The Group Of Seven

Seven things about me, as inspired by Roy's tag:

1. In just under 3 weeks I've become utterly obsessed with my Blackberry. My wife, who at first was apprehensive of hers (along with all new technology), has been using it non-stop as well. It's been a good text'mas. :)

2. My wife and I live with two American Pointers, two horses*, three laptops, two smartphones, and many, many usb peripherals. The office is the warmest room in the house.

3. My day job consists of maintaining and improving the build systems for JBoss Tools and JBoss Developer Studio. My night job involves numerous Eclipse projects, including Modeling and Dash. Basically, I hibernate in the winter in front of the computer.

4. My parents - divorced - are of Jewish/American (dad) and German/Canadian (mom) decent. They've now been separated longer than they've been together. With the subprime mortgage crisis in the US, he recently moved back to Canada to seek more gainful employment. Unfortunately, he chose Calgary which isn't faring much better, now that gas prices are finally coming back down. My mom now lives in Scaborough near us, having returned from her self-imposed escape to Vancouver, and is more or less retired.

5. I graduated from the University of Waterloo back in '99 with a BASc in Chemical Engineering, having spent the balance of my last two years learning about programming, workflow design, process control, and optimization. In retrospect, it seems I was always headed for release engineering.

6. Much like Andi Gutmans, I too hate shaving... but as I work from home, I can get away with not doing so for days at stretch. I love my 30-second commute to work, which offsets my 8-to-10-hour workdays quite nicely. Why commute 2-plus-hours a day when you can use that time to get real work (or at least email) done? Thankfully, more and more companies are realizing this and are letting us work remotely.

7. I try to find time - when not working or hacking - to walk my dogs, hike, cycle, kayak & swim: sometimes several in series. One favourite route involves cycling from my house to the beach at maximum speed, swimming in the lake to cool off, then portaging the bike up the side of Bellamy ravine and home. This past season I rode over 750KM and kayaked over 75KM, mostly in and around Toronto, Scarborough and Pickering.

So, then, here are 7 more in this chain, in no particular order...

1. Opal Aristizabal, tech writer and Insight driver
2. Jamie Callingham, one of the few teacher-types I know who actually has time to maintain a blog
3. Alain Cloutier, graphic designer with a slightly insane blog, two great kids, and horse-addicted wife. He and I share a similar pain -- horsefolk are a special (wonderful) breed of crazy. :)
4. Kenn Hussey, IBM ex-pat and blogger with great frequency, especially this past Blaugust.
5. Wassim Melhem, overworked - but always well-dressed - project manager
6. Julia Raphael Morgan, opera singer sans blog at the moment...
7. Andrew Overholt, Linux evangelist and fellow cyclist

And here are the rules I'm supposed to pass on to the above bloggers:

• 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.

* - The horses don't live with us, thankfully -- it's someone else's job to feed and muck them.