Oh no! I was tagged by Axel Hecht. And I don’t even understand his reason for tagging me (id est, he gave a reason and I don’t understand it). By the laws of the internet (and to make myself and my relationships to others “less one-dimensional“) I had better comply, however.

So, the rules:

1. Link to your original tagger(s) and list these rules in your post.
2. Share seven facts about yourself in the post.
3. Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
4. Let them know they’ve been tagged.

Seven facts:

1. I am a Dutch national, currently doing my MSc Advanced Computer Science in Britain, and taking intermediate-level French lessons on the side. The accent of (some of) my classmates drives me insane.
2. I got into Mozilla (and eventually its development) by writing scripts in VBScript for a fansite of an MMORPG (to calculate experience gained from using certain skills), and having the website owner tell me that the result “didn’t work in Mozilla”. Very badly written JavaScript versions were published later, and I vividly remember cursing the various differences I ran into when converting my code. Everything seemed much harder in JS. I’m afraid the damning evidence of all this is now lost, as the website was taken down some time ago.
3. I once taught first-year students in highschool (when I was a fourth-year, out of 6 years) how to make websites with Frontpage. I am hopeful none ever got published somewhere remotely important. I repented before the end of highschool.
4. I had the dubious honour of working for McDonalds once, for 6 months on a temporary contract. I declined staying afterward.
5. The pronunciation of my first name (and the difficulties people have with it) is a subject of hilarity among some of my international friends that I have by now resigned to. For those who don’t know how to deal with it still, I wrote about it some time ago. For something that even people who read that post might not know, it is short for “Gijsbert” which is equivalent to the name “Gilbert” in German, English, and French. Except nobody there actually calls their kids Gilbert.
6. I have 5th cousins who live in Alberta, Canada, who randomly found me through Facebook.
7. I was robbed in my own home (student flat) at knifepoint about 2.5 years ago. Fortunately, nobody got hurt. I still have the IRC log from that day and at the time its timestamps helped me, bizarrely enough, to identify precisely how long the robbery took to the police.

Seven people who shall also have to go through this harrowing experience:

1. Nadya Peek, because she always has something to say but never blogs.
2. Aaron Leventhal, who tends to have interesting stories about his history, and certainly has more of that than me.
3. Ben Millard, who doesn’t seem to have been tagged yet.
4. Okke Formsma, who is in the states at the moment and would presumably love to share childhood memories while far away.
5. “Schrati”, because she keeps blogging in different languages and I really wonder in which she would write this.
6. Daniel Glazman, because so much of his life is public knowledge by now that I wonder what we do not yet know.
7. Shawn Wilsher, because if I remember correctly he got into the Mozilla Project after me, is now definitely in much deeper than me, and still did not respond to the previous person who tagged him.

And finally, if you were wondering, the title of this post means “Seven freaky things”, not “Seven without linge cases” as Google would like you to believe.