7 Things You Didn't Know About Me

Allen at The Whited Sepulchre

has tagged me with an online meme called "7 Things You Didn't Know About Me". He's written a list of 7 things we didn't know about him, he's linked to 7 other bloggers who are supposed to do the same. Then I'm supposed to link to 7 other bloggers, and next thing you know, we've got this Amway pyramid of links and traffic going back and forth to each other.

Here are my 7 things you don't know about me.

1. I was born in Hongkong and moved to Australia about 14 years old. English is my second language.

2. My first conference presentation was in 1990 in Sydney at the Education for Computer Conference. About 10 years later in a completely separation occasion, I met the then conference organiser, Prof Sandra Wills. Next day when we met again, she pulled out the conference proceeding, pointed to a photo we took together and asked was that me? Since then, we have been good friend.

3. Albert is a name I gave myself. Before I came to Australia, there is only person in the world calling me using that name. Now there are too many to count. Guess who was that person - my wife!

4. I just did a google with "albert ip". All the 10 results on the first page was about me! WOW!

5. I have no formal qualification in Computer Science. Actually when I was doing my undergrad, I had a summer learning FORTRAN, COBOL etc and I hated that. With over 15 years of teaching experience in Physics (and have written two textbooks for Hong Kong students) I could not get a single interview for a teaching post in Physics in Melbourne here. But I got three offers on that Christmas Eve, all computer related!

6. Together with 4 of my students, I was the inventor of ][net, a local area network for Apple ][ using its game port as the interface. The network went at 46K bits per sec. Much faster that the 9600baud disk drive that we had!

7. Nowadays, I work from home. My work space includes two laptops each connected to an additional monitors. I ran MaxiVista so that I can use all 4 monitors at the same time using one keyboard and mouse. Cool!

Again, quoting Allen:

And now I'm supposed to tag 7 more people with this thing. (The goal is to send traffic back to Pete's Allen's site, via my link, and then I'm supposed to go whoring for 7 more links back to my site.)

I am going to use "atheist cartoon" as a search key and see what I will find.

1. The first one the list is Atheist Funeral from ClangNuts.com


2. What will happen when Atheist arrives at the gate of heaven? No entry according to Chris Madden. Would you mind?


3. Ray Comfort, given I have been very critical about his thinking, probably will not join the game. But if Ray is a real gentleman, I hope he will play along and be tagged by this meme. I find a lot of entertainment from his posts, etc.


4. The good people at Atheist-Online has this about science and religion.


5. Atheist Cartoon of the Week… World History Posted on December 28, 2007 by atheistkiwi


6. From Friendly Atheist. This is not a cartoon, but very much has the same effect - If Atheist and Christian Buses Collided…


7. Last, but not the least, is of course the cartoon which led to protest across the Muslim world. As reported by The Atheist Blogger,

The free online encyclopedia Wikipedia was unsure whether to allow them on their article covering the controversy. The subsequent debate went on for almost two years (officially starting on 11th April after Wikipedia removed the images).

However, two days ago the debate ended and the decision was made to reinstate the images in the article, but to tag them with an id so people can remove the images from their view of the page.