Dammit, Marcoos has tagged me!

The rules:

  1. Link to your original tagger(s) and list these rules in your post.
  2. Share seven facts about yourself in the post.
  3. Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
  4. Let them know they’ve been tagged.

Seven things:

  1. Although I only speak French and English, I've also have been learning Spanish, Latin and Russian. The French school system forced me to choose between math and Russian in high school. I wanted to do a career in computing, so I had to drop Latin and Russian. I still manage to read and speak a bit of Spanish when needed in order to survive (Une cerveza, por favor!). Gandalf laughs at me because I tend to pronounce his name with a Russian accent. That's probably the very last remainder of me studying Russian...
  2. I used to be a computer science teacher for a year in a junior high school. When "offered" to do a military service, I asked to be a teacher instead. The system allows a handful of people to be sent to a third-world country to help as volunteers. I was sent to Luxembourg, which hardly qualifies as "third-world".
  3. After this stay in Luxembourg, I came back to Paris. I needed to work and loved riding my mountain bike (I used to organize day trips with bikes for friends), so I has sold mountain bikes in a large shop for a while (Go Sport les Halles). When it comes to live by your passion, computers are better than bicycles!
  4. I started computing when I was 12 or 13, and I loved it so much that I wanted my career to be around computers. It's still the case today. When I saw computers connected to a network, I had the same experience. I wanted my career to be around networks of computers. Then I saw the Web, the same happened to me. You know the rest.
  5. When I was a teenager, I used to be an intern at the CMI (a computing research center) where I've most likely have met with Richard Stallman around 1984 and other people I still see in the Open Source movement. I used to spend my nights hacking minicomputers there while going to high school at the same time. Not surprisingly, I miserably failed at my exams the first time. At the time, I hated school because it prevented me to spend time in front of computers.
  6. My wife and I are almost high school sweet hearts, even if we separated for several years before getting back together for real after we realized that it really made sense. We've been together for 18 years non-stop now (celebrating our 15th wedding anniversary last week, BTW).
  7. I used to have long hair for a while, and this was frown upon by my inlaws. Once, my wife's grand-mother told me "Tristan, I think your hair is a little too long, don't you think?" at a family dinner. Next morning, I shaved my head. a couple of picture are still on line to testify (although the link is safe for work, pregnant women are advised not to click) ;-)

Name of the 7 people that will curse me because of this

I'll start by breaking the rules, as I'm not sure I want to bug 7 people at once. I'd rather bug only one or two severely. Who would that be?

  • John Lilly, because we want more John and less books on his blog
  • Mitchell Baker, because nobody will dare asking her, and she needs to blog more (and yes I know Mitchell that you won't like it, but pretty pleaaaaase! ;-) )
  • I wanted to tagg Mark Surman, but it's already done.