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Alex Goad of Net Frontier Marketing tagged me for the 8 Random Things Meme: If participating, you’re supposed to divulge some personal trivia not everyone is likely to know about. (Though it’s quite feasible that nobody wants to, either, heh.)

So here goes.

1. Having grown up in the subtropics of Africa and Asia, I simply can’t stand the sun anymore. My favorite region to relocate to would probably be Siberia (which I actually crossed on the Trans Siberian Railway from Moscow to Beijing in February once – a real fun trip fondly remembered to this very day) or Laponia. Any place where it’s really, really snowy. And cold. And dark much of the time. While currently living in a skiing resort in the Belgian Ardennes promontory may come close, it’s still way too warm for my arctic tastes.
2. Moreover, being raised as a diplomat’s child, I’ve traveled most parts of the world several times over right from childhood – which over time has informed me with a thorough hate of traveling as well. Expectably, whenever I tell people who simply cannot fathom this admittedly fairly ideosyncratic sentiment that I’ve seen enough of the world not to like it, they tend to write me off as a blasé sofab. To which, ironically, the only rational response can be “QED” IMV.
3. When serving for two years in the German army (during one of the many peaks of the Cold War), several of my military superiors used to ask me at one point or another why the hell I had volunteered for the reserve officer career. (Of course, I haven’t the slightest what made them ask that in the first place…) My standard reply being that this was because under the Geneva Convention it would exempt me from forced labor as a POW. They invariably found my response hilariously funny – only that I for my part was actually dead serious about it. This finally convinced me that a civilian career as a comedian further down the road was positively out of the question… 
4. While I grew up in a multilingual environment, with English as my unofficial second mother tongue of sorts, when I enrolled at Bonn university for English literature and some other languages, I had two endure three mandatory written English language skills tests, just like everybody else. In the course of one of these I discovered a major English typo in the test paper which actually had to be officially amended by the teaching staff monitoring the tests (some of whom were Brits, heh). Funnily enough, I actually failed two of these damn tests, forcing me to attend two additional one-semester English remediation courses before I could embark on my studies proper. This positively sucked, especially when both my tutors asked me right during first class what the heck I was doing there, exempting me from any further active participation barring the final exams. There was a vague possibility of some computer glitch having occurred in grading those initial test results, but the matter was never positively resolved. While it didn’t quite diminish my fascination with computers, it was probably quite material in effectively immunizing me against all IT hype and hysteria – a fundamental techno-scepticism that has continued to pay off bigtime to this very day.
5. It was still during my (albeit final) university days that I founded a specialist bookshop together with two buddies. Little was I prepared for this rather ill advised nose dive into entrepreneurship. (Neither did I have any money to my name to actually make it come off.) It took us several years to actually become profitable, but what I really enjoyed about the entire experience was not having to endure a boss – and I’ve stuck inveterately to the self-employed lifestyle ever since.
6. Before I went into software development, I made a great living online in my incarnation as the notorious “taxBomber”, promoting offshore finance conduits, tax minimization programs, alternate citizenships and privacy protection. Among several other stunts I pulled off at the time, my local partner and I managed to convert high-tax Sweden into a watertight tax haven. All of this was absolutely legal, of course, based on scrupulous research and investigation of all the pertinent laws and regulations – so much so, in fact, that the Swedish government actually changed the legislation to close these legal loopholes because of us. Later on, I decided to pursue some less controversial industry – which got me stuck in cloaking. (Am I doing something wrong, I wonder?)
7. One major motivation to get into IT in the first place is based on the fact that I’m essentially lazy to a fault. Of course I did have to learn the hard way that computers won’t actually help you save time over the long haul. Still, it’s great fun to develop new stuff and blithely rush in where angels fear to tread. (And yes, I know what this makes me in the eyes of Alexander Pope…)
8. While I have 27 published books under various noms-de-plume to my credit (a few of which have been translated into 7 languages beyond my native German), I actually abhor writing. IMV it’s a thankless and tedious task – which is why our next major project, the fantomas textMachine™, will focus on intelligent automatic text generation that will pass even the most critical human editorial muster. If successful, it will hopefully qualify for yet another triumph of personal and collective laziness.

Passing the baton to 8 other bloggers, as is part and parcel of the 8 Random Things Meme project, here’s my unsolicited list:

• DigitalGhost
• John Andrews
• Michael Martinez
• Mike Grehan
• Mikkel
• Peter Da Vanzo
• Teresa
• Woody Maxim

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