Tag! I'm it. Here Are My Five Things...

posted Monday, 8 January 2007

Brian Leonard tagged me and now I'm tagging John, Erwin, Matt, Sandip and Craig.
I had to think up five things you probably don't know about me. Here are my five :

	Surprisingly, my first language was Spanish. I was born in Madrid, Spain and somehow Spanish happened before English (my father was American) and French (my mother was French). Today I am busy learning Chinese. Toward that end I recently purchased Rosetta Stone's Mandarin package. My ability to speak Chinese is pretty horrible. It is unlike any language I have ever spoken - Spanish, French, English and Japanese all lack tones and the up, down, flat and up-down nuances of tones are deadly. The same word in all forms of the tones mean completely different things. I am rapidly improving - but still I am pretty awful at it.
	I visited the set of Luke Skywalker's home years and years before Star Wars. Star Wars was filmed in Matmata, Tunisia. I lived for eight years in North Africa in Tunisia. My family stayed at an underground hotel in Matmata when there were no tours and no Star Wars. Even then it was pretty amazing. One of the extremely memorable visits was visiting El Djem which hosts this amazing Roman ampitheater. I remember us driving down the road in the middle of what I thought was nowhere - and then suddenly in front of us was this impressive Roman ampitheater.
	This past year, I played basketball at a training facility for Chinese Army officers. While in Yunnan province - the local basketball courts were in use and they were kind enough to allow us to play at the training facility for officers in the army. We played basketball with a small audience of Army officers looking on. While in China I visited Shanghai, Kunming, Yuxi, Li Jiang (wow - this reminded me of Kyoto), Dali, Hong Kong and Shenzhen ( a very, very cool city).
	I spent one month working on a solar energy village. What ? As a way to reboot myself I spent one month in the fall of 1980 working at Arcosanti. Arcosanti is an attempt at a solar energy community near Prescott, Arizona. Basically I volunteered to help them for a month build stuff and bending rebar, pouring cement, etc. It was an interesting month especially coming off of a crazy six month work schedule.
	In the past I worked on robots. I am not talking about the "I, Robot" humanoid-kind - rather some work-centric garden variety of manufacturing work cell kind. When I worked at Boeing I worked in a group that developed robot work cells. I was responsible with programming the system controller and managing the exchange of units between two robot subsystems. It was, to say the least, a lot of fun.