Meme: 7 things about me you’d not likely guess

I sat down to do some Java programming for a school project when I went to check my email first. Turns out my mother has “tagged” me with an internet meme, to post 7 things about myself you wouldn’t guess. (A meme is “any unit of cultural information, such as a practice or idea, that gets transmitted verbally or by repeated action from one mind to another” – Wikipedia.) She didn’t include the instructions in her post, so I went back a couple levels to see what the original meme stated.

“The meme asks me to give a link to the person who meme’d me, to tell 7 interesting things about me, and to then pass the meme on. I interpreted the meme to mean that I should tell things that you’re not likely to guess. Here goes:”

So for me:

1. I originally learned most of the fundamentals of programming on the Cybiko handheld computer, not on a typical PC. Major props to Greg Smith, who had great patience chatting with me on AIM late at night. I’d ask him how to do something and he’d nicely show me how; stuff like manipulating sprites, improving performance with graphics tricks (very necessary on a low-powered handheld), fixing my syntax, and squashing silly bugs.
2. I bought my first domain name, 4Cybiko.com, in 2001 for $15 from 15DollarDomains.com, which no longer exists (merged to a different name).
3. I was addicted to 3D virtual worlds circa 2003, spending hours building my own buildings, towns, streets and cities. I had lots of online friends and we developed some very interesting relationships, purely online. I forget the name of the original one I got hooked on, but they eventually closed down their servers, and I moved on to “Awaba”, the only free one in existence at the time. I only stopped because they closed down, too.
4. For years I played StarCraft “Shareware” because I was too young to make any money and actually buy a copy of StarCraft. Fortunately it has a multiplayer mode, although you can only play as Terran. Today StarCraft and Brood War are so cheap on eBay it makes no sense to play StarCraft Shareware. If it weren’t for shareware, though, I wouldn’t be still playing it today. The shareware model can really work.
5. I’m not a fast reader. Reading books often bores me. There are no hyperlinks. Reading on a computer is the way to go.
6. I once burned my finger on a soldering iron.
7. I once cut myself on the sharp edge of an old computer case. It was a fairly bad gash and it left a scar.

I tag Audrey, Larissa, and Illya.