I normally don’t participate in this sort of thing, but I could hardly resist when I was tagged by Enkay Blog. He was one of the early readers of this blog, and I owe a lot to him for promoting the first contest I had (when it would have increased his chances of winning $100 by not promoting it).
So here are the rules for this 8 interesting things post:
– Each player must post these rules to begin the meme.
– Each players starts with eight random facts or habits about themselves.
– People who get tagged must blog about their eight things and post these rules.
– At the end of your blog, you need to choose eight people to get tagged and list their names.
– Don’t forget to leave them a comment telling them they’re tagged, and to read your blog.
Here are the 8 interesting things about myself:
1: While in college, I failed Speech class three or four times before finally passing. Most of my old friends find it hard to believe I now teach college and stand up talking in front of students all the time.
2: To stick with the college theme for a moment, it took me four colleges and fourteen years to get my undergraduate degree. I have to confess I wasn’t a very good student. My Master’s degree took only two years, and I made perfect grades all the way through. Maybe the pod people replaced me between the two degrees?
3: I have a wonderful two-year old daughter. We’d never expected to have kids, and my daughter fought her way past various forms of birth control to get here. We’re so glad she did!
4: I have a personal web site where I’ve written quite a bit about my personal philosophy on growth, finances, and the like. It’s called Guardian Tree Productions.
5: I’m a life long gamer, and love board games, roleplaying games, murder mystery games, card games, and pretty much anything that involves getting together with multiple people and having fun.
6: In high school, I designed a chess variant where pieces traveled in time in addition to their normal movement. I never could get anyone to play that version with me.
7: I write science fiction when I get the chance (which isn’t much since I started this blog!) I’ve put a couple of my stories up on a really old home page of mine. The page itself is hopelessly out of date, and all the material there is slated to be worked into another site some day.
8: Also back in high school, I helped a friend of mine make a movie about zombies. He now owns his own production company and makes movies for a living.
This is the spot where I’m supposed to tag other bloggers. Most of the ones I would have tagged were also in Enkay Blog’s list, but here are a few that missed the list: Tyson, Carolyn, Rosa, and Lori.
Oh, and may I just say that the latest poll over at Carolyn’s site, Juggling Frogs, gave me my best laugh yet today.
Jay –
Thanks for sharing. So now that I have been tagged, look for a post over the weekend.
Tyson
Some really interesting facts there Jay! I couldn’t imagine any of my professors failing speech class because to get up there and lecture can be quite nerve racking! Good job with the post! Thanks!
This is interesting. Do I have to wait to be tagged or can I start a list by myself? I want in on this and think that it would be a great way to get some link love.
Gaje Master –
I will tag you on mine.
Tyson
thank you, you are such a sweet hart, I will have this up by the end of the night. I just now seen this when I went to check out Technorati, I knew that site was good for something.
Hi Rosa, sorry I missed tagging you! Thanks to Tyson for picking up the slack. I’m looking forward to seeing both of your posts.
I got mine done and thanks for tagging me. here is the link if you want to check it out. Don’t laugh though, yours was just as bad as mine.
http://gajemaster.justfree.com/blog/?p=52
I hope that you enjoy. I am now on my way to tagging tyson. Thanks you guys.
@#6. How does that work? I play chess but that really intrigues me. Do pieces just move out of no where?
[quote post=”269″]@#6. How does that work? I play chess but that really intrigues me. Do pieces just move out of no where?[/quote]
My really out of date homepage has a section on that game, at http://home.columbus.rr.com/jshaffstall/temporal.htm
The basic idea is to treat time as another spatial dimension, and extend piece movement into that dimension as well. So if a knight wanted to move two turns forward in time, it could only move one space in another direction.
Thank you, Jay for tagging me. I’ve already answered this one:
Hopping on the Tag-wagon
Maybe your time-travel chess companion is just ahead of you, but a bit out of phase!
I just tried to check my link in the previous comment. I clicked on it, and it ended up on my site. Then I tried to hit “back” to come back here to go on to read the next post.
Instead of coming back here, my browser got stuck in a loop with “www.google.com/reviews/polls/display/[some long number]/blogger…”
What is that? Is it something you’ve inserted intentionally? I couldn’t “back” onto this page. I had to use the back-history list and jump over the aforementioned link. I tried this whole thing again in a different window, and it behaved the same way.
If this is something you’ve put in intentionally, why? Is it something you’d recommend? I’ve never seen (or maybe just never noticed) it before.
[quote post=”269″]Instead of coming back here, my browser got stuck in a loop with “www.google.com/reviews/polls/display/[some long number]/blogger…”[/quote]
No, that’s nothing I’ve done (at least not on purpose!) As far as I know, the Back button should work fine. It must be an odd combination of the Back button just after you’ve submitted a comment.
[quote post=”269″]Maybe your time-travel chess companion is just ahead of you, but a bit out of phase![/quote]
I hate it when that happens! 😉
Re #1 and #2: It’s amazing what capabilities appear in the presence of motivation.
It sounds like, as soon as you found something that mattered to you, speaking about it and excelling in courses about it came as a natural byproduct.
[quote comment=”716″][quote post=”269″]Instead of coming back here, my browser got stuck in a loop with “www.google.com/reviews/polls/display/[some long number]/blogger…”[/quote]
No, that’s nothing I’ve done (at least not on purpose!) As far as I know, the Back button should work fine. It must be an odd combination of the Back button just after you’ve submitted a comment.
[/quote]
Please disregard! It just happened to me with another link, completely unrelated. It must be happening on my end. Maybe I have some spyware on my system? I’m sure it’s not on your end.
(As Emily Littella said to CheddarCheese: Nevermind.)
Sorry about that!
Hey Jay…sorry it’s been a while. I subscribe to you feed so I knew about being tagged. Still gotta go and do that. I’ve been so busy with the kids. You’ve been writing some good stuff. I’ve been printing out some of them for later reference for when I makeover my money blog.
P.S. I’m a huge gamer myself. I love scattergories, 42(dominioes), and even Halo;)
Hi Lori, I’ll look forward to your post! I haven’t gotten into Halo myself, but I’ve been known to kill some time on computer games, too.
I think I figured out that Google link issue. I *think* it has something to do with the ‘poll question’ in my sidebar. It happens a few times a week, to random-seeming IE windows. I think it’s benign.
On an unrelated note: I noticed that your posting is almost perfectly consistent over time. Do you post on a schedule? Do you throttle your posting frequency? How do you manage the posting such that it comes out so evenly spaced?
[quote post=”269″]On an unrelated note: I noticed that your posting is almost perfectly consistent over time. Do you post on a schedule? Do you throttle your posting frequency? How do you manage the posting such that it comes out so evenly spaced?[/quote]
Two secret techniques: first, my two year old daughter has decided bed times are for babies, so I’m almost never on the computer until about 10:30pm, or after around 9am.
Second, I do use WordPress’ ability to schedule posts for later publication. So when I get on the computer, I’m generally writing for a few days out and scheduling the post to appear.
My basic strategy has been to have the main post of the day show up around 11pm, and the secondary post, if any, show up in the morning around 8am. Email feeds go out around noon, so I try to make sure there aren’t too many posts in those.
Oh, as an example of how useful scheduled posting is, I was out of town this last weekend at a family reunion. But the posts kept being published right on schedule. Very handy for times when you just have to be away from the blog for a few days.
I wish Blogger would implement a way to future post. I’d love to build up a scheduled stockpile.
You can do something similar by enabling the send-posts-by-email option and scheduling an email program to send at a specific date and time. There was a post about it at http://www.bloggerbuster.com/2007/07/how-to-schedule-blogger-posts-to-future.html
Juggling Frogs –
Just come over to the DarkSide and WordPress will show you things you never thought were imaginable.
Jay,
THANK YOU!!! That’s a great idea. I have to sign up for a different e-mail client to do it, (I’m using Outlook XP, which doesn’t have that feature), but it might just be worth it.
Tyson,
It’s getting more and more tempting! I spent the first month and a half tinkering with the blog. Now that I’ve stopped, it’s daunting to contemplate porting the thing over to another platform and messing with a new template. {sigh}
Otherwise, I’d be there yesterday.
[quote post=”269″]Now that I’ve stopped, it’s daunting to contemplate porting the thing over to another platform and messing with a new template. [/quote]
The template would be an issue. The content will port over very easily, with WordPress’ import from Blogger feature. You’ll just have to cleanup the category list afterward.
Just the ability to use a full screen editor (rather than the little window Blogger gives) would be such an improvement.