Eight Things You Might Not Know About Me

Wednesday, January 2nd, 2008 | Misc, Private

It’s a new year so it’s time for a new ~~scam~~ blogmeme. Craig Cmehil (SAP Evangelist), who was tagged by Maggie Fox (love her posts on DFOF), tagged me to write 8 things you do not know about me.
If you just came to my Blog via Google search words like “blackberry 8310 gps”, “flickr girls” or “trial bike videos” (according to Google Analytics the most popular ways to find my Blog right now) you don’t know anything about me. On the other hand if you happen to be my wife or my brother you know already everything. So let’s assume you are somewhere in the middle and therefore you might not know…

1) I have young parents. My mother married with sixteen (my parents are still happily married) and I was born when she was twenty. My brother Thomas is 10 years younger then me and is also a Product Manager (at Ciao).

2) I was born in Rotenburg an der Fulda in Germany which was also the hometown of the Rotenburg Cannibal. While I do enjoy fine dining I do not endorse his activities.

3) On a positive note I was born on the same day like Linus Torvalds.

4) My father, grandfather and great grandfather worked all as forest rangers. I grew up in a forest house about a mile away from a village with 90 residents. My parents tell me that when I was a baby our hunting dogs would guard me during the day (but no, I was not raised by wolves). I have a German hunting license which is actually very hard to get (requires one year of training and many tests and exams), but have not practiced hunting for a long time.

5) During my first week at college (European Business School) a fellow student introduced me to Hiphop. After listening to KRS-One “By All Means Necessary” I was hooked and started to build up a Hiphop vinyl music collection. A few years later I also got involved into the local Breakbeat and Techno scene. Together with some friends we recorded radio shows and made them available via tapes in the university library (pre-cursor to Podcasts). I actually co-produced a Breakbeat record under the pseudonym Rawmotion. Since I graduated fairly young I was not ready right away for serious work and jobbed in a local record store during the day and as a DJ during the night. My record collection is now for sale.

6) I only ate Asian food for the first time when I was 18. It was a Chinese restaurant in Kassel and I remember I was immediately comfortable to eat with chopsticks. Since then I have travelled to Asia multiple times (Malaysia and Japan) and even my wife (whose grandparents are from China) agrees that I am a natural with chopsticks. I assume I was Chinese or Japanese in a former life.

7) I lived for two years in Columbus, Ohio. Go Buckeyes! And by the way the midwest is not as bad as many people think. I had a lot of fun and made good friends. However I prefer to live on the West Coast.

8 ) My first computer was a Commodore 64. I bought it when I was 15 from my own savings. My parents did not want to get me a computer since they thought I would only play with it and it would distract from homework. Well they were kind of right since I used it mainly for gaming. A couple of years later I got a Commodore Amiga which was an amazing machine at the time. I was so disappointed when I started to use PC’s at work, but got used to it. A couple of weeks ago I switched to Mac.

I doubt that anyone will make it to the end of this post, but if you did it congratulations… now you know everything.

So for all my work writing this up late in the evening I now want to know eight secrets from Rashmi Sinha, Jonathan Boutelle, Ryan Stewart, John Dowdell, Ted Patrick, Jason Calacanis, James Ward and David Hornik.