Seven Things

Sat, 3 Jan 2009 5:12 UTC

Started by Tony Bibbs (or maybe Marcus Whitney before him) and tagged by Elizabeth Naramore and Jon Whitcraft, I have succumbed to the 2009 blogging phenomenon known as “tagging.” Initially, I was going to ignore the tag, but when Elizabeth tagged me “just because,” I knew it was on.

So, here I am, writing the seven facts about myself. Happy, Elizabeth ?

• I was a youth minister for just over 4 years; I quit because I was burned out and tired of parents telling me what to teach their children; I have now become jaded and cynical of organized religion… maybe I’ll get better some day.
• I didn’t drink any alcohol until I was 21 (honest).
• I was in a short-lived, lounge-rock band in college called Not Quite Seven; we played mostly at Uncle Calvin’s in Carrollton, GA; our last show was at GA Tech in 2000—I played bass and sucked.
• My degree is in English Literature, not Computer Science.
• I go by my middle name, so consider “Ben Ramsey” a pseudonym of sorts and not my legal name.
• I taught myself to play guitar and hammered dulcimer, though I am long out of practice for both.
• My first program was written in BASIC on an Atari 400, and it was a Mad Lib generator that prompted the user for input (nouns, adjectives, adverbs, etc.) and plugged these variables into a story it printed out; I was 8 or 9 years old.

And now I get to tag people! Yay! Here are my tagees:

• Brian DeShong because he’s my boss and keeps telling me to stop saying that
• Aaron Wormus for being a good friend since the early days of #phpc
• Eli White, practitioner of anachronism and fellow lover of good beer
• Michael Kimsal who has PHPGUY on his car tag
• Greg Stein for always knowing the best places for drinks at OSCON
• Laura Thomson for despising all frameworks
• Rafael Dohms who is Mr. PHP Brazil

And here are the rules:

• Link your original tagger(s), and list these rules on your blog.
• Share seven facts about yourself in the post—some random, some weird.
• Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
• Let them know they’ve been tagged by leaving a comment on their blogs and/or Twitter.