Like Ken Camp, I generally avoid most all of the cross-blog "meme of the day" type of things, but since Jeff started it and many of my other colleagues in the VoIP blogosphere have already played along - and I've learned a few interesting connections from that - I figure I may as well play along as well. Jeff said:

Turns out there is a game of Blog-Tag going around theblogosphere in which bloggers are sharing five things about themselvesthat relatively few people know, and then tagging five other bloggersto be "it."

For my own record, here were two of the tag trails that led to me:

Jeff Pulver -> Andy Abramson -> Ken Camp -> me
Jeff Pulver -> Andy Abramson -> Ken Camp -> PhoneBoy -> Irwin Lazar -> me

So here, Jeff, is my list:

1. My Bachelor of Arts degree is in German and while I no longer have the fluency I did 20 years ago, I enjoy speaking the language and can still hold my own in a conversation. (In fact, it was German that first introduced me to some of the power of the networked world when circa 1986 or so I used BITNET Relay to text chat with other German students in Ohio and...yes... Germany! Sitting there typing out German phrases at some incredibly slow speed... but it worked!)


2. The first computer I worked with in any major way was the Apple II ("II", not "II+") that one of my then-best-friends in our neighborhood received in 1977. I still remember well the outstanding user manuals that told you everything about the computer in incredibly fine detail. A very stark contrast to the "friendly" (but empty!) manuals that later came out with the Apple IIe and later models.


3. I had the privilege of spending 6 weeks in 1990 at a remote scientific research camp of about 60 people in the middle of the Greenland ice sheet. The project was drilling an ice core through the two miles of ice to study global climate change. I was just a field staffperson helping move the ice cores around inside the snow trenches[1], but I learned a lot, including the fact that there was a unexplained (at the time - 1990) melting of ices sheets around 1200 AD.


4. In the very early 1990's, I chaired the national "IT Committee" for the Sierra Club and helped in the effort to connect all the Club's leaders via e-mail at a national, regional and local level (using good old dial-up cc:Mail!). A group of us also ran a skunk-works project to create a web site (because no one in the leadership at the time believed there would be any value in it) and took out the "sierraclub.org" domain name.


5. I was a volunteer firefighter all through high school, university and afterward and went through all the state "Firefighter I" training and the even more rigorous EMT training/certification. My involvement only stopped when I moved to a location that had only paid firefighters.

Given that I lead such a public life, it's actually fun to think about the things that people generally don't know about me... some of those things are, of course, lurking out there on the Net just waiting to be found by the appropriate search term..... :-)

Given that most of the folks I already know within the VoIP part of the blogosphere have already been "tagged", I'll have to tag Martyn Davies (martyndavies), Mark Evans and Jon Arnold (yes, he's already been tagged, but he hasn't written yet, so it has to count doesn't it? :-) Oh, why not... I'll tag Tom Keating and Rich Tehrani, too, to see if they want to play.

Thus endeth my participation in this meme du jour... let's not do another one for a while, okay? (Like I really don't want to know what kind of hat you are... )

[1] Funny story about how I got involved... I was unemployed after serving as the Executive Director for New Hampshire's statewide "Earth Day 1990" effort and went to visit a friend at UNH. She was heading off to Greenland and said "hey, I think they are still looking for people". I put my name in and a week or two later someone called and said "Can you be ready to fly out next week from an Air Force base in New Jersey?"

Tags: blog-tag, jon arnold, mark evans, rich tehrani, tom keating, voip