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Five things you didn't know about me

CodeGearHead Nick Hodges tagged me, so I suppose I'm obligated to over-share now.  Hard to compete with piloting a Hornet through the sound barrier, though...

  1. I have a morbid and unnatural aversion to touching gooey, greasy, and/or sticky substances.  I'll deal with it for brief periods if I must (e.g., to knead biscuit dough), but I'll avoid it if I can (you won't catch me fingerpainting!).
  2. I spent one month on active duty in the US Marine Corps before being discharged for a heart condition called WPW Syndrome.  After that, I had a couple of scary WPW episodes, including an ER visit due to a 300 bpm heart rate and an 86/84 bp for several hours on end.  My WPW was corrected by a catheter ablation procedure in 1992.
  3. My inner monologue has a soundtrack.  Thought or spoken words or phrases tend to trigger my brain to internally play songs that contain the word or phrase.  This might happen, like, half a dozen times in a single meeting.  Today an email came across my desk today with "favorite things" in the title, and -- well -- I've been hearing Julie Andrews ever since.  I have no idea how you solve a problem like Maria.
  4. The Delphi books that I co-wrote with Xavier Pacheco have sold somewhere near 100,000 copies worldwide -- even outselling Tom Clancy for a couple of glorious days on Amazon.com.  They've also been translated into Spanish, French, Portuguese, Czech, Italian, German, Dutch, Polish, Russian, Chinese, Japanese, and a few other languages.
  5. I'm a geek by trade, but I do know my way around a hammer and nail.  In our previous home, I tore the kitchen down to the studs and concrete floor and built a new kitchen from scratch, including flooring, cabinets, appliances, electrical, plumbing, finish work, etc (although I had a granite company install the countertops).  What I learned: construction is hard, and doing software for a living is a good gig.

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