Tuesday, January 08, 2008

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.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Nice list--I especially like the misnumbering ;). Apparently I wasn't interesting enough to warrant a link to the place where you were tagged. It's on in case anyone is interested.

Hope to see you at Collaborate in April!

Charles Schultz said...

Actually, it was a typo on my part. See "(to his blog and his buddy Jake)". The first linked accidentally copied the second. I have corrected. that.

Don't worry, Dan, you are quite the interesting guy. The Diving stuff sounds great!

Jake said...

Interesting stuff, I'm glad you decided not to kill Dan's email. The beginning of the year seemed like the best time to get this going. It would be nice to see a new blog from Job spring out of it too.
Jake