5 Things Meme

I rather like the 5 things meme that is going around at the moment, so I’m going to take Eric Meyer’s open tag as an excuse to participate 😉

Admittedly, I found this quite hard to do — different groups of friends know very different things about me. There are various things that would be a real surprise to work friends that are identifying characteristics to my web friends and vice versa. So I’m just going to do my best here!

Five things you might not know about me:

  1. When I was at school, I helped build part of South Africa’s first satellite. I also helped to develop the method by which we tracked and evaluated the results.
  2. I am a crack shot, best with handguns and assault rifles, although I do like to play with the occasional sniper rifle too. My parents are opposed to firearms and would never have one in the house, so I learnt to shoot when I join the target shooting team in highschool.
  3. My first big career direction decision had me choosing between going to study Computer Science (my eventual choice), Classics (Latin & Ancient Greek) or attending Film School.
  4. For a few years I was half of a soft rock duo. My primary contribution was song-writing and backing guitar.
  5. Growing up, I was extremely short-sighted, to the extent that I would walk into walls if I tried to go anywhere without my glasses on. After many years wearing contact lenses, they damaged my eyes, so I had to stop playing waterpolo. To remedy this, I had laser eye surgery, which gave me 20/20 vision for the first time in my life.

I’m going to tag Elly, Rachel, Simon, Guy and Nat. Oh and Mili too.