I'm tagged and happy newyear!

First of all: Happy New Year!

Sahil Malik tagged me so here are the 5 useless, braincell destroying trivia about me you probably didn't nor wanted to know!

1. My first program was a solver for a*x^2 + b*x + c = 0 on an MSX in MSX basic. That's right, my first program was completely useless and written in MSX Basic ('MicroSoft eXtended Basic') on my Toshiba HX-10 MSX computer with a whopping 64KB ram and an 8bit Z80 CPU, back in 1986. My brother and I were newspaper boys for a couple of years before we could affort this fine piece of Japanese computer hardware.
2. I can't sing. It's forbidden by law that I even stand close to a microphone so I won't be able to torture others with the horrible notes I produce when I try to sing. Luckily, I love metal music and enjoy torturing others by hammering power riffs on my electric guitars.
3. For years I hated databases Back on the university (in the netherlands, it's called a Hogeschool, it's on the level of US colleges, B.sc. degree) I really hated databases and everything that was related to it. Probably because of the teachers I had, who all had the magical gift of bringing everyone into a deep sleep within seconds. After graduation however, I saw how cool databases really are and that they actually are everywhere, even in 3D engines.
4. My favorite writer is Richard North Patterson. Although I recently read a great novell by John Katzenbach, I still find the work of Richard North Patterson the best I've read in years.
5. I love debugging. I really do. That might sound strange, but debugging is something I find similar to solving a complex puzzle: there's a solution, and it's my job to find that solution in the shortest time possible. A software engineer who loves debugging might also sound like that the software engineer builds in bugs just to have an excuse to debug later on , however I find the quality of work one can produce the top priority, so no worries there: in contrast, what I really hate are bugs in my software when it's out in the open, as I find it a signal I wasn't paying enough attention to get rid of the particular bug.

The 5 persons I'm tagging are: Jeroen van den Bos, Paul Gielens, Jimmy Nilsson, Roy Osherove and Dennis van der Stelt.