In Spanish “Eres” means “You are it”. I have been tagged by my TuDiabetes friends Landileigh (who just turned 45) and Khurt, so here I go, according to the rules:

1. Link to the person’s blog who tagged you.
2. Post these rules on your blog.
3. List seven random and/or weird facts about yourself.
4. Tag seven random people at the end of your post and include links to their blogs.
5. Let each person know that they have been tagged by posting a comment on their blog.

The seven random/weird things:

1) I love writing Amazon.com reviews. The weird thing about it is that I continued doing it for the longest time (started in 2000), although I wasn’t getting paid for it in any way, simply out of the gratification I got from sharing my thoughts about music, books, movies and gear I had gotten my hands (ears/eyes?) on. I still don’t get paid for it, but now at least I can ask (some) publishers for copies of books I would like to review, so it means I can read my favorite stuff for free without having to go to the library and, at times, before the book gets published.

2) I have never had a pet, other than a few fishes that I knew very little about and ended up seeing die because I was unaware of the fact that you are not supposed to wash out all the water in their aquarium. When I was little, my parents used to say that we would have a dog when we moved to a house. When we ended up living in our first house, we didn’t get a pet, so it sort of lost validity as an argument. Today, we have a betta fish (Santiago’s fish, called “Chapulin”) and I am warming up to the idea of us getting a dog soon.

3) I can’t believe it took me so long to adopt the Mac OS X at home. I never really was a PC advocate, but I kept telling myself the same stories from the olden days to talk myself out of getting a Mac. Now that we are on a Mac workflow at home, I can’t imagine going back.

4) I used to LOVE only pop music back in the day (high school, etc.) I called that period in my life the “dark period” for a while when I had an opposite reaction and stopped listening to pop music cold turkey. I started only listening to prog rock (Genesis, Yes, Pink Floyd, etc.) and became the most monotonous person to ride on a car with for a very long time, because I had nothing that most people could relate to among the tapes I carried with me. I am happy I changed my listening habits away from only pop… and later, away from ONLY prog (nowadays I go back to it once in a while). These days, I listen to anything I can.

5) I used to write poetry. Between 1988 and approx. 1998-1999, it was my outlet. Not any more, but I miss it: it was like a faucet getting opened and words would spew out of it like crazy. Those were good times.

6) I learned to scuba dive in 1998 (got the basic and advance PADI certification) because I was afraid of depths. I don’t know if I will ever have the courage to jump off a plane with a parachute: I am afraid of the sense of void that such things create.

7) I have made most of my career decisions in the craziest ways:
-I decided to study Electrical Engineering because I read some cool stuff about bioengineering in a catalog from a Canadian University. I later realized I should have studied Systems Engineering but I made some great friends in EE.
-I decided to study my M.Eng. in EE to later discover the internet while I was studying and realized my TRUE passion was the Web. It took me 4 more years to actually dedicate myself entirely to it (starting in 2000).
-I took my first job with Procter & Gamble because I was a “broke” student, I didn’t want to live with my parents until I found another opportunity and they offered me a great package. I spent 4 years working at a diaper manufacturing facility, made some great friends in the process and learned what became the foundation of my management experience down the road.
-I made the career move into Web, right at the time that the internet bubble started to explode. I never was out of a job but it sure was a scary 3-4 years until things became more stable. Today, I don’t fear change: I know it’s part of life.

This is to say that sometimes, the decisions we make, although they may not make much sense always bring something good with them and always lead to great lessons waiting to be learned, great people waiting to be met and new doors waiting to be opened.

So there they are: my seven random things.

I now tag Luis, Rafa , Gilberto , Henkel , Mat , Amy and Rorro .