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7 things - the virus

When I returned from vacation it looked to my like Planet-PHP blogs were infected by some strange virus. Everyone seems to be keen on providing 7 things that many people don't know about him. Since I got tagged 2 times now (Kore and Sebastian), I'll jump on the bandwagon and also share some weird info with you.

1. I started programming with QBasic in 1993 on a 2/86 machine my father gave to me. In the lack of a QBasic book I used my fathers old GWBasic book for learning. I was very much looking forward to my X-mas present in this year, which was a version of VisualBasic (yes, you now may throw stones at me).

2. I do dance sports in my free time (if I have any). Yes, this is really sports, although most people don't believe it. It all started in 1995, when a good friend invited me to come around at a dancing school. I considered him mad, but finally he finally persuaded me. The reason I then stayed there was the girl-boy ration, which was around 80:20.

3. My first visit to an International PHP conference was sponsored by my former employer Deutsche Bank and I turned up in suite and tie. I was the only one back then who was dressed like this. Nowadays I'm one of the few people turning up in jeans and geek shirt.

4. Until about a year ago I could not cook anything except for spaghetti out of the box. By now I love cooking and experiment a lot with recipes from chefkoch.de.

5. Whenever I'm forced to use a Windows systems, if for work or to help friends, I get an outburst of fury after less than a minute. Therefore I usually refuse to help friends who use Windows by wearing my "I will not fix your computer" T-shirt.

6. My favorite place to be at home is the bathtub. I have a dedicated table in my bathroom to place my notebook before it, so I can stay for hours in the tub.

7. I always wanted to write a PHP extension and had many cool ideas for that. I hate the fact that I started with basic instead of C and that I was never forced to learn C in a school or university course. Since it seems quite time consuming to get into C with developing a PHP extension, I never got much further than a hello world example by now.

I'm trying to split the 2 batons I received into 7 equal pieces in throw it to people who have not been tagged, yet:

• Stefan for beery discussions on patterns, software design and crazy projects.

• Judith for her excellent presentation, moderation and training skills.

• Sandro for being a valuable coworker (sadly not anymore) and friend.

• Peter for being the PHPUGDO doyen and cool birthday parties.

• Jo for nice beer talks at IPC and crazy blog entries.

• Nicole for refreshing talks from a technologically experienced users point of view and her Web 2.0 addiction.

• Wolfgang for driving the PHP community site that helped me a lot when I started with PHP.

The rules of this little, somewhat stupid ;), game:

• 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.