Five Things about Me
The game of blog-tag has finally reached me: i got tagged by Albert. While this is obviously a pyramid scheme which at some point will collapse, I must admit that I have enjoyed reading the “five things” entries of other bloggers so far. So here we go, five things you probably don’t know about me:
- As a child back in the 70s, the children’s TV series “Wickie der Wikinger” (Vicky the Viking) and “Sendung mit der Maus” have played a big role in getting me interested in science and technology.
- At primary school, I was the first in my class to borrow a book from the public lending library in our school building. I went to the library on the day we received the ID cards, right after school, even though I knew that I would miss the school bus (that was before I was allowed to ride the bike to school); fortunately the walk home was only 20 minutes. The first book I borrowed was a children’s book about the exploration of space.
- I have a long list of failed hobby projects in the time between 1983 and 1986. Overambitous designs, fragile architectures collapsing after minor changes, lack of documentation causing incomprehensible code, loss of interest after a few weeks – all the things you can expect from a typical teenager. Looking back I learned some of the most valuable lessons in that time.
- I once wrote a Sidekick clone called SideWorx for the 8bit computer CPC 464 (by Amstrad, sold by Schneider in Germany). Even though the program worked very well with other programs, its reliance on a rarely-used third-party memory expansion kit prevented any success. Computer magazines I sent the program to ignored it, presumably because the editors weren’t able to try it out. This was before the Internet and access to a BBS was out of reach for me at that time, so without any chance to spread the word, SideWorx had in total the impressive number of four users (my father, two of his colleagues, and myself).
- As a student at university, I got hired more or less immediately after using a self-written tool in a programming class. Students had to develop a program in Turbo Pascal, teaming up in pairs. I ended up with some other guy I didn’t know and we started coding. After some time we ran into a situation where we needed to modify the source code in a very repetitive way. I left the IDE, grabbed a disk out of my backpack and started up a text editor with a macro recorder. The other guy asked where I got the editor from and I told him that I wrote it myself. What I didn’t know was that he – at age 19 – had his own software company and a fat BMW standing in front of the university building…