Mr T's rants and ravings

1. I ride a unicycle. I keep toying with the idea of buying an off road unicycle and a large wheel unicycle for road riding.
2. When I was a teen I rode a bicycle from California to Delaware with a group. Nothing like travelling coast to coast on a bicycle to understand America.
3. My original major in college (which I completed half way through my junior year) was sociology.
4. I’ve only dated one person more than a couple of times and we’ve been married almost 32 years.
5. I don’t drink alcohol but not because of religious reasons. I think it all tastes bad and the idea that it impairs judgment is enough reason to eschew it anyway.
6. I like to play poker. I’m not good at it but it is fun and since it is a skill game I have a chance of getting better.
7. I collect poker chips from casinos/card rooms where I have actually played. I have chips from about 20 places in 9 different states.
8. I ride a snowboard these days because my knees like that better than skiing. I miss the skiing though.
9. I have had ambitions to work at two companies in my career that are really hard to get jobs at – Digital and Microsoft – and have been able to work for both of them.
10. The first programming language I ever learned was FORTRAN. It’s been over 15 years since I wrote a program in it though.
11. The first programming language I taught myself was BASIC-PLUS. Over 30 years later I still choose a version of BASIC as my programming language for most things.
12. I had lunch with Grace Hopper once. She was visiting the college I was attending and a small group of students had lunch and discussion with her.
13. I was an operating system developer for almost two years. During that time I wrote the UI for a print/batch system from scratch. In BASIC-PLUS! Well I wrote some assembly language code too.
14. I’m a preacher’s kid and proud of it.
15. As a young person I was a “fire buff” and went to a lot of big city fires – sometimes riding fire trucks. Other times I went in my father;s car because he was a chaplain for the New Your City fire department. I had my own turnout coat and boots too.
16. I’m an avid reader and will red almost anything but my favorites are science fiction and history non-fiction.
17. I like to go snowshoeing in the winter time. Nothing like a walk in snow covered woods and trails.
18. My summer exercise is kayaking.
19. I used to SCUBA dive but it’s been years.
20. Snorkeling is one of the things I really like to do when I can get into warm clear water. Doesn’t happen enough. Warm clear water is only found in swimming pools in New Hampshire.
21. I’m addicted to email. But than if you know me at all you probably know that.
22. I’ve written several textbooks – all on Visual Basic.
23. What I really want to do is write fiction. I can’t seem to find the discipline to actually it though. I did try once and there are some short samples at http://www.acthompson.net/Fiction.htm I just looked at the dates on those and can’t believe it has been so long.
24. I have not lived in East Hampton, NY since I was 5 but I still think of it as home.
25. I am genetically incapable of keeping my opinions to myself. That probably explains why I am writing this. And blogging. And Twittering. And getting involved in all sorts of online forums.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 2nd, 2009 at 7:45 pm and is filed under MrT. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.