evilgreenmonkey

Initiated by Jeff Pulver, Blog Tagging has been going around the search blogosphere like wildfire. It’s a way of putting a human face to bloggers; breaking down the divide by offering 5 unknown facts about themselves. When you are tagged (a link to your blog) by another player, you must post 5 new facts about yourself and then tag 5 new bloggers.

Unfortunately, I’ve been a homeless blogger (accept for Search Engine Roundtable) until today - so sorry to Ben Pfeiffer, Lisa Ditlefsen and David Wallace who tagged me without a response.

So here it goes, my 5 noble nibbles of knowledge about Rob Kerry:

1. Business was in my blood. As a boy scout, I (along with a friend) was tasked with creating a newsletter for the scout group. With the assistance of my father, we decided to cover the cost of printing through sponsorship and proceeded to acquire advertising deals with local businesses. As one of the advertisers (an Estate Agent) had a heavy-duty photocopier, we negotiated a front page ad deal in exchange for free printing of the newsletter. We were able to give back almost all of the advertising revenue to the scout group, donating more then we could have made from shaking collection tins outside of Tesco. The newsletter itself was pretty good even by today’s standards; with scouting news, a list of peoples awards and achievements, jokes and cartoons.
2. At the age of 14 I started reselling domain names, gaining customers through natural search referrals alone. I must have been the youngest person in the world to have a merchant account for processing credit card transactions - I’m still not sure how I managed to get it.
3. I wasn’t a great student at school. The all-boys high school I attended was state run (despite being run like a strict private school) in the leafy sub-urban Home Counties. My parents couldn’t have been happier with my GCSE (exams taken at 16) grades, although it went a little downhill from there. I think it started when we were allowed out of the school grounds at lunchtime. It was compulsory to wear a suit (including tie) at all times, which just made us look like all the other businessmen walking around the town in their lunch breaks. What do 16 and 17 year old boys, dressed like adults, do with an hour of time to kill? Go to the pub of course! Needless to say, this somewhat restricted our study time and didn’t bode well for our after-lunch lessons.
4. My mother still doesn’t know what I actually do for a job. I’ve tried to explain it many times, although I think it usually ends up in her head that I work for Google. I was also shocked to discover that she didn’t know the name of the last company I worked for - even though I was living at my parents house for a few months whilst working for that company. Whether this is a sign that the average internet user’s idea of the web is as far from our own as ever (when did your Dad last Digg?), or that I don’t talk to my parents as much as I should - I don’t know.
5. I may be copying Li’s 5 facts here, although I’m surely the geekiest person at a Search Engine Strategies conference?! My favourite TV shows include Stargate SG1, Stargate Atlantis, Buffy, Angel, Star Trek (not the first series - that would make me a nerd), Family Guy, The Simpsons, Spooks and X Files. I even have the movie Serenity in PlayStation Portable UMD format so that I can watch it on trains, planes and automobiles. 90% of my books are published by O’Reilly, featuring every operating system, programming language and server software you can think of. My movie collection is a little more respectable - merging the boundaries between geek and, well… whatever the opposite is. Favourite movies include The Godfather, True Romance, Pulp Fiction, Carlitos Way, True Lies, Austin Powers and Shooting Fish. My music collection is a weird mish-mash including Oasis, Queen, Pink Floyd, REM, U2, and the list goes on. I know absolutely nothing about music, I just like listening to it. When at home, I usually stream BBC Radio 3 over the interweb - a collection of classical and jazz music which is perfect for when you’re coding, blogging or trying to think.

Phew, that’s me done then. Not exactly the most compelling of facts, although at least it should give you some insight into my weird twisted brain. As the whole Blog Tag phenomenon seems to have come and gone, there’s very few bloggers to tag - apart from the rest of you.