Five Things You Didn’t Know About Me

For a couple weeks now I’ve been reading a lot of blog posts regarding a popular meme (by the way I’m so clueless I never even really knew what “meme” meant. It’s kind of appropriate:

As defined by Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene (1976): “a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation.” “Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation.

We’re all imitators to some degree or another and I have been hanging around the periphery of problogging for some time now. Hero worshipping some of the big names and, at times, shamelessly trying to do what they do.

Anyway, the baton has now been passed to me. Tim Hibbard, world famous (literally) for his “Where’s Tim?” site has been kind enough to “tag” me. Thanks, Tim (I think).

Why the hesitancy regarding the “thanks”? Oh it’s not from being bashful about writing about myself … that part comes easy … it’s about how much my mind is occupied with trying to think of five more people to tag at the end of the post. I’ve just been engaging in a back-channel conversation with Brendon regarding recent post he made about relationship building, and in the course of writing an email and doing some thinking on the subject I realized just how rotten I have been myself on that subject. I’m not big on new years resolutions but here’s a great start at keeping what should have been one of my most important ones for 2007.

1. As Tim mentioned about himself, I’m a terrible salesman. I tried selling GPS systems as a paid career for about a year and had zilch success. My wife and I ran our own sales business for a couple years and we did OK, but if I had to depend on selling to feed me, I’d be skinny as a rail.
2. I am a great procrastinator. This has caused me a lot of problems in life, but the salvation will come at the end … I know I’ll be late to my own funeral. I plan to organize and get rich from a dies-paying International Procrastinator’s Society one of these days now … as soon as I can get around to it.
3. I was a computer “geek” long before most computer folk these days were thinking in ones and zeros. If you know what core memory is, can set the read, write and inhibit currents in a core unit, or you know how to tell the difference between Teletype paper tape punched in ASCII or Baudot code, then you are a contemporary. EBCIDIC anyone?
4. My first job for the USAF involved crawling around inside the wings of B-52s to fix fuel leaks. Did you know an early model B-52 has more than 76 individual rubber fuel cells? Did you know that every time Dubya flies Air Force One to Saudi Arabia for lunch with his old business partners the fuel burn is in the neighborhood of 35,000 gallons, each way?
5. Next to my lovely wife and my children my great love is aviation and airplanes … I started my first aviation-related job when I was six, wiping oil off the bellies and landing gear of airplanes owned by the fellow who maintained this plane: (note, this is not the airplane she was flying when she disappeared)

6. I’m a big fan of Microsoft’s Live Writer blog management software … it’s not just for their abysmal “Live Writer” blogging service, it works better than any other product I’ve found for Wordpress on my own leased server.

Ooops, that’s six. Well consider the sixth one a penalty item imposed on me for tardiness.

Now for the hard part. I hereby tag the lovely and delightful Unofficial Cook, Brendon, Aviatrix, Sean and a player to be named later.