30 days of me – day 1

Ok, today I’m supposed to post a recent picture of me and 15 interesting facts about myself. Great. Gosh, how do I start. Maybe with the photo…

That’s how recent it gets. It shows me and a reasonably annoyed @karoricat.

Now to the 15 random/interesting facts:

1. I grew up in a tiny tiny tiny village in the middle of nowhere in Germany and even though I enjoy being there for a few days I will never ever go back to small-town village life again.

2. My first computer was a Commodore 64 and the second programming language I learned after BASIC was assembler code on an Intel 8086 chip (my first PC – some sort of an Amstrad device).

3. I was sick a lot as a child. Mostly really bad colds and flu and I missed weeks and weeks of school when I was young. I’ve outgrown most of it but I usually get about one bad “I really need to stay in bed for a few days” cold attack once per year.

4. I’m married to another lovely German (@blauerpunto) and at home we speak a terrible mash of English and German. I actually do notice that my German skills are going down the drain drop-by-drop…

5. I suffer from a mild form of koumpounophobia. For years I thought it was just me but then I met a very good friend of us here in NZ (who’s now in the UK) while working on a project with her and we discovered each other.

6. I’m a pilot. I’ve got a New Zealand PPL with about 130ish hours logged and I’m rated on Cessna 172 and Piper Tomahawk (note to myself: get back into more flying soon). A mid-term goal is to get a Commercial License (CPL) and earn some money with flying on 1-2 days per week and do cool IT stuff on the other days.

7. I have a Master’s degree in Maths with major subjects: Numerical solutions of Partial Differential Equations, Common Differential Equations and Theories of Software Engineering and for a while I was thinking of doing a research PhD afterwards (that was way before we moved to NZ though).

8. I have a French godchild. She’s super-cute, her name is Ambre and she’s got the cutest French-Kiwi-English accent mix ever 🙂

9. I’m a bit of a board game geek. My first board game purchase (after childhood stuff) was the Civilization board game. I still have it. The rarest board game I own is Gunslinger.

10. I love reading. I actually think that teaching one’s children how to enjoy reading is the most important thing one can do in the education of their kids. My parents did and I can’t express how grateful I am for that.

11. I started doing ColdFusion development back in the days of 3.1 and 4.0 when I was working for a funny start-up in Düsseldorf in Germany in the late-90s dotcom boom. We had lots of sushi, there was expensive art on the walls and the office was super posh. I think they burnt about 1 million German marks in 6-8 months for “stuff” (Luckily I got out into a good job before they ran out of cash).

12. In a work relationship I absolutely hate unrealistic people who try to convince me that “this can’t take more than a few hours”. I’ve walked away from an employment once because of that and do not feel bad about it at all.

13. I travel a lot and my carbon footprint is absolutely shocking. The good side of that is that I usually get to bring a lot of stuff that’s not available easily in New Zealand (Ikea, Aldi etc)

14. I’m most likely Air NZ’s (@flyairnz) most annoying and demanding customer. On the other hand I really love that airline and I know more about airfares, booking classes and how to get the best possible travel experience for any given amount of money than most people I know (maybe besides @smamol) and a lot of travel agents.

15. I don’t want to have my own children – luckily my wife feels the same – but I enjoy being around them occasionally (as long as I can pass them back to their lawful “owners” when they’re dirty 🙂

Tagged as: 30daysofme, Fun