five things you might not know about nicolle (rogueclown) neulist...

This morning, Andrew Hay borrowed a page from the Facebook playbook, posted five facts about himself in his security blog, and tagged a handful of people to play along. One of them, Erin Jacobs, tagged me. Although I am going to adhere to my longstanding policy of not tagging anyone else to do a meme that I have chosen to do, I do think it's a fun way for you to get to know me a little better, especially since my site is so new and since I am so new to the community. As Erin so wisely did, I am going to try and keep the facts at least slightly professional, so it can remain responsive and interesting to this site's intended audience.

Without further ado, here are five things you may not know about me:

1. I can't shake the idea that I would be even geekier than I already am if my family had owned a computer with a command line interface when I was a girl. Instead, my family's first computer was a Macintosh 512 that it got when I was three years old, and its second was a Macintosh Classic it got when I was ten or eleven.
2. When I first got into computer programming, in middle school, the only computers my family had were those Macs. We didn't have any kind of BASIC interpreter for them. So, my programming process involved writing my BASIC code on notebook paper, typing it into the school computers if I had the chance to do so, and translating all of my code to the Texas Instruments graphing calculator language so I could run my code on my calculators away from school.
3. It always made me sad that I did not have a Commodore computer when I was younger. I finally fulfilled that dream earlier this year when a fellow member of Pumping Station: One gave me a Commodore 128 earlier this year. I am especially proud of the musical suite I composed on it for PS:One's Geek Prom in June of this year, and I plan to post the code from that project on this site as soon as I once again have a functioning cassette drive which I can use to access the code.
4. I have an almost obsessive desire to know how things work at the deepest possible level. I started teaching myself Python last year. It's great for rapid prototyping, but many of the calls felt way too much like black boxes to me. As such, I decided that the only logical response would be to teach myself C. I find C more satisfying still, but I still can't shake the idea that there are still things under the hood that I can understand better. I know that the next step in this trajectory will involve learning assembly language, although I know myself too well to call this the "end" of this trajectory.
5. Doing this meme is reminding me of a comment that Tom Eston made in one of his talks (the one at Notacon, if I remember correctly): that the 25 Things meme on Facebook was a clever way for malicious people to suss out the answers to your password questions on social networking sites. As such, I have been extra-vigilant in writing these in order to make sure that these answers do not touch upon my internet security questions.

Hopefully some of this gives you all a better idea of how I tick.