Five Things You Didn’t Know About Me

07Feb07

Olivier Ansaldi tapped me up for this ongoing chain letter, blog style so here are five things you didn’t know about me:

1. I’m the eldest of three kids and my parents are divorced. My father has remarried and now has another three kids, the eldest of whom is about the same age I was when my father was the age I am now. He’s English but still lives in Ireland. My mother, who is Irish, moved to the United States about 13 years ago and is now a U.S. citizen. She lives in Austin, Texas and works in the IT industry there. She has also remarried but hasn’t had any new kids of her own. She has acquired a slightly stroppy 16-year old though…

2. For my sins I spent a year and half doing a marketing degree before I fell into this software engineering malarkey. On my first day in class I realised that I knew a few people there but started to get a sneaky feeling that we’d ended up in the course for people who couldn’t do anything else. I decided I was better off doing something I enjoyed and, at the time, computers were my hobby. Marketing’s loss is software development’s gain. Or the other way around, I forget.

3. Plan A when I left school was to study history in college¹. I didn’t get the grades however and was forced to rethink my plans. Unfortunately I couldn’t think of anything else and ended up in Marketing. I still have a serious interest in history though, especially 19th century Irish history at the moment. It’s in the blood though because my grandmother was a published historian who specialised in the earls after the Battle of Kinsale.

4. I should be heir to a small fortune. Before my parents divorced, my father owned about 10 acres of land in what was then a fairly rural part of Dublin. At the time (around 1990) the land was all agricultural and couldn’t be developed so it wasn’t worth very much (even by the underpriced standards of those days). The land was all sold off around the time of the divorce. In the last couple of years a motorway was built through the area and the land was all rezoned for high density development. The land alone would probably be worth close to €20 million today. Bah!

5. Writing is my secret love. I’m not as prolific or as good as I’d like to be but one day I hope to get something substantial completed. I have, what I think, are a couple of really good projects which I’m currently working on and I’m seriously considering entering this year’s NaNoWriMo. In the meantime I’m going to keep practicing here.

Now, I’m supposed to pass this on to five other bloggers… but I don’t actually know five other bloggers I could pass this to. The only other blogger I know is Olivier and he’s the one who sent this to me. The baton will therefore be carefully put away until such time as it can be passed on.

– Fintan

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1 – Actually plan A was to become a fighter pilot but as with most childhood dreams, reality got in the way.

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