Dave Donaldson

5 Things

Monday, January 15 2007

I was sort of hoping that I wouldn't get tagged with this round, but James Avery and Jim Holmes ruined it so now I feel obligated.

Here are 5 things you might or might not know about me:

1. I'm a diehard Foo Fighters fanboy. I've always liked the Foo Fighters, but I took it to a whole other level when I saw them in concert for the first time about 3.5 years ago. They were out doing their One By One tour and made a stop in Columbus at a place called the PromoWest Pavilion (now called the LC). That place is a small outdoor amphiteater (~3000 people) and I remember the energy from the band was something I'd never experienced. Nothing but pure rock-your-face-off adrenaline for almost two hours. And my date for that concert? My mom (she's a rocker herself and has a crush on Dave Grohl). I also saw the Foo Fighters in concert again just a few months ago in August in Chicago when they were doing a very limited acoustic tour (only 15 shows). Wanna know who went to that concert with me? No, not my mom, but my oldest son (he's 8). If it was a typical rock show I wouldn't have taken him, but this was a slightly laid back concert and he really enjoyed it. If you look at this picture, we are about 1-2 rows behind the row in the bottom of the picture, dead center.

BTW, my license plate reads THE FOO and soon I'll be getting a tattoo of one of the Foo Fighters logos on my arm.

2. I know more about the original Star Wars trilogy than George Lucas. OK, maybe not, but I'm a lifelong fan and know some seriously obscure stuff, which means when it comes to playing Star Wars Trivial Pursuit, I dominate.

3. I've never broken a bone in my body. Of course I'm knocking on wood as I write this, but it's true.

4. Some people know me as The Name Nazi. James gave me that nickname on our last project because I would tirelessly get onto developers about choosing good names for classes, methods, properties, etc. I'm a serious stickler for good API design, most of which starts with having good and clear names for everything. So be warned, if we ever work together, give careful thought to the names you give class members or prepare to suffer a beatdown ;-)

5. I don't have a degree. I went to Ohio State and bleed scarlet and grey, but as of this day I'm about 60 credit hours short of graduating with a B.S. in Computer Science. It all started when I switched majors from Actuarial Science to Computer Science. I began majoring in Actuarial Science because the one thing I was always good at was math, and one of the higher paying jobs that relied on pure math was an actuary (another option I considered was becoming a high school math teacher). I was well into my sophomore year and taking high 500-level math courses until I took a prerequisite course titled "Computer Science 111: Programming in Pascal". By the time I finished that class I knew I was hooked into the world of programming and logic, but I was in a tough spot because I was studying for the first actuarial exam during that time, which I told myself if I passed and did well then I would continue on that path. Needless to say, I didn't study for shit for that exam and only scored a 2 (it's scored 0-10 and you need a 5 to pass). After that I filed the necessary paperwork to change majors, set myself back 2 full years in college, and the rest is history.

That should do it. Apparently proper protocol is to tag a few other people, but pretty much everyone I would tag has already done this, so I'm breaking the chain here.

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