I got tagged by G. Lane Cavalier at http://glcavalier.wordpress.com. Who obviously has too much time on his hands and will do anything to avoid studying his Japanese. You can track back “Tagging” by visiting all the sites that have participated in this foolishness. You might even find something useful in this whole exercise..

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The Rules:
1. Post these rules before you give you the facts.
2. List 8 random facts about yourself.
3. At the end of your post, choose (tag) 8 people and list their names (linking to them).
4. Leave them a comment on their blog letting them know they’ve been tagged!
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Quibble: Rule#1 has been garbled in transmission and I’m too lazy to track it back. I will guess that it should either read “you give your facts” or “you give the facts about yourself”. Hmmm, does a flawed rule mean that you can toss the whole thing? Since I have a huge ego, I’ll go along with he gag. But I doubt I have eight bloggers to tag.

8 Facts about me:

1. In grammar school, after having been caught throwing paper airplanes on a Friday, I was given the punish lesson to make and number 100,000 by Monday. I called my Mom to bring a numbering machine home from work. And, did you know you can make a paper airplane in four folds that will fly. I was tired of paper airplanes after that.
2. I served 4 Years in the USAF, and despite going to the three survival schools — air, water, and ground — other than basic training and the survival schools, I never left Maryland.
3. I’ve traveled by car in 49 of the 50 states.
4. My wife and I hung out in the same bar for at least a year before we met at my cousin’s wedding, but never met at that bar. She knew most of my bar friends, but never saw me there. (Maybe I was under the table by the time she’d arrive after work.)
5. I was awarded the Joint Service Commendation Medal for my computer representation of non-English non-Cyrillic languages while assigned to the National security Agency. (As a result of that work, when I was discharged, I was designated as a ‘key intelligence asset’, had a twenty year restriction on foreign travel, and had to file an annual reports on myself and any contacts with foreign nationals. Arghhh!)
6. In 2004, I had been to every major league baseball stadium at least once.
7. I’m not “lucky”, but I am an observant injineer. When I was in LasVegas for Comdex, the Rivera was just introducing “loyalty rewards”. On slot machines, they put in ticket dispensers that counted down your play with each coin you gambled. When it reached zero, it spit out a ticket. You could redeem the ticket for prizes. Like a carnival. I realized that people would not leave a slot machine with a low number on it unless they went broke. Thus, the low number was an indicator that the slot hadn’t hit lately. Each break in Comdex session, I get twenty bucks and go play the “low count” slots. I won 22k in two days — several times summoning my wife to wait for the payoff so I could go back to the session. By the next trip 2 months later, when I was ready to kill ’em, they changed the system. Argh!
8. I am an introvert. As such, I was great as a systems programmer in college. I love the internet because I can avoid people. :-) Like GLaneC!

Here are the Taggee’s:

Kent Blumberg http://kentblumberg.typepad.com
Andrew Flusche http://www.legalandrew.com
Liz Handlin http://ultimate-resumes.blogspot.com
Dave Opton http://execunet.blogspot.com/
Andy Roberts http://distributedresearch.net
Dave Taylor http://www.intuitive.com/blog/
Des Walsh http://www.thinkinghomebusiness.com
Vincent Wright http://linkedinbusinessdiscussionindex.blogspot.com/

(I’m astonished that I could come up with eight.)

FJohn