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@ijansch Isn't apple anti fanboy-ism simply the second step to becoming an apple fanboy. Denial.

Sunday, January 11 2009

7 things

I've been tagged by Lorna Jane in the current internet meme of telling seven things about myself that nobody knew. If your reading this because your following planet gnome-nl, then you have probably missed the meme, but it's the current rage in the php community. But i'll be sure to facilitate some cross over.

So without further ado, let's begin.

• I knew i wanted to become a programmer at a rather young age. I can clearly remember lending a "programming" book from the local library containing programmes for the C64 that my family had at that time. However, the book simply contained multiple pages of "code" you needed to copy by hand, and seeing as i was around 10 years old then, with the attention span of your average house cat, it didn't really work out. However, a few years later when we had a PC my mother taught me how to create simple quizzes in DBase, and later i started writing and adapting programs in Basic. After that i never really stopped.
• Not much of a new thing, but i used to have long hair starting from 2000 til early 2008. I actually wanted to cut it before i started working at ibuildings, but as things went i forgot about it until i was already working there. There was no real reason to cut it beyond, there being no real reason to keep it, and i needed a change. Any photographic evidence to me having long hair will be categorically denied.
• I speak a very small amount of japanese. I've always been fascinated by japanese culture and as such tried to learn the language. I'm still planning to learn it one day, but i'm not in a hurry.
• The first "real" program i wrote, that could be called a program, was 'pong' in qbasic. It made use of the graphics mode and contained a algorithm to draw numerals and variable refresh for speed. You played against the computer, who had 3 difficulty settings. The difficulty basically determined how fast his paddle could move.
• My first 'hack' was editing the save game of the shareware version of 'one must fall', a old robot centered beat-em up. I used a hex editor to change a certain position to 0xFF, to give me lots of money.
• My first involvement with gnome was when gnome-nl announced that they wanted to expand into doing a bit more with marketing and such. Before gnome-nl had been primarily a translation effort. Since i had a lot of trouble contributing back by writing code, i figured this would be a nice way to do something. Before i knew it i was at the novell congress with reinout, vincent and ronald and had a absolute blast telling people about the wonderful world of gnome.
• I didn't realise PHP had a professional community before coming to ibuildings and meeting all these people being really passionate about a PHP. Before that, i always figured PHP was a bit of a ragtag community without any real substance. Which was a pretty nice eye opener, and i will certainly try to become apart of this community.

And now you know.
Below in no particular order are the 7 new people i tag.

• Harrie Verveer - I knew harrie for a long time from the cafe, but never knew he was a programmer until i joined ibuildings.
• Reinout van Schouwen - A crossover to gnome. reinout is one of the mayor gnome-nl contributors.
• Wouter Bolsterlee - A fallback crossover to gnome. Wouter is another mayor contributor, and also a php developer if i'm not mistaken.
• Boy Baukema - Another of the ibuildings developers farm, passionate about JS and this should be a good excuse to write something new on that blog of his.
• Dade - He liked Ruby on Rails, but i'm not going to hold it against him. (yet)
• Willem Spruijt - Willem Spruijt is one of the people behind Qash, and since i think Qash is a absolutely brilliant application, i'm tagging him as well.
• Paul van Veenendaal - A old-time co-worker of mine, his current job description is (i kid you not) Wizard Digital Lab. I have no idea what that means, but i'm hoping to find out.