absent.canadian

Last April (yes, almost 7 months ago), Ginny From The Blog tagged me.  I’m somewhat belated in my response … but better late than never.  And with a nod of respect to the Plaid Toaster, I’ll do this as a bullet list.

So … as tagged, here are ten random things about me that you may not know (and may not need to know – but it’s still fun, right?)

• I have been on the Internet “proper” for over 15 years now.  And I used electronic bulletin-boards for almost a decade prior.  I’m not sure what’s worse – having been “online” for a quarter-century, or having spent virtually all of my conscious life with a computer as my primary mode of communication.
• I once tripped and fell and broke my clavicle.  It was during a high school dance.  I did my driving test with my arm in a sling, and passed on the first try.
• I have owned seven cars.  Six of them were roadworthy.  Five of them were Volkswagens.  I experienced flat tires in four of them. Three of them needed a lot of work when I bought them.  Two of them were bought new.  I rebuilt the engine in one of them.
• My family had one of the first Sony D-50 Discman CD players back in 1983.  I know this because one of our first CD’s was Tina Turner’s “1984″, and I thought it was so cool to play a song called “1984″ in 1983.  I still have that Discman, and that CD.
• The coolest tape I had to listen to during our high school ski trips was Billy Idol’s “Vital Idol”.  I would play it over and over when I was skiing, imaging myself on stage rocking out with Billy.
• I had my first car accident in 1995.  I had my second car accident in 1995.  I have not had a car accident since.
• My first cell phone was a Nokia 100 that I bought in 1995.  It’s still at my parents’ house in the basement – possibly in its original box.
• When I was visiting my parents two years ago, I visited my old dorm room at Trent University.  In 1993 I signed the back of the mirror in my wardrobe with a black magic marker.  That same mirror is still there with my signature (and many others) on it.
• There’s nothing that infuriates me more than gum chewing.  It makes me physically ill to listen to someone smack gum.  Cracking gum edges me dangerously close to violence.
• I have never used a drug, nor have I ever smoked.  Ever.

I was thinking about a post on Michael Gannotti’s blog, and it struck me that I have been online for approximately 15 years now.

To be precise, “online” is referring to the Internet. My first glimpse of this beast was on my father’s IBM Thinkpad 700, setup on our kitchen table with a telephone line plugged into a giant USRobotics 9600 modem. I was a burgeoning high school student at the time, and wanted to send an “electronic mail note” to a university professor for an answer to a paper I was writing.

I was less than a year later that I got my first email address at Trent University. Oh, the days of logging into VM mail and Pine on our student VAX 5000. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, that’s fine – this was back in the days when the internet was the realm of nerds and geeks, and hanging around a VAX 5000 wasn’t a great way to meet women.

It may surprise some people that I have only had three email addresses in my lifetime. My first was at Trent, and my second was when I signed up with the TVOntario Online bulletin board. My third, and current email address came into existence in 1998, when I bought the mikehelms.org domain.

But seriously – 15 years on the Internet. Almost half my lifetime spent pushing electrons around the globe.