Adblock Plus and (a little) more

Now it got me as well · 2009-01-15 23:24 by Wladimir Palant

Giorgio knew very well of course that I was only waiting for a chance to tag him, so he tagged me first. Argh… Whatever, here are the rules:

1. Link to your original tagger(s) and list these rules in your post.
2. Share seven facts about yourself in the post.
3. Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
4. Let them know they’ve been tagged.

And here are seven things about me you probably don’t know:

1. I lived the first twelve years of my life in Chişinău (or rather Кишинев as it was called back then). No, not Russia but still USSR — close enough. No, I don’t speak Moldovan language, four years of Moldovan classes at school certainly weren’t enough to leave a trace in my memory (more about this below).
2. I discovered programming when I was eleven and immediately got very enthusiastic about it. My first programming language was Basic (not very surprising) but shortly after that I learned FoxPro. No, not Visual FoxPro — FoxPro 2. My parents got so concerned that I spend too much time at the computer that they added a boot password. Of course they had no chance, it didn’t take me long to hack it.
3. I experienced all secondary school types in Germany first-hand, starting with Hauptschule (where I got pretty decent grades despite not knowing the language at all), spending several years at Realschule and finishing with Gymnasium. That’s what happens when you come to a country and nobody cares to explain you that there are three different school types in this country and the one you went to before is equivalent to Gymnasium. I only got that important piece of knowledge when our class was brought to a job information center and I was told that I cannot become a programmer after finishing Hauptschule.
4. I wrote a simple game for the Электроника МК-61 calculator. For those not knowing what I am talking about, that was a very advanced piece of technology, with memory enough for 105 (!) instructions. The one I got had an additional quirk: it would overheat and behave erratically after some 20 minutes, so you had to learn typing in your 105 instructions very fast. Of course my parents didn’t buy this calculator for me (it was worth 1/2 of what you would usually earn a month) but I “inherited” it from my brother once he didn’t need it any more.
5. I lived in Norway for three years and yet I still don’t speak Norwegian. I can understand Norwegian texts and I might be able to understand a Norwegian talking to me — if he does me a favor and speaks slowly (something Norwegians almost never do). I know that this is lame but my brain is surprisingly incapable of absorbing human languages, especially in spoken form. I only speak three languages because I had no other choice. And in Norway everybody can speak English so why should anyone learn their language?
6. Once upon a time I was co-administrator of a community site called Vampires.de (yes, it is long gone). How did I end up there? I have no idea but a friend of mine liked hanging out there, I helped out with a few issues and then it already happened. So I learned Perl by hacking their YaBB forum (those of you familiar with the YaBB forum know that this is a very bad way of learning Perl) and even wrote a web-based chat for that site.
7. This chat (named “GT-chat”) became my first contribution to the world-wide internet community. It wasn’t great but apparently most other chats were even worse. After some time I became disgusted by the infantile community this project attracted and abandoned it — only to discover that my loyal followers kept the project alive and even ripped off the horrible design and the awkward English translation of my old site.

Now finally my seven victims:

1. Neil Deakin, because I still don’t understand how one man could have built up such a comprehensive source of information about the Mozilla platform.
2. Robert Sayre, because he is always so kind — what secrets is he hiding?
3. Andreas Wuest, because he should finally start to blog.
4. Frederic Wenzel, because Germans should get some fun too.
5. Myk Melez, just to learn where all those ideas come from.
6. Melissa Shapiro, how does this PR thing work anyway?
7. Jan Odvarko, for no real reason.

Tags: mozilla off-topic

Comment [2]

1. rick752 · 2009-01-16 07:11 · #

   Ha!
   I loved the way Georgia tagged you:
   “Wladimir Palant, so he can take a break from his efforts to make Adblock Plus supersede NoScript.”

   Gotta love you two …. like friendly enemies’ :-)

2. Stupid Head · 2009-01-16 13:17 · #

   You mean… frenemies?

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