First 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.

The seven things you may (or may not) know about me:

1. I started my programming “career” when I was awfully young with an AOL mini HTML page. Which consisted of ascii smilies (including some alt+numpad combinations I found interesting for AOL Chat Rooms). Later moved to batch programming, then QBasic, before I even learned OF javascript.
2. I learned of the existence of W3C and the HTML and CSS WG’s at some point after I started working on mozilla.
3. I never took any programming classes until late college (basic C++ course) — after I had already been programming with mozilla for a while.
4. I am a dad!
5. I have never been out of the country, though I would like to. I have only ever stayed (briefly) in 3 other states. And only 1 of them was without my parents. (Maine, Florida [Disney], and with my and my fiance: Pensylvania)
6. I have a strong love and fondness for Star Trek, though I don’t forsee myself ever going to a convention. (Nor have I ever used KaiRo’s LCARSTREK theme) TNG was my favorite, followed closely by Enterprise.
7. I attended Catholic School most of my life. While I do find myself very spiritual I do not currently attend church, and have an open mind. I specifically avoid debates/conversations about religion and politics (strong opinions in almost all cases)

For fear of planet.mozilla.org killing me, I won’t tag many there, (as this has already propogated nearly all of planetmo) and instead tag some other people I do read regularly, outside of this group.

The people I’m tagging:

1. Chris AtLee — Because his work is interested, and he did not get tagged, far as I can see.
2. Sean Martell — Talos scares me, but hopefully this will make Sean scare me less
3. Raymond Chen — Author of “The Old New Thing” blog. Has more readers than most of the mozillians here, but he always has something interesting to say.
4. John August — I started following his blog during the Writers Strike, and never stopped. (I find myself always at a brain fart when composing anything written, and I am intrigued at the subjects he writes about, even if I am unable to achieve or understand them)
5. (6 and 7..) The Geekdad crowd.  In particular at least Russ Neumeier who’s posts I usually enjoy the most.

As of today, December 19th 2008 — I am the father of a healthy son, Joseph Ellis.

7lb 7oz, 20″ long.

This will be a big change for me, and an exciting one. I still can’t picture how I came from being a child to a father, but its a journey I’m ready [as I'll ever be] to lead my son along. And who knows, perhaps I can get him interested in programming for Mozilla [or really anything] by age 5!

But all in all, chances are he’ll only be interested in video games and toy trucks, and nerf guns. But well that’s childhood I suppose I should not make him grow up too early — after all he can’t even crawl yet.