I’m not that fond of the Internet equivalent of chain letters, but I’ll make an exception this time because two people (Mark and Marco) tagged me on this.

The rules once more:

  • Link to your original tagger(s) and list these rules in your post. (Done.)
  • Share seven facts about yourself in the post. (Almost.)
  • Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs. (I’ll break this one.)
  • Let them know they’ve been tagged. (And this one too.)

The things:

  1. Not to go all meta on you, but I’m fascinated by how people present themselves online, of which this “seven things” meme is a classic example. Obviously you want to avoid the trivial on the one hand (“I have a small mole on my left knee”) and the shocking on the other (“I killed my neighbor and buried his body under my garage”), and find something that’s mildly quirky, at least slightly revealing of one’s character, and not self-perceived as unflattering. (I thought of titling this post “Seven things I don’t care if you know about me,” but decided it was a bit too off-putting.)
  2. Prior to joining the Mozilla Foundation I’d spent most of my career as a “sales engineer,” a somewhat oxymoronic job title since strictly speaking SEs are neither salespeople nor engineers. Among other things, working with sales reps on a regular basis increases one’s appreciation of and amusement at films like Tin Men and Glengary Glen Ross).
  3. As an ex-mathematics student (I had a dual major, with physics as my other) I get annoyed when people make easily avoidable math mistakes. (I mean, easily avoidable with a Google or Wikipedia search.) I once sent a long email to Kevin Kelly patiently explaining that Metcalfe’s Law did not mean that the “value of a network grows exponentially with the number of nodes” (e.g., like 2^n), but rather only that it grew geometrically (n^2). I’m not sure whether he got the distinction or just didn’t care; this was during the neon phase of Wired when “exponential” was the new black and you weren’t hip unless you were recycling Henry Adams.
  4. My childhood home was across the road from a distillery. For those of you who enjoy the end product, I can tell you that the intermediate stages are not nearly as appetizing.
  5. I aspire to finish reading Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa, Or, The History of a Young Lady, the Mt. Everest of eighteenth century English novels; currently I’m stalled at page 618 of 1499. (I’ve also read Richardson’s Pamela, Or, Virtue Rewarded, which is a mere foothill in comparison.) This is not my only long novel reading experience; I’ve also read The Tale of Genji twice, in two different translations (Tyler and Waley). However I have no plans at this time to read War and Peace, Remembrance of Things Past, or anything written by Neal Stephenson past Cryptonomicon.
  6. I listen to a fairly wide variety of music, especially in the years since I discovered the eMusic MP3 store. I liked eMusic so much I started a blog about various business-related aspects of eMusic and the broader music industry, though I no longer have time to update it even semi-regularly.
  7. I can’t think of anything else, and in any case six is a perfect number. (No, really.)

Continuing on the theme of exponential growth, if everybody tagged with this meme followed the rules and tagged seven new people, and if no one was tagged twice, then after several rounds of this every Internet user on the planet would have published their own “seven things” post. To help preserve the world from this fate I’ll break the chain, although if the typical chain letter can be believed I’ll suffer horrific bad luck as a result.

Philipp - 2009-02-20 09:09

Thank you for sharing No. 5. I thought I was the only one (the odd one) who stopped reading Stephenson after Cryptonomicon. I feel vindicated.