Friday, January 25, 2008

Blog Tag - 8 Things you may not know about me

Well thanks to Flavio I am on the hook for providing some information about me you may not know already.

  • I HATE the cold! That is why I now live in Northern Indiana which as well as getting a large amount of "lake effect" snow also has the added bonus of getting strong winds that yesterday had the temperature @ -20F. Today the wind is down but the temperature isn't exactly balmy :(
  • I grew up in Brisbane, Queensland Australia in Sub-Tropical weather and I LOVE heat and humidity. (These are the night time temperatures)
  • My beautiful wife is also Australian
  • I have three wonderful kids - My two girls were born in Australia while my son was born in New Zealand but had an Australian Passport by the time he was two months old. They all have Australian accents with some American creeping in.
  • My favorite sport is Australian Rules Football - My wife also loves watching for completely different reasons. I used to play in my formative years and it is just such a fast paced exciting game.
  • I really enjoy building elaborate creations with the kids using Lego. My father just sent over his HUGE Meccano collection so now my kids and I are going to be building even more strange and wonderful thingamebobs - I love seeing their imagination and creativity at work.
  • As a family we love playing Board games such as Monopoly, Risk, Sequence, Mouse Trap you name it (we have two old trunks full of games and puzzles) or card games. The biggest problem is finding a time when we can all get together and just have some family time.
  • I will listen to all different types of music (Modern, rock, oldies, classic, soul, even rap, etc... just not Country & Western) and generally like the music my kids are listening to - which is probably just as well as I often have very little choice but to listen to it - but when I need to write code (especially complex code) I prefer dance/techno as the strong bass beat allows me to zone out all the other distractions, though I rarely listen to it except when coding.
  • Scary movies are not my thing at all ... The scarier the movie the more likely I am to be cowering under something - Not my cup of tea at all!
  • In my almost 15 years with Oracle I traveled more in my first year as a PM then I did in the previous 13.5 years as an Oracle Consultant - Most Oracle Consultants are TRUE road warriors who are on the road week-in week-out, but I was on several long term assignments and didn't travel at all (other than moving my family from one city to another)
Well that took for ever to finish :)