I’ve been tagged, which means I have to share 5 things most people don’t know about me. Since I’ve only resumed blogging about a month and a half ago, that’s pretty much everything, so here goes:

1. I like chemistry as much as programming. If this were a world where the internet didn’t exist, that’s what I’d be studying. I aced organic chemistry 1 & 2 at Drexel, where I was probably the only non-physical-science major in the class.
2. I play computer RPGs, and I always play a wizard/sorcerer/mage. A blue one if possible. My first was a text MUD (Multi-User Dungeon, a predecessor to the graphical MMORPGs) by the name of Realms of Despair. Its persistent world has been online virtually uninterrupted for 13 years, during which time I played over 7400 hours. I played a sorcerer in Diablo I and II, and a mage in World of Warcraft.
3. I hold a 7-year grudge against Andy Frain. It was the year 2000, I was 15, and I published a weekly e-mail newsletter called Site Builder News. Andy approached me with an offer to sell one of his e-books for 40% commission on each $97 sale. I thought it was a good match for my list, he seemed like a decent person. We agreed on some text to send a mailing out to my list recommending the book. I sold 8 copies with the first mail, yielding him ~$800 and me ~$320. He never paid that commission despite us both having access to the receipts from the payment processor showing the orders resulting from my mailing. He made excuses for months, and when I posted about it on message boards he had posted on before warning potential affiliates, started threatening me for libelling him somehow by sharing that he was refusing to pay commissions on his book. It’s now 7 years later and I still think about it too often.
4. I have math OCD. If I’m not thinking about anything, I inevitably start doing mental math. In high school it was an obsession with the number 5. Adding 5s, multiplying 5s, taking roots of arbitrary numbers ending in 5. Now it’s the number 2. I can count powers of 2 faster than I can say the numbers out loud up to about a million.
5. I’m an extrovert online and an introvert offline. Those of you that only know me online might be coming from one of the many forums where I’ve made thousands and thousands of posts; SitePoint isn’t the only one, only the one most related to this blog where I put it in my signature. Those that know me in an online game know I type a lot, and respond to questions quicker than most anyone. Even having a blog is unlike me.

   Offline, I’m a quiet person. If I don’t have classes for whatever reason (holidays, breaks), I might not even talk for days. When I speak in a class, it’s usually something I’ve had time to think about; I don’t blurt things out. I’m taking a course on entrepreneurship and have raised my hand during the class only once — the professor asked why Google had become the leader in the search industry despite earlier competitors like AltaVista. He suggested it was their minimalistic interface, probably ignorant of the significant algorithmic difference that produced the vastly superior search results that really got people to switch and stay. What I said in response was probably over everyone’s head there.

   I’m an INTJ (what that means).

I’m not tagging anyone because I don’t need to in order to maintain the structure of the game. It’ll still grow as an n-ary tree with a logarithmic frontier, it’ll just be ever so slightly less than base 5. Computer scientists don’t care about the exact value; it’s asymptotically O(log n) either way.