Friday Five
1. As a child, who was your favorite superhero/heroine? Why?
Superheroes weren't a big deal to me, I was much more into science fiction. One of my first memories is the Apollo moon landing; when I was at that very impressionable age, the exploration of space was a huge deal. I guess in retrospect it was a bubble in the zeitgeist, like the dot-com obsession. So by that theory, in thirty years we'll generate a crop of programmers (or, shudder, a crop of "business development managers").
2. What was one thing you always wanted as a child but never got?
A slot-car racing track. You snapped together a track from hard plastic pieces with thin wires running on either side of a deep channel; one wire carried a negative charge, the other a positive. Cars stayed on course with a little post that fed down into the channel, which was enough to keep them on course as long as they didn't skid. Your sole control was a trigger-like device that controlled how much current was in the wires. The sound of the little motors, the particular scrape of the pickups against the track, the slight smell of ozone...
3. What's the furthest from home you've been?
I've been physically farther than New Guinea, but culturally, Papua New Guinea and West Papua / Irian Jaya are different worlds.
4. What's one thing you've always wanted to learn but haven't yet?
To narrow it to two obvious ones, I'm ashamed that I don't speak any non-English language and that I can't play any musical instruments.
5. What are your plans for the weekend?
A friend is having a "7 Deadly Sins" party tomorrow night; I'm going as "Pride," Tina's going as "Sloth."
8:27:19 AM 
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