Giuseppe claims he didn’t want to get involved, but this tell-seven-things-about-you game is as fun as it is useless. The rules:

• 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.

So, here come seven completely useless facts about myself:

1. My first programming language was APL, which I learned from my father (1924-2001, worked for IBM Finland 1951-83). The picture is of an APL ball for an IBM electric typing machine / terminal (and I bought such a typing machine in 1979).
2. In 1980 I wrote a Z80 machine code program which calculated all primes up to 32767 in 200 milliseconds using the Sieve of Erathostenes.
3. The same year, 1980, I wrote an APL program that accurately “predicted” a header in Svensk Damtidning, a Swedish “royal gossip magazine”.
4. The same year, 1980, I decided, based on real-life experience of stubbornness of my potential co-founder, not to start a company with Michael “Monty” Widenius.
5. In 2003, I travelled Munich-Amsterdam-Delhi-Amsterdam-Munich only to spend a night in a chair at Indira Gandhi airport without being let into the country, as I had forgotten to apply for an Indian visa in advance.
6. I pretend to blog in eleven languages. I have also pretended to give speeches in those languages (plus Chinese, Czech, Finnish and French, which I don’t yet blog in).
7. In August or September each year since 1993, I have travelled with my university friends to a new country none of us has visited before. An additional requirement is for the country to be perceived as so inhospitable by our wives, that they don’t even want to join us. Last year, we picked Kosovo.

My seven invitees:

1. Zack Urlocker, long-time colleague at MySQL and Sun, fellow runner and traveller, because I have complete faith in him taking swift action on the game-of-seven.
2. Dave Douglas, EVP at Sun, my co-passenger in Decadence Airlines who has contributed very much to making my life@Sun a happy one.
3. Patrik Backman, my former colleague from MySQL AB and Sun, because I consider it my responsibility to encourage him to refresh his blog or start a new one.
4. Michael “Monty” Widenius, because of useless fact #4 above, and because he should do it again (blog, that is)
5. Alok Parikh, my mentee from Sun’s mentoring program, because I’d love to see what seven facts he’ll come up with.
6. Giuseppe Guerrasio, who has encouraged me to continue my Italian blog (and of all languages I don’t speak, I speak Italian the best).
7. Ulf Scherling, an Austrian who is one of my great role models in photography. So are Riccardo Desiderio, Oswin Eder, James Duncan Davidson and Julian Cash, but I’ve blogged about them earlier so it’s time for Ulf.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 20th, 2009 at 23:11 and is filed under MySQL. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.