Joe Duck tagged me, so here it is. Five of the lesser-known facts about me:
- I was rescued at sea twice. Neither time went exactly perfectly.
- I, too, wrote an operating system as an undergrad. I missed my chance for fame and fortune, in no small part because the PDP/11 was the smallest system I wrote for. When it wasn’t being abused by student jobs, the PDP ran RSTS/E. UNIX was considered rather primitive at that time. I later wrote a little bit of IBM’s VM/ESA 2.0 operating system, but I decided to get out of the operating systems game because the field seemed to be dominated by the hardware vendors.
- I live in a house that had a busy morning on April 19, 1775. Benjamin Hosmer was brother to Joseph Hosmer, who spurred the Minutemen into action at the North Bridge with his cry, “Will you let them burn the town down?” Sarah Hosmer, Benjamin’s wife, takes her eternal rest in a gravesite behind the house with their infant daughter. Mother and daughter died in the smallpox epidemic of 1791 and were buried promptly, in accord with the practices of the time.
- I have seen original message flimsies of two orders given to the U.S.S. Enterprise (CV-6) in WW2:
(Dec. 8, 1941) EXECUTE WAR PLAN LOVE AGAINST JAPAN
and
(Apr. 18, 1942) LAUNCH PLANES AS PREVIOUSLY DIRECTED.
The first message initiated formal hostilities by the U.S. Navy against Japan; the second was sent from the Enterprise to the Hornet to launch the Doolittle raid.
- I dig Nashville and I really like Dolly Parton’s music. She’s put out a lot of terrific albums.
But, bloggers… I think I will have to get some folks blogging so I can tag them! I know Senor Duck, of course, and Sim Simeonov, but they’re already tagged.
