Ten things I've done that you probably haven't

[dagibbs]

This was, actually, an interesting enough meme that I thought I'd do it. Trying to not be TOO specific, while getting uniqueness (at least among LJ friends) was quite some work.

1) Bicycled accross large chunks of western Europe. (Italy, Monaco, France, Germany, Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands.)
1a) Bicycled along part of the course for the Monaco GP while they had it repaved & resurfaced for the GP, and walled off from traffic, with the boards up and everything, but still let bicycles on it. That was the BEST road surface we rode on the whole bloody trip. Glass smooth.

2) Attended over 100 science fiction conventions.

3) Rode and dropped a motorcycle on the Shanonville race track. (The corner monitor figured I was doing about 80mph when I went down, I think I probably was a bit slower, I probably started braking at about 80, but managed to scrub a bit of speed before I locked the front wheel and went down.)

4) Achieved Air Canada Aeroplan Elite status. (Yes, I travel a fair bit for work.)

5) Played in a World championship Bridge event. Didn't win, but didn't disgrace myself either. I did learn just how damn good the world class players are, though

6) Dated a woman 14 years older than me. Hm... oops... that isn't unique, actually now that I think about it, since I think northbard's #7 might be related to an older woman if I remember the incident properly.

Maybe, instead, I should go with:
6a) Offered my motorcycle to a friend at an S.F. convention for escape from a jealous husband. :)

7) Jumped out window of my 2nd floor dorm room at university because my dorm-mates had "secured" the door shut from the outside.

8) Wheeled Fritz Leiber around an S.F. convention in a wheelchair.

9) Swam in a cold lake in Quebec on May 24 weekend. Repeatedly. Year after year.

10) Fixed bugs in a commercial operating system's kernel. If that's not specific enough, qualify it a bit more as, "in a commercial micro-kernel operation system's kernel".

11) Stayed awake for 68.5 hours straight. Then, went to sleep, got up 4 hours later, and walked home.

12) Bug-fixed and enhanced a character-graphics RPG game. (It was/is called Omega and is in the same family as Hack, Larn, Moria, Nethack, Ancient Domains of Mystery, etc.)

13) Took two partners to a work event. (Work summer BBQ one time, work Christmas party another time.)

14) Been mistaken, repeatedly, by several different people, on several different occasions, for thatguychuck.

15) Burned a book. Actually a bunch of them.

Comments

[mycrazyhair.livejournal.com]

15) Burned a book. Actually a bunch of them.

*blink*

Wait, what? Okay, you've got some explaining to do, and you'd better start fast. Give!

Sorry, dagibbs, but...

[purplesofa.livejournal.com]

I've burned books too.

Explanation: My parents are book lovers. They have untold rooms full of bookshelves. My mom has been on the local public Library Board and she also helps out every year with their used book sale, which is held at the library branch next door.

People donate vast numbers of old pulp paperbacks (romance, cowboy, etc. novels) to the library, which is not interested in cataloging stuff of that quality. If the pulp novels don't sell (for 10 cents or something ridiculous) it is/was apparently not worthwhile to sell them to the downtown used bookstore. So at least one time, my mom (who lives next to the library, and has a large garden) took home the leftovers and threw them on the bonfire, along with tree prunings and whatever. And I was there to help out.

Other years, she has buried stacks of novels in the ground, as compost. She does the same with my dad's twenty-year-old computer magazines. Is this any less sacriligious?

Re: Sorry, dagibbs, but...

[dagibbs.livejournal.com]

Darn. I thought so many of my friends were book lovers that this one would be unique.

[dagibbs.livejournal.com]

I have done it. As noted in reply to purplesofa, I thought this one would be unique as so many of my friends are book lovers, and would consider even the thought to be blasphemous. I included it in the list for shock value, of course.

[raendrop.livejournal.com]

You don't look a thing like thatguychuck.



(We met at ConFusion, at the regency dance lesson. I kept having issues with my boots.)

[dagibbs.livejournal.com]

At the point in time when these mistakes were made, Chuck had long hair and still wore glasses (I think he mostly wears contacts now, I don't think he's gone the laser surgery route), and I had not yet grown a beard.

[brendand.livejournal.com]

I still think you should trim the beard. And 100 conventions? That's a fair few, yes, but I'm sure there are quite a few people who are pretty close to that number, if not over it. I realized at Cap that I've been to 20, and I didn't know what a con was until after I turned 18.

[dagibbs.livejournal.com]

Yes, the beard currently needs trimming. Partially I didn't tend to trim cause D liked it longer, but that's no longer an issue. Lately it hasn't gotten trimmed due to inertia.

And, I know people who've done more than 100 conventions myself -- I just don't think anyone in the "you" addressed by this post has done more than 100 conventions. Hm... of the people who read my lj, the only person I thought might be close was jeffreyab, since he's been doing this longer than me, but I'm pretty sure he doesn't have the count. (And, tammylc got pretty busy with cons for a while, but she hasn't been doing this long enough.) But, I'd forgotten one of the more recent friends list people when considering this, zencuppa might have the edge, I don't know enough, and don't overlap fully enough in cons to have a good feel for that.

[tammylc.livejournal.com]

One year when you, Jeff and I were coming back from a Chicago con (Windycon, I think) we figured out that at that point I'd been to 50 conventions. I must be closing in on 60 or 70 now. My pace has definitely dropped off post-baby, though. And even the year of baby - that was to be my 13 convention year, and I ended up dropping a couple of them for various reasons.

[dagibbs.livejournal.com]

My best year, a few back now, was 13. It's a bit harder to get 13/year from Ottawa, especially now that a couple of the nearby ones (like local to Ottawa) are gone. I have to range a lot farther afield to find cons from here than you do from Detroit.

[thatguychuck.livejournal.com]

14) Been mistaken, repeatedly, by several different people, on several different occasions, for thatguychuck.

Hey, that's happened to me too!

Then again, it's also happened too many times that people have assumed I've been dagibbs, too. :)

And Raendrop's right now though, we really don't look a lot alike. I did go the laser surgery route though. You've never seen me in contacts. :)

[dagibbs.livejournal.com]

Actually, I don't think you've been "mistaken" for thatguychuck, I think, though, you've been "taken" for thatguychuck, quite correctly.

Guess I was wrong about the contacts/laser thing. Oh well.

[boywhocantsayno.livejournal.com]

Played in a World championship Bridge event. Didn't win, but didn't disgrace myself either. I did learn just how damn good the world class players are, though

Define "World championship event". ;)

I admit, I've only played in North American championships, but that's because I don't travel much. Unless you could things like the upper levels of the Epson Pairs (or whatever it's called nowadays).

[dagibbs.livejournal.com]

I mean the 2002 World Bridge Championships (http://www.worldbridge.org/tourn/Montreal.02/Information.htm), in particular the Rosenblum Teams (Open World Team championships). This was a WBF event, not an ACBL event. In 2002, it was held in Montreal.

For concrete evidence, I'm listed in the participants for the Rosenblum teams here (http://www.worldbridge.org/tourn/Montreal.02/Rosenblum_Teams.pdf).

I also have played in the Spingold a couple times, one year we unseated the 15th seed team in round one. In the 2nd round, that year, we lost in overtime. (Yeah, tied at the end of the 48 or whatever boards it is, and had to play 8 more. That was probably the best I've ever played.)

[foms.livejournal.com]

1) I bicycled for a living. Probably over 100km per day, five days per week, including winter, in Montreal. Not quite the same.

2) I figure that I'm probably at about only 70 sf cons.

6a) You also drove someone who missed her train from Montreal to Burlington, VT (about 250km) and back on my say so on about 15 minutes' notice. A good friend.

8) I've hobnobbed with and had lunch solely with Roger Zelazny. I've also had Diane Duane tell me to get off the phone (to Ireland (before cheap long-distance)) before I bankrupted myself. We hit it off pretty well.

9) I know that lake. I've been in Lake Champlain in a fairly cold November, for about 45 minutes. Afterward, I ate quickly and then fell asleep under more covers than I've ever used, for about two hours. Been in similar water many times.

11) I haven't done 68 hours. Once, I stayed up for about 50 hours, slept for two hours and then stayed up for another 42 or so hours.

14) I'll tell you the mistaken for stories in another venue. Come to think of it, I've probably told you some of them.

Whew.

[foms.livejournal.com]

Con_girl made me rip books into pieces when she managed a bookstore. It was very hard.

[dagibbs.livejournal.com]

Mistaken for Jesus is different. :)

And, you know, cause you read my LJ I couldn't mention going to the con the wrong weekend as one of my uniques, too. :)

Though, I've also arrived at a convention to find it cancelled, which is somewhat different from arriving to find that the convention is NEXT weekend.

[dagibbs.livejournal.com]

Oh, and that drive to Burlington -- I apparently did that with half a case of beer in the trunk. I didn't realize this until I got to the Canadian border on the way home, and they became curious about why I'd just been in the states for such a short time. (It was my parents' car, I'd borrowed it for the weekend. This was a few (many) years ago.)

[tygerr.livejournal.com]

dagibbs
11) Stayed awake for 68.5 hours straight. Then, went to sleep, got up 4 hours later, and walked home.

foms:
11) I haven't done 68 hours. Once, I stayed up for about 50 hours, slept for two hours and then stayed up for another 42 or so hours.

I *keep* hearing stories like that, often from Canadians. After about 30 hours for me, everything shuts down whether I'm technically conscious or not (something about which I lose control after the aforesaid 30 hours--I can fall asleep while *walking*, or conversely might be unable to get to sleep even if I go to bed in a dark room after taking sedatives).

HOW in the names of all the gods can you DO that? There have been numerous occasions in my life that I really wanted to be able to do that. (Again, often in order to keep up with the Canadians....) Is there something in the water, or what?

[dagibbs.livejournal.com]

See, we Canadians live in the land of extreme seasonal differences in daylight. In the summer, the sun shines 24 hours straight, and we naturally don't sleep while the sun is shining. Of course, in the winter when the sun doesn't shine, we sleep for days on end to compensate. Of course, for special situations (e.g. an SF con) we can treat it as a virtual, or artificial, summer and stay up for an extended time -- but we have to sleep for a week afterwards to recover.

Seriously, I don't know about foms, but I was 17 at the time. I don't think I even did much caffeine. Maybe the caffeine has wrecked my system -- but I can't do shit like that no more.