KIRUPA.CHINNATHAMBI

Jeff Wheeler (nokrev) tagged me today, and while I had planned on writing a detailed post on stacks/heaps to complement the structs tutorial published earlier, I guess I do owe you all a fun post to start off the New Year! (I'll be sure to make my next post twice as boring to make up for it!)

So, at Jeff's request, here are five things that many of you may not know about me:

Thing One
I'm a huge fan of video games, and I play video games all the time. The first video game I ever played was Commander Keen: Invasion of the Vorticons sometime in 1991. Since then, I have played most of the well-received games such as all of the Mechwarrior series, WarCraft I/II/III, StarCraft, Unreal Tournament, and many many games in-between.

Those who know me in real-life probably aren't surprised at this, for I talk about video games all the time, sneak in video-game related dialogue into conversations having nothing to do with video games, etc.

Thing Two
For fun, I created a Facebook group called "Keep Pluto a Planet" and declared myself Dictator of General Executive Manager (DGEM). With no publicity, the group now has about 90 members. Here is a screenshot of the main page:

As you can tell, the group wasn't meant to be taken seriously. Or else, I would be living in Canada right now.

Thing Three
I really enjoy playing sports. For many years, I played golf both competitively as well just for fun, though I haven't played in a while. It is kind of hard to find a good 3-4 hour chunk of time where you run around hitting a ball with a club. Besides golf, I took karate (Wado Ryu) classes for about 6 years.

Since joining MIT, I participate in several intramural (IM) sports - mainly dodgeball and badminton. I was captain of my dorm's badminton team this season, and that was a lot of fun. I don't think we had the worst record on campus, but I am sure we were close

Thing Four
I do my best work between 1 AM and 5 AM, and almost all of my blog posts and tutorials are written during that timeframe. The time I actually publish the posts and tutorials is in the afternoon of the following day when my proofreading skills are sharpest. (This post being the lone exception!)

Thing Five
My musical tastes are fairly strange. In my personal time, I primarily listen to music by the Bee Gees, U2, REM, The Corrs, and Enigma. All of my music was in CD form prior to being stored on my hard drive, and I have several closets full of CDs from each of the groups I listen to. If I like a group, I try to get their entire collection of released music. That is easier for some of the more modern groups, but for long-standing groups with many albums, such as the Bee Gees, it is more difficult where I am still on the lookout for one or two singles released only in certain parts of the world.

Well, I hope this helped you all to learn a little bit more about me. It seems as if I must tag a few other people to continue this Chain Letter 2.0 Beta, so I hope the following people will forgive me one day for guilting them into (hopefully) sharing 5 things about themselves: Emma Dobrescu (ditt0), Joshua Jenkins (xxviii), Brian Haveri (bwh2), Rich Lander (CLRHoser)

Cheers!
Kirupa Chinnathambi, DGEM