Meme of Five

My friend Stacy tagged me with this little “Meme of Five” thing, and I decided to go along. Here are the rules:

1. The rules of the game get posted at the beginning.
2. Each player answers the questions about themselves.
3. At the end of the post, the player then tags five people and posts their names, then goes to their blogs and leaves them a comment, letting them know they’ve been tagged and asking them to read the player’s blog.
4. Let the person who tagged you know when you’ve posted your answer.

And now, my answers…

What were you doing five years ago?

Me at the Naked News party, 2003.

I was:

• Dealing with the fall-out from The Girl Who Cried Webmaster, an identity thief whom I dated very, very briefly. After her, I established my “no dating girls with LiveJournals” rule.
• Interviewing for a job at Tucows.
• The usual (for that era) girl trouble and other random weirdness.
• Hanging out with LizVang at the Canadian Idol auditions.
• Giving directions to strip bars.
• Comtemplating pimp-slapping the people at the Bell store.
• Being mistaken for legal aid.

What are five things on your to-do list for today (not in any particular order)?

1. Continue writing specifications for a couple of projects at b5media.
2. Drop off my bike for a tune-up at West Side Cycle.
3. Pack for my trip.
4. Deposit my tax refund cheque.
5. Kill Clarence the drug dealer for crooked cop Francis McReary in Grand Theft Auto IV.

What are five snacks you enjoy?

1. Oreo Blizzard from the world’s most oddly-located Dairy Queen at the Dragon City mall here in Accordion City, down the street from the office, deep in the heart of Lactose Intolerance Central.
2. Chocolate chip cookies from Le Gourmand.
3. Fruit from Fresh and Wild.
4. Coffee yogourt.
5. Two small 70-cent chicken pies from Ding Dong Pastries.

What five things would you do if you were a billionaire?
(not in order of action folks!)

1. Two chicks at the same time.
2. Set up some investments to make the money continue to work for me. Give some deserving charities nice fat cheques.
3. Take a big steamy dump on this PC laptop and buy myself a Mac. Reimburse b5media for the laptop I just pooped on, too.
4. Buy houses in Toronto, Boston and Manila and float between all three. Pay off any outstanding debt on my sister’s, mom’s and in-laws’ houses. Buy my brother-in-law Andy Ramoniac and his wife Sue a house.
5. Roland FR-7 V-accordion synthesizer, baby!

What are five of your bad habits?

1. Tendency to bite my thumbnails when deep in thought, annoyed or stressed.
2. I check my email and IM too often.
3. Tendency to overthink and over-edit what I write.
4. Diet Coke.
5. Tendency to make wildly inappropriate, lurid or so-weird-it-silences-the-room remarks.

What are five places where you have lived?

1. Manila, Philippines: My place of birth.
2. Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.A.: My first home in North America. I was there before Wendy was!
3. San Francisco, California, U.S.A.: I lived here during the dot-com bubble.
4. Accordion City: The city in which I’ve lived the longest. I came here in 1975.
5. Kingston, Ontario, Canada: Where I lived during the Crazy Go Nuts University years.

What are five jobs you’ve had?

Me playing accordion on the bar at the nightclub “The Living Room”.

1. Computer programmer. It’s something I’ve wanted to be since the seventh grade.
2. Technical evangelist. A role that I landed partially because of the accordion and had from 2000 through 2007, first at OpenCola, then at Tucows.
3. Project manager. My current job at b5media.
4. Snow-cone street vendor. There are some interesting stories from that time that I haven’t blogged yet.
5. Go-go dancer, pictured above. I bailed after a couple of weeks because my weekends were no longer my own, but I had a good time, and ladies did actually stuff bill down my pants. That’s why I didn’t have a bachelor party — most of my thirties was a bachelor party!