Another 7 things…

Thanks to robcee you get to learn a little more about me. Much like him I’ve done this once before (perhaps it’s a sign of our age?) but it was over two years ago so let’s see if I can manage to rustle up a whole other seven things. I believe that the original meme said the facts had to be surprising things that most people didn’t know but I think I’ve used up all the surprising stuff about me already so most of this is probably common knowledge to those that follow my twitter stream.

Here are 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.

My new things:

1. I like creating fractals. I guess this says that I have an artistic side but fractals are kind of cheating, you can create beautiful images mostly by tinkering with numbers in equations. I haven’t had chance to do it much lately mostly because the better software is Windows only and rebooting my laptop into Windows is tedious.[flickr size=”small”]4715418159[/flickr]
2. Another part of my artistic side which has grown in the past couple of years is photography. I’ve liked taking photographs for some time but for a lot of that I was really just playing with simple point and shoots. Since moving onto the excellent Canon Powershot S90 and now the Nikon D7000 I like to think I’ve been able to get some really great shots. Of course I throw away more than I take. During a recent weekend trip to a lake I think I took around 1000 shots, kept about 90 of those and uploaded just 35 to flickr.[flickr size=”small”]5766449103[/flickr]
3. I am engaged to the gorgeous Tiffney. We’re going to be married at the start of September, just five months after I proposed. We took the easy route of paying for a mostly pre-packaged wedding. I think some of our friends who are also getting married at the same time are a little jealous of how easy it’s been for us.[flickr size=”small”]5777718954[/flickr]
4. We own a cat, Loki. He is curled up next to me as I write this. We named him before we knew just how appropriate it was. We had to buy sheets of plastic to lay by the sides of the bed to stop him scratching the mattress in the middle of the night. We used to also have a second cat, Ripley, but sadly she passed away at the start of the year from cancer.[flickr size=”small”]5870075150[/flickr]
5. I have just bought a condo with my fiancée, the first place I’ve owned. It feels nice to no longer be answerable to a landlord though I guess we still have to answer to the homeowner’s association. Since we only just moved in we don’t know where any of our stuff is including the TV remote which is quite irritating.[flickr size=”small”]6015887571[/flickr]
6. For a few years while I was at university I answered to the name Andy. This started because in my scuba diving class there was a large number of Andys and our instructor decided to just start calling us all Andy. I was one of the few from that year’s novices who got more involved in the club afterwards and so the name stuck. In fact I got so used to it that one evening in a noisy pub someone was trying to get my attention by calling “Dave” and when that didn’t work they called “Andy” which I heard right away.
7. My IRC nickname (Mossop) originated in college. There was a childrens TV show on at the time featuring extremely badly modelled puppets. Someone in my physics class claimed that I looked like one of them, the nickname stuck and I’ve been using it online ever since. One bonus is the name is so unusual that I mostly get away with using it wherever I go.

Now for the tags, hopefully many of these are new to the game:

1. Myk Melez who always has something interesting to say and hasn’t blogged enough lately.
2. Dave Mason who needs to get his blog syndicated on planet.
3. Jeff Griffiths who has only recently started at Mozilla and needs to get his new blog syndicated on planet before he follows through on this.
4. Blair McBride, my chief partner in coding for the grand Add-ons Manager redesign for Firefox 4.
5. Daniel Holbert, his blog title makes me laugh and the second coming of this meme needs to branch out into other teams.
6. John Ford, so he can get the build and release teams in on this.
7. Philipp von Weitershausen, I can’t pronounce his last name and I’m sure he’ll tag lots of the new services guys.