Saturday, January 03, 2009

Seven Things About Me - Tagged by Marco

I've been tagged by Marco Tabini. This gives me an opportunity to share some things you may not know about me:

1) I was born in Switzerland to a Swiss father and British mother, moved to Israel at the age of 10, started at an Israeli school and within a year I moved to an American school (in Israel) where I graduated with a US high school diploma. As a result I don’t know any language perfectly. English is my best but I still lack a very broad vocabulary.

2) I got a warning letter during my studies at the Technion that if I don’t shape up they’ll kick me out. Working on PHP was just so much more fun. I am one of the only people I know who didn’t even know who most of their lecturers were (until today) as I rarely attended classes. I spent my days sleeping and the nights coding.

3) I am training myself to make the perfect Cappuccino. Although I’ve only been a serious coffee drinker for about three years, making a great cappuccino has become a hobby of mine and I have all the right prosumer equipment to do so.

4) I was on the varsity basketball team in high-school and even flew abroad for some competitions. Although I only play about once a year or two I am still a decent shot when I get the chance (but I lose my breath within a couple of minutes).

5) I envy graphics and Web designers. I have close to no artistic talent but have always wanted to find time to develop this side of me. Unfortunately I haven’t even managed to find the time to learn Photoshop yet alone practicing on the artistic side.

6) I hate shaving. I really hate shaving. When I was in the army I made sure to time the shave just often enough so I could still get away with not shaving every day. Unfortunately these days Eyal, my four year old son, complains when I want to kiss him and I’m not shaved so there’s finally someone who’s motivating me. Wife and Army didn’t do quite as good of a job.

7) I love food and eating out. Typically we start our days off, first thinking where we’re going to eat, and only then what we’re actually going to do. My first two hours of my first time in New York were spent booking restaurants for every day of the following week.

Here are the people I'm tagging:

- Marcus Börger: Smart guy and happens to live in my original hometown of Zürich.

- Mark de Visser: Few know the open-source space better than Mark.

- Roy Ganor: Leads the Zend Studio and PDT team and still not broadly known despite having a lot of interesting thoughts to share. Need to get him aggregated onto planet-php.net :)

- Stas Malyshev: First person to join Zend and someone who's opinion I deeply respect (even if I don't always agree).

- Christopher Jones: Probably the first big vendor employee to get deeply involved with the PHP community.

- Gaylord Aulke: Very talented and experienced Web architect who's led many great projects.

- John Coggeshall: Who I am sure can surprise us all with his factoids.

 

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.