Tim Foster's Weblog

I'm rubbish at this sort of thing and generally don't do Internet memes, but since stevel tagged me, the worry of whether I'm interesting enough to come up with 7 things you may not know about me has been weighing heavily on my mind. Judge for yourself whether they're interesting or not!

1. As a kid, I lived opposite Rathfarnham shopping centre, which in those days was shut at weekends and at 6pm each night. This made for the perfect place to tear around on my blue Raleigh Grifter, a fantastic machine - which probably weighed as much as I did at the time. I have fond memories of that bike - it's motorcycle-gripshift and it's wonderful, if sometimes deadly, 3-speed Sturmey Archer hub.

   Much of the time was spent just messing about, playing chicken with brick walls (pretending you were an X-Wing trying to pull up before crashing into the shields of the now-fully-operational Death Star. I still have all my teeth, in case you're wondering), but playing "Squares", a mixture of a slow bicycle race, sumo wrestling and Kick Start, was the best way to spend your time on a bike.

   Here's how you play: decide on a playing area, a square or rectangle, marked out by the white lines of a few empty car parking spaces. Then get a few of your friends/siblings on bikes to cycle around within the confines of that square. If you touch the ground with your feet or go outside the square, you're out. The winner is the last person on their bike. Hilarity ensues. (and the odd grazed knee, I'm guessing)

2. I'm the most optimistic person I know. I think this tends to eventually get on people's nerves, but I can usually be relied on to put a cheery spin on whatever situation we're in at the time.

3. Back in the day, I spent way too much time writing mod files using FastTracker and others. This was all on our 16mhz i386 (2mb ram!) with a handmade Covex thing stuck in LPT1 - I couldn't afford real hardware, which was probably for the best. I've lost most of what I wrote over the years, but have dredged up a few bits of music here, with one converted to mp4, just in case you don't have a mod player handy. If you don't, don't worry, you're not missing much!

4. From time to time, I wonder what life would be like if I followed the other career ideas I'd had. Over the years, I've wanted to be a cabinet maker and a rally driver. I studied Science in university and was still doing two units of Botany in my final year, before deciding computers were for me.

   Even now, I wonder whether I'd be any good at photography, probably not - though more on my SmugMug page (I like the New Zealand ones - and am looking forward to visting there this year for Glynn & Jayne's wedding!) On the other hand, without the pressures of deadlines and actually putting bread on the table, perhaps being an amateur isn't so bad after all.

5. I'm the only Genesis fan I've ever met - I mostly prefer the Peter Gabriel era, but like all of their stuff really. I tend not to really like any other prog rock band I've listened to.

6. I used to role-play rather a lot: epic games that'd last multiple weekends, with story arcs that went on and on. We played anything we could get our hands on - D&D, Runequest, Call of Cthulu, Paranoia, Shadowrun, the system didn't really matter to us. Haven't played in a year or two though, but it's still something I really enjoy. I'm not sure whether this qualifies me as "evil" stevel? Depends who you ask I guess ? :-)

7. Do you ever get the feeling that you have a really good idea floating around in your head, but can never quite organise your thoughts enough to express it? I get that all the time. I hold a few software patents (not really worth talking about) and have submitted one or two other patent disclosures, but still feel like I haven't quite had my "Eureka!" moment yet - it's not something I worry about, but it's in there somewhere.

Ok, with that out of the way, here's another list of people who can choose to ignore this Internet meme if they so choose:

• Rich Lowe @richlowe - because I bet he won't play along! (hah - see, I said I would :-)
• Fintan Ryan @fintanr (blog)
• Mark Musante @mmusante (blog)
• John Corrigan@corriganjc (blog)
• Constantin Gonzalez @zalez (blog)
• Jesse Silver@silverguru
• Alan Coopersmith@alanc (blog)

Here are the rules:

• Link to your original tagger(s) and list these rules in your post.
• Share seven facts about yourself in the post.
• 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.