Pondering the ten things ... let's see if I can come up with ten.

[unixronin]

Not that most of these things are that unique, in the right circles.  But I suspect they're rare among my circle of friends and readers.

Not necessarily in chronological order:

1. Qualified as RAF Marksman at age 17.
2. Better still, I got my picture on the front page of my town newspaper when I was eight or nine years old, shortly before the first Apollo moon landing, by predicting -- correctly -- what the astronauts would find there when they landed.
3. Served as defence consultant to a significant political party, and helped write its defence policy.
4. Ridden the Laguna Seca racetrack on my VFR750F3.  Whooo, the corkscrew and the Andretti Hairpin.  (OK, it was only a parade lap, but....)
5. Worked at Microsoft, at a company that became part of got borged by Novell, and a company that became part of got borged by Red Hat.  How's that for hitting opposites in the industry....
6. Wrestled and wrangled sealions and elephant seals for six hours every Friday night for, oh, a year and a half or so.
7. Been told "My god, you look studly!" by the CEO and President of the company I was working for.
8. Kayaked the length of Lake Windermere, a significant part of it by kayak-surfing the bow-wave of the Windermere Ferry.
9. Free-soloed the Don Quixote route at Minnehaha Rocks, Spokane, Washington (ranked a 5.11 route) in combat boots.
10. Within three years of my family being told I'd probably never walk again:
    • Learned to walk again (in two or three months);
    • Returned to motorcycle riding (in just over a year);
    • and even managed to run a little bit, albeit rather unevenly (within three years).

Only took me, oh, three days to come up with these ....
(I'm still working on improving the running.  Need more run, less stagger.)

Footnote:  Hastur in a barbed-wire merrywidow, I'm learning to HATE Semagic.  I am continually being surprised by its versatility in finding new and inventive ways to do exactly the WRONG thing, frequently in ways that blow away the formatting of (or completely garble the contents of) an entire post.  If there's a way to screw up any non-trivial operation, it seems Semagic will find it.  It's mostly safe in the raw-HTML mode, but doing any formatting in the WYSIWYG mode is just asking for it.

Comments

[anda.livejournal.com]

I wish to blazes that I knew WTF kind of stuff you're trying to do with Semagic. I have had basically NO problems wtih garbling or weird formatting in EITHER html or wysiwyg mode.

My biggest gripe is that I can't get it to stop using non-breaking spaces, but that's really really trivial. Second biggest is difficulty with setting a default security level (it does, but only on keywords, and I want it set a -default-, and not whine when I overwrite it), and really, I'd rather implement that on the LJ side, not the client side.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Well, for example, this time, when I tried to wrap that list in an lj-cut tag, it turned the entirety of both nested lists into a single <LI> punctuated with <BR> tags, and undeleted a list item I'd deleted fifteen minutes earlier just for good measure.  And when I posted the incomprehensible recruiter gobbledegook last week, it not only totally reformatted the whole thing, eliminated all my paras and breaks and turned them into escaped inline text, it took big chunks of the text and rearranged them in a different order.  I didn't find out it had done it until I looked at my journal.

[iphy.livejournal.com]

I use wysywig mode, I think, and this never happens to me. I am with Anda. I basically never have any problems with semagic even when doing lists and cuts and whatever else.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Maybe it just falls apart in extremely tight memory conditions ..... this laptop is so short of RAM it doesn't even rank pity.

[darthgeek.livejournal.com]

The WSYIWYG mode just makes my brain hurt. I leave in in raw HTML mode and don't have problems.

[cymrullewes.livejournal.com]

1. survived fire at 18 months
2. bicycled in to an iron girder at 15(?) and bent rib cage.
3. wrote a cookbook
4. swordmaker
5. writer of one tremendous random effect spell
6. saddlemaker
7. named two girls without their mother objecting
8. had Londo Molari at a loss for words
9 drunken dancing samauri
10. hella dealmaker on onikiri.

Love you.