reoriginalize

Katie tagged me some time back, but I’m slow and lazy and all that, so without further ado, my 5 things:

I’m fluent in spanish. Well, arguably nowadays as it is so infrequent that I use it, but I went to an immersion school (means they only spoke spanish to me) for the first 6 grades, and than into a pretty high level spanish program for 7 and 8, making english my second language according to the school system.

I was a philosophy major, for the little bit that I went to college (I finished high school at a JC and put in a year and half afterwards). Technically I was doing a bunch of stuff for the CS major too since I wanted to go to MIT, but I ended up dropping out and moving to Canada before finishing the classes I needed. If/when I go back to school, I’ll probably start off with math and take philosophy classes on the side.

I’ve worked a lot of different jobs, all of these have at some point been my source of income: translating documents to spanish; babysitting a little girl; weeding; data entry, reception and graphic design at an insurance company; cashier and customer service at a computer store; host, server and trainer at a restaurant; gambling; barista at a cafe; sales and stock at a clothing store; general grunt and server for a catering company; parking at a music venue; painting houses; writing php, sql and sysadmining at a hosting company; writing perl and ant at an identity company; writing javascript and xul at a browser company; writing python for the department of defense; writing php, python, sql and sysadmining at a web service. Some other things I did that I volunteered / never got paid for were: writing lpc for a MUD at a university, trying to start up a game development company, interviewing people who just got out of jail for drug abuse and and writing some software for rfid tables and kiosks for a company in Amsterdam.

I was a theatre person in high school, even snagged some lead roles. My high school had a big drama program that brought in more money than football, so being a lead in the plays had many parallels to being the star quarterback that is so often portrayed in movies and I pretty much had run of the school during my junior year.

I got into “learning” because of a crush in kindergarten, her name was Jennifer and she had a big crush on me but I was still in the girls have cooties phase and one day during nap time she had been taken to the back of the room to take some tests with these college people so I snuck back to listen to what they were talking about and overheard them say that she read and wrote at a high school graduate level and I instantly developed a huge crush on her (but had already scared her off with my anti-girl actions) and I thought the only way I was ever going to impress her was to be rily smart ‘n shit, so by 1st grade I also read and wrote at a high school graduate level when I took my tests, but alas I was at a different school by then.

Next up: Michell, Jeff, Marco, Andy and Dries