Eight Random Facts

I’m breaking my longest blog silence in a while (over a month!), thanks to prodding from Mark Oehlert, who tagged me with the “Eight Random Facts” blog meme. I actually enjoy these memes; you learn a lot about folks that they might never otherwise reveal. Plus, it’s a good way to get people to post something. In Mark’s case, not only were all eight of his facts interesting, I was surprised to learn that he knows how to count to eight in Korean. How many non-Koreans know how to do that?!    (MFV)

Here are the rules:    (MFW)

  1. Post these rules first, then give the facts.    (MFX)
  2. List eight random facts about yourself.    (MFY)
  3. Tag eight people, listing their names and linking to them, and letting them know they were tagged.    (MFZ)

I’m actually using Mark’s modified rules, tagging seven people and leaving the eighth open to any and all of you.    (MG0)

Here are my eight random facts:    (MG1)

  • I sang in a Korean children’s choir when I was ten. My singing career included a “music video” of me singing a Korean folk song at the beach, which played on the local Korean television station every night for a week. Unbelievably, no agents ever contacted me, and my singing career ended soon thereafter.    (MG2)
  • My body is on the March 1997 cover of Dr. Dobb’s Journal. They replaced my head with a computer monitor, leaving me with head-image problems that persist to this day. My boss at the time promised to serve as my agent, but once again, no one ever contacted me. I tried to fire him, but he claimed that I couldn’t fire someone I wasn’t paying. (That, of course, was libel. I was paying him on commission.) Thus ended my last foray into what we from Los Angeles call The Business.    (MG3)
  • I discovered a bug in the very first computer program, Ada Lovelace‘s code for computing Bernoulli Numbers, which she published in 1843. I briefly mentioned my findings in the sidebar of an article I coauthored with Betty Alexandra Toole on Ada Lovelace in the May 1999 issue of Scientific American. Frankly, this alone should qualify me for my own Wikipedia page. Take into account my glorious accomplishments in the entertainment industry, and the fact that I don’t already have a page is even more mystifying. What’s up, Wikipedia community?!    (MG4)
  • I am the proud owner of three bobblehead dolls: Steve Garvey (my favorite baseball player growing up), Tommy Lasorda (my favorite overweight Italian baseball manager), and Mr. T (everybody’s favorite mohawked, bejeweled tough guy). I’m looking to add James Worthy (my favorite basketball player growing up) and Bruce Lee (everybody’s favorite butt-kicker) to my collection, but I’m not sure they even exist.    (MG5)
  • I have two non-family portraits hanging in my office: Doug Engelbart and Thomas Kuhn.    (MG6)
  • My favorite book is Robert Penn Warren‘s All the King’s Men, which I read at least once a year. All of my computers are named after characters in the book.    (MG7)
  • My secret passion: Watching cooking shows. I’m a bit of a cooking show snob. I think the shows on KQED are much better overall than the ones on Food Network. My favorites are Lida Bastianich, Rick Bayless, Bobby Flay, Jacques Pepin, and of course, Iron Chef. I was also a big fan of Julia Childs, the most famous alumnus of my junior high and high school.    (MG8)
  • My two sisters (one older, one younger) are my favorite people in the world. My nephew, Elliott, is my favorite person under three feet tall, although he’s growing like a weed.    (MG9)

As for folks I’m tagging, it was hard limiting myself to seven people. Please participate even if you weren’t tagged! Those I chose in the end are all great people doing brilliant work and writing interesting, insightful pieces. They all also have lower Technorati rankings than me. In some cases, it’s because they don’t blog that often, although each of them has posted at least once in the last two months. In other cases, it’s because they’re not as well known as they should be. If you’re not already following them, you should be. It will be well worth your while.    (MGA)

Productivity501

Most of the blogs I subscribe to are by folks whom I know, or folks whom are two degrees away. I don’t search for interesting things to read — way too much of that already — but occasionally, minor perturbations uncover new and interesting things. Today, I discovered Mark Shead‘s blog, Productivity501, via an indirect link back. It’s a blog about productivity. I find productivity so important, I generally avoid spending time reading about it. However, two items jumped out at me.    (M6D)

First, Mark wrote a clever twist on the Tortoise and Hare fable, set in an Iron Chef competition. I freakin’ love Iron Chef. More importantly, he made a point I’ve also emphasized in the past — clean working stations are a critical pattern for high-performance work.    (M6E)

Second, I previously blogged Martin Fowler‘s hypothesis that bigger screens made developers more productive. Mark cites an actual study that makes the same claim.    (M6F)