Seven Things
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.