge these silly chain mail things (well don't I sound mature). Actually, I was honored to be included in Dan's 8, and I am having a hard time coming up with 8 folks I would contact. But not being a big fan of such things anyway, I have no problems bending the rules a little.

And just for the record, I did enjoy this exercise, especially reading about other folks with whom I have communicated, and some I have never met.

1. I was awarded a "Citizenship Award" from the American Daughters of the Revolution. To this day, I have never taken the time to find out who that group (cult?) is. I was in high-school at the time, and when asked what I wanted to do with my life, I said I wanted to make video games. Yes, I was an outstanding citizen.

3. My beautiful wife originally was attracted to me when I had a monster beard and earlocks to boot. Make no doubt, the hirsute appearance has not the draw; she liked me despite that.







4. In boyscouts, our troupe was a drum and bugle corp. I played a contra bass which I thoroughly enjoyed even though I was not that great (and that is being generous). I enjoyed traveling around Illinois, even done to Missouri once, not to mention several parades in downtown Chicago.

2. I put a pitchfork through my foot when I was kid. It hurt. It was right after my dad said "Be careful with that thing, you could hurt yourself." I proved him right.

10. When I started blogging about Oracle stuff, I had only just heard about the late Lex de Haan. He seemed like a really impressive and well respected man, so I named my first blog in his honor. Ironically, blogger updated their software and I have not been able to go back to the old blog.

7. I am the oldest of 5 children, and I am proud of them all. One brother plays professional volleyball and travels a lot (even outside the states), another brother is helping special needs students at our old high school and working on his Education certification; one is taller than me, the other is bigger, and I am not a small person by any means. One sister was working at McGraw Hill until she switched to a smaller publisher that she enjoys much more, and my other sister, on a lark, picked up Muay Thai with the well-known Team Toro for kicks.

13. One of these is false.

6. Going to college at the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana (I know, it is called UIUC), I had the wonderful experience of trying out the grassroots of the WWW with Mosaic. I maintained a webpage that blatantly said "I am NOT the author of Peanuts", but I still received fan mail. I even had a teacher ask me to write a special comic strip for her classroom. I was touched, but on the other hand, I got to thinking that some people just want to believe something no matter what you tell them.

0. I bailed hay once, and we had roosters for a short time while I was growing up. To put this in perspective, I grew up in the Chicago 'burbs, 10 miles outside of downtown. There are no farms within 10 miles of downtown, at least none that are not called zoos. I bailed hay because my parents at one time thought we were going to move out to a farm (Minnesota), so we tried out farm-life for a week. Crazy idea that. A couple years later, we somehow brought home roosters as pets and kept them in the basement of our neighborhood bungalow. Another crazy idea that. They did not last long; one died and the other was called out because our neighbors did not like how it crowed before the sun came up.

1.6180339 I jumped out of a perfectly normal, safe, solid, airplane at over 14000 feet. Instead of a parachute strapped to my back, I had a another guy who was risking his life for a measly $200. Also, if you did not get the golden ratio hint, my first dbms was Sybase (in a dusty attic somewhere in my memory).


I am going to tag Job Miller (great excuse to start a blog!) and Ravi Gaur.