Tagged (?)

So, it looks like I've been tagged by Crestfallen. Honestly, I'm not sure how this all started or what the point is, but I'll be a good sport about it. So, I guess I need to write about 5 things that people don't know about me.

1) When I was a high school kid, I hammered nickels into flatter, wider sized slugs. The vending machine in the locker room would accept them as quarters if you kept trying them. After perhaps a net profit of $4, I stopped this nearly daily activity when I accidentally hammered my thumb.

2) The first stock I ever bought on my own (non-custodial account) was 3dfx. I remember my hands were trembling as I clicked on the "Confirm Order" button. Amazing to think that the entire size of that position was a great deal smaller than a typical daily move the current Long-Term Portfolio sees. Anyway, I ultimately sold it for the same price I had paid for it many months later. Eventually, the company went bust, and its assets were bought on the cheap by nVidia.

3) As sad as it may be, I was thrown into the world of Texas Hold'em and the more serious side of poker after watching Rounders. It was not long after watching that movie that I thought it would be really cool to make some extra money playing poker on the side. After writing code to compute the likelihood of hands holding up against random hands and reading a few books on the subject, I felt I was ready to jump in a real game.

It took some convincing, but I was able to talk my roommate at the time (GZA of 12th Street) into going to the Commerce Casino with me. We played $1/2 (the lowest limit they spread), and I proceeded to lose $35. Not long after that, we figured out that it was probably close to impossible to beat the game due to the rake. We moved up to $3/6 upon realizing that. It would be a few more months before I was a consistent winner. And, looking back on how I used to play, I'm surrpised I was not a loser for longer.

4) In college, I took a Computer Architecture class. One of the assignments dealt with writing code to simulate 16-bit multiplication using some simple instruction set. Instead of thinking through the logic, I was lazy and tried to be a bit funny/stupid. So, I did a pretty ridiculous cut-and-pasting job that did the multiplication without any loops. It basically did things based on how a human would slowly hand compute numbers to sum leading to a product. The final printout of the code was some 30 pages long. It was not long before I got the nickname, Brute Force.

5) I've partied really hard in Los Algodones, Mexico, a border town near Yuma, Arizona. Along with a lot of others, I drank a bit too much and sang a lot of bad sounding karaoke. While I don't remember most of the night, I do remember singing Van Morrison's Brown Eyed Girl quite horribly.

I suppose it is now time to tag someone else. Eeny, meeny, miny, moe... catch a feline by the toe. If she purrs, let her go, eeny meeny miny moe. Rowr it is. She doesn't purr, she definitely revvs (in her Lotus!).