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Monday, December 18, 2006

5 Things You Did Not Know About Me

Tony Ruscoe alerted me to the game of blog tag, in which you tell 5 things about yourself, and then “tag” 5 other bloggers. Eric Enge, Marcus Tandler, David Berkowitz and John Mueller tagged me, so here goes:

  1. I started briefly programming Pascal in school with 15 but then forgot all about it, until I discovered QuickBASIC with 16/17. I didn’t have a PC, but using my father’s laptop, I was able to program games on weekends (when the laptop was sure to be home). The reason I learned QuickBASIC was to create a choose-your-own-adventure game, because my previous attempt resulted in a severe crash: I (ab)used the numbered cells of a long animation in Amiga 500’s Deluxe Paint program (one cell = one station in the adventure) until finally I wasn’t able to open the file anymore, thereby losing the whole adventure, including all its many illustrations!
  2. As a kid in Germany you’re not allowed to go into video game arcades (they’re 18+ here), so when I was a kid the first thing I did on many vacations in other countries was to look for the arcades, just to watch the grown-ups – teens, I guess, but they look like regular adults to you when you’re small! – play Pac-Man and such (incidentally, I also picked up my first English vocabulary on Pac-Man high-score tables, albeit only 3-letter word ones, and mostly the rude kind).
  3. The biggest thing I ever programmed, if you just add up the time spent, was a browser-based WYSIWYG Content Management System in around 2000 (it used XML in SQL displaying XHTML Strict, and a probably forgotten IE5 feature, CSS behaviors, with features like discussion forums, drag-and-drop of documents in sitemap trees, dynamic search results included as content modules, and much more). Guess what – when it was finished, the internet bubble burst, and the product and company went into near-dotcom oblivion.
  4. My secret hope is to accidentally run into Daniel Clowes one of these days, just so I can tell him how much I admire his comic books. (Considering that Mr. Clowes isn’t known to travel around Germany much, that probably won’t happen.)

Number 5 will be revealed only over a beer! OK, I’m tagging Tony Ruscoe, Orli Yakuel, Jeremy Zawodny, Matt Cutts, and Ionut Alex. Chitu.

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