tech ramblings

I feel like I’m about last to the party, but after getting tagged by Ben Ramsey I thought I’d contribute to this meme/tag/whatever that’s going around the PHP community.  I intend to blog more in 2009, so this is a starting point anyway.

Seven Things you didn’t know about me:

1.   I learned to program in the 4th grade on an Apple II, in LOGO.  A high school near me had a program where a group of selected nerds from local schools would go there once a week and share two machines.  I was the only one in primary (elementary) school.

2. I used to do a lot of singing - school choir, madrigals, musicals, an a capella group with my friends, and a youth gospel band.  I sing alto.

3. I’m not religious and consider myself a (non militant) atheist.  We were raised that way since my family is a combination of Catholic, Jewish and Presbyterian and my parents didn’t believe in organized religion.  Despite this I went to an Anglican girls’ school for 11 years (also see the above mentioned gospel band) and am technically Jewish.

4. I met my husband Luke Welling in Advanced Software Engineering at college (RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia).  We had to do a review of each other’s code as part of an assignment.  The first words he ever said to me were, “This is crap.”

5.  I moved house every 1-2 years when I was a kid, left school at 16, went back at 19, and then spent far too much time nerding out at college, which I loved.

6.  I’ve been riding horses since I was four years old.  At four, I rode my Shetland pony Froggy through the house to annoy my mother.  (I believe I succeeded.)

7.  I sold my first article to a magazine when I was about 13 years old.  It was a light humorous piece about the challenges involved in buying a horse and was printed in a national horse magazine.  (I always wanted to be a writer when I grew up…or possibly a veterinarian…or maybe a secret agent.  I never thought it would end up being tech books that I wrote.)  I have also written one complete bad novel, and the beginnings of several others.  (Nanowrimo, I’m looking at you.)

OK, now here are my tag-ees.

• Luke Welling, my awesome other half
• Zak Greant, old friend and PHPer, now fellow Mozillian
• Gozer, mod_perl afficionado, who we shall one day convert. (hah!)
• Andrei Zmievski, White Russian
• Ed Finkler, Chief Funkatron Officer
• Mike Morgan, Mozilla’s webdev Czar and my boss
• Jeff Loiselle, CakePHPer and muso.

Tag-wise, here are the rules:

• Link your original tagger(s), and list these rules on your blog.
• Share seven facts about yourself in the post—some random, some weird.
• Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
• Let them know they’ve been tagged by leaving a comment on their blogs and/or Twitter.