#7things from @bcompton

Skip this if you hate: twitter, memes, twittermemes, personal information about strangers, chain memes, math dorks, non sequiturs.

@drinkerthinker tagged me with this seven-things meme, so I figured I should do it. Most of the people who see this will be Twitter people, and almost no one who follows me on Twitter actually knows who I am or anything about me, so it should be pretty easy to find seven things that no one knows.  Will they be interesting? No. No, they will not.

1. I joined XBox Live just to play Rock Band with @drinkerthinker and @beep, but then we never got around to it, and then their XBox died, and now it’s all sadness, everywhere. I’ve never played online on XBox Live with stranger-strangers because I’m afraid of unmuzzled twelve-year-olds.  

2. My long term memory sucks, and I have forgotten a whole lot about my life. I only feel like I have a better grasp on memory since perhaps 2000, and that’s just because it’s been better documented. (I kind of stole this one from @cleversimon’s seven things. His is better-written.)

3. I started dating my wife in 1996, shortly before I turned 18. We had the least romantic proposal ever in the spring of 2000, which was completely my fault. We lived in Kentucky at the time, and I’d just accepted a job offer from Amazon.com as an entry-level programmer in Seattle.  She wouldn’t move to Seattle with me unless we were engaged, so I asked her, even though she had already effectively proposed to me. To me it seemed like a no-brainer, because I knew I wanted to marry her already, but because I am an idiot it never struck me to ask her.  We married in 2001 in Renton, WA (a Seattle suburb), exactly one month before the terrorist attacks. (2001 was also the year that the big earthquake hit Seattle. So it was a really fucking crazy year.)

4. From 1998 through 2000 I ran a small indie record label called Doom Nibbler Records.  I released two 7” vinyl records and two CDs for five different bands. My most ambitious project was a totally self-funded full album for a band of teenagers in Virginia Beach, VA. I dropped $3k in money I saved by getting a full scholarship to my university on recording and mastering a record, but before I could send it to press, the band broke up. Therefore one of the CDs in my collection cost me three thousand dollars and it’s not even very good. The label did not survive the disaster, but it’s not like anything I actually released sold, either. 

5. I turned down a job offer in 2005 or 2006 from Valve Software, which was really stupid. I’ve made tons of terrible career decisions. I think there are still a few people I worked with at Amazon.com that would hire me again, though, so I haven’t burned every bridge.  But still! Valve Software! I was going to be working on Steam and not games, which meant a lot of Windows programming that I despise, but still, the video game dork inside me hates the rest of me.

6. I took guitar lessons through my high school years and got good enough to be proficient but never above average. I played in a band in high school called Powch. We recorded six songs in a basement studio and put them on a cassette. I think we printed a couple hundred cassettes and sold them to classmates. We played three club shows in Lexington, KY to tiny crowds, and a few more at schools and other tiny things. We were scheduled to open for Zen Guerrilla in one of these shows but that band pissed off the sound guy so badly that he walked out and didn’t return.  We weren’t a very good band, but we weren’t horrible, either. It was a lot of fun. I’ve since recorded about ten songs on my own, instrumentals, all recorded on my computer. I made a dozen or so copies of a CD with some of those songs on them and handed them out to coworkers in 2001 or 2002. (I play an American Fender Telecaster with dual humbuckers, by the way.)

7. I have no idea what to do with my life. I like to write but I have no direction with it. I am a good programmer but I can’t stick with a job anymore because I get bored so fast. (There is no programmer market here in Lexington, even if I wanted to go back to work as one.) So I guess you could call me a stay-at-home-dad, but I’m not really comfortable with that label because it feels like it’s been applied by default, not as something I really wanted to do. I think stay-at-home parents are awesome, I just wish I could find it fulfilling enough to stop spending so much time every day wondering what it is I’m supposed to be doing with my life.

8. BONUS: I want to do a podcast with someone. If you’re interested in doing a podcast with me, about whatever, let me know. Bring ideas. I am creatively bankrupt.

I believe everyone has been tagged for this, but just in case, here are some people I don’t think have been tagged and who might actually do this:

If somebody wants me to tag them, I will do so. I wrote this fast and didn’t edit much and as a result it’s pretty shitty. If you read the whole thing, you’re a better person than I am.

Comments (View) | 3 notes | | Jan 13, 2009
  1. bcompton posted this
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