Grumble grumble meme grumble grumble
My friend Ed was snagged by one of the evil web meme thingies, and decided to share the love by passing it on to me. A while ago I promised myself that I'd only do the first one of these that anyone got me with, and this isn't the sexual deviancy rating meme that would prove that I've become terribly middle-class in my old age...
- 10 years ago:
- Living in That Paradise That Is California™, spending a lot of my free time doing Linux development. I don't remember if I had a job at that point; we moved to Pasadena during one of their periodic tech depressions, and I spent a lot of time looking for jobs before finding the one at McAfee. California is not my favorite place in the world, but the San Gabriel mountains were very nice to have 3 miles from our front door, and sometimes we could actually see them.
54 years ago:- Living in Portland. We'd just spawned for the first time, and I was trying to combine working for a living with having A Baby™. The glorious B*sh economy was showing signs of making it possible for me to spend lots of time at home (I had to drop my consulting rates by about 40% after the real-world impact of the y2k coup de etat in the United States started sinking in, and the real economic fun hadn't even started yet), but, for the time being, I was still taking the trolley out to Beaverton every day for an AS400 programming job. I wasn't doing much in the way of Linux development any more; the core team had fallen into disarray a few years before, and I'd stopped trying to develop patches because they kept falling into deep holes in the ground, and after working for a year at an innovative, but badly managed, Linux startup, I just didn't have the interest in doing much Linux work aside from tweaking Mastodon; I'd instead fallen for the siren song of FreeBSD, which promised a more sane development environment.
- 1 year ago:
- I was working for my current employer, and shovelling mass amounts of money into various Democratic Party campaigns to try and get Maximum Leader Genius out of Al Gore's house (fat lot of good that did. "Owning the ballot-counting companies" trumps "faith and pure intent" every day.) I had become disillusioned with FreeBSD, which turned out to not be more sane, but more like the big commercial versions of Linux (with an inferior collection of applications, some terribly-broken drivers in the kernel, and a warehouse-sized chip on their shoulders about Linux.)
- Yesterday:
- March Fourth! at Saturday Market. We also went to a farmers market and bought a huge pile of fresh berries that the best converted into jams and jellies last night, and I spent a couple of hours installing a pile of free software on gehenna so a friend could try moving his wordpress-based weblog there.
- Today:
- I'm writing about the evil lifetime meme while trying to bully R*dh*t Linux 8.0 into making an am64 initrd on an ia32 machine at work.
- Tomorrow:
- These days I make long-term plans, but no short-term plans. I expect to be working tomorrow, and I'll probably engage in some Evil-Party approved financial planning by buying a lottery ticket, but that's the extent of my planning.
- 5 snacks I enjoy:
- Unfortunately, as a computer programmer the whole idea of "snack" sort of merges in with the whole idea of "luncheon", so it's somewhat pointless to ask. That said, I am fond of
- Anchovies
- Cheeses
- Vanilla ice cream
- Biscotti, when I've got enough energy to bake it myself
- candied dried squid, though I've not had any of it for a long time.
- 5 bands/singers that I know the lyrics of MOST of their songs:
- I don't memorise lyrics. When I was younger, I played the B-52s (and later Two Nice Girls) obsessively, but I never remembered the lyrics to any of the songs more than superficially. These days I listen to the Mekons about as obsessively, but I'd be damned if I could remember more than snippets of the lyrics to their songs when those songs aren't actually playing.
- 5 things I would do with $100,000,000:
-
- Buy a house in Canada.
- Start a business in Canada.
- Split up US$25,000,000 to donate to various organizations that support gay rights, civil liberties, and preservation of railway history.
- Set aside US$10,000,000 as "family money" to provide assistance to members of my immediate family when they're going through rough times.
- Put the residue into investments to ensure a steady income for the rest of my life.
- 5 locations I'd like to run away to:
-
- Canada.
- Canada.
- Canada.
- Canada.
- Western Europe (with possession of a valid EU citizenship and passport)
- 5 bad habits I have:
- Does the word dooced sound familiar? I'm sorry, but the only 5 you're going to see here is the now-obsolete 5th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States.
- 5 things I like doing:
-
- Building railroad models
- Coding
- Doing projects with the bears.
- Doing almost anything with the best.
- Building computer cases.
- 5 things I would never wear:
-
I don't know if never is applicable; I've done lots of things in my life that I'd previously thought I'd never do. My pasty white American protestant background has left me with lots of prejudices that would make it difficult for me to wear
- "traditional" womens clothing. Though, to be fair, some of this is because I don't have the right shape for it to fit properly.
- S&M-style leathers. I don't have the butt to wear chaps (and, to be honest, never had even when I was at my most fit. The men in the Parsons family tend towards a pleasing pear-shape, which is most obvious when they look in the mirror.) So, no leathers for me.
- lycra shorts. I (used to) ride my bicycle a lot, and am fully aware that lycra shorts would be a lot more comfortable than cutoff jeans, but see my previous comment about a pleasing pear-shape.
- gothy clothes. Because I get the giggles even thinking about it.
- makeup. As a pasty-white redhead, I've got sensitive skin and I think that makeup would translate to hours of rashy fun.
- 5 TV shows I like:
- BURN YOUR TELEVISION!
- 5 movies I like:
-
- The movie adaptation of Peter Carey's Bliss (his best book, and a very sweet and skillful recreation of it as movie.)
- The movie adaptation of Jane Austin's Persuasion.
- Babe.
- Galaxy Quest
- The Life Of Brian
- 5 famous people I'd like to meet
- Most of them are dead now, and I'd need a babelfish to understand most
of them, but I'd like to meet
- Frank Sprague.
- Sappho.
- George Stephenson.
- Jane Austin.
- Lenin.
- 5 biggest joys at the moment:
-
- the best.
- Russell.
- Silas.
- Not having a brain tumor, stroke, or other easily recognisable and fatal brain disorder.
- Seeing March Fourth! twice this weekend.
- 5 favorite toys:
- As of right now I can only think of three "favorite" toys. I like making things, but it's the making, not the tools I make them with, that interests me. I make a terrible yuppie.
- The one true editor.
- My camera.
- The big yellow house.
- 5 people to tag:
- I don't really have that many close friends these days, and I'm not really comfortable passing the weblog hot potato to casual acquaintances, so the meme stops here.