TimBerglund.com
See what large letters I use as I write to you in my own hand.

101 Things About Me (Now! 1% More!)

  1. I have messy handwriting.
  2. I met my wife in 7th grade.
  3. We started dating in 10th grade. That’s more than half of my life ago.
  4. We got married six weeks after graduating high school.
  5. She was totally hot then.
  6. She still is.
  7. I have three children.
  8. They are all homeschooled.
  9. Most unbiased observers report that they’re well-behaved.
  10. Well, yeah.
  11. I was born in 1972.
  12. I’m about 5′10″ tall, and around 165lbs.
  13. I used to wear glasses (a very mild prescription).
  14. As of May, 2004, I am a part-time M.A. student at Denver Seminary seeking a degree in Philosophy of Religion. I’m not anymore. Job+kids+school+no vocational reason for it=just too hard.
  15. The label “Evangelical Christian” applies fairly well to me.
  16. But labels are complicated. You have no idea.
  17. I brew my own beer.
  18. Most of the time it works out pretty well, no matter what Lileks thinks.
  19. I have a dedicated refrigerator in the garage to hold the fruits of my labor. It was given to me by a teetotaler.
  20. I have some hope for his eventual repentance.
  21. It turns out that refrigerators assume that the ambient temperature in their operating environment will always be higher than their internal set point.
  22. On a related note, a hot pad in a refrigerator during a January cold snap will keep beer from freezing.
  23. I squeeze the toothpaste from the end. I even used a little plastic device to harvest the most possible toothpaste from the tube as it’s used.
  24. This sort of anal-retentive behavior does not apply to the tidiness of my desk. Unfortunately.
  25. I am the second of five children. Our birthdays span 14 years.
  26. I have a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Engineering from the little-known Florida Tech.
  27. I’ve been writing software for more than two-thirds of my life, professionally for one third of it.
  28. I started when I was ten.
  29. My first computer was a Vic 20, followed by a Victor 9000, followed by a Commodore 128, followed by an Amiga 500, followed by a succession of nameless, faceless, loveless, beige-box PCs.
  30. My first real computer program was called “Cipher.” It would encode and decode text in Caesar’s Cipher and Railfence. It was written in BASIC.
  31. String manipulation has come a long way since LEFT$(), RIGHT$(), and MID$().
  32. I learned BASIC from a paperback book bought from a cheap little newsprint flyer from Scholastic Books.
  33. Next was 8086 assembly language, which my dad taught me, with the help of a photocopied 8086 reference manual. Then came C, which I taught myself from the pedagogically unfriendly White Book (first edition) by Kernigan and Richie. Then came Pascal (college), Visual Basic (first consulting job), C++ (later consulting job), various microcontroller assembly languages (too many consulting jobs to remember), and Java (respectable day job that started as a consulting job). Nothing very exotic.
  34. I am an Oracle user.
  35. I am a Linux user.
  36. I am an Enterprise Java developer.
  37. To use Struts is not to love it. But I use it anyway.
  38. I am an amateur astronomer and astroimager, but I don’t put as much time into the hobby as some people do.
  39. I have turned out some decent images.
  40. I drive a 2002 Toyota Tacoma. I have taken it off-road several times, loaned it for sundry moves and landscaping projects, and hauled various loads. It’s good to have a pickup.
  41. I am not much of a video gamer, but I am a sucker for AOE. Still.
  42. I have good friends in Mongolia, Spain, and a couple of Central Asian countries.
  43. I have been to Spain, but not Mongolia, and not Central Asia.
  44. I have been to Taiwan on business.
  45. I’ve been to Mexico on pleasure.
  46. It’s very difficult for me to eat a meal without reading something. I think I get this from my mother, who always read while she ate.
  47. I was born in the Lehigh Valley of Pennsylvania.
  48. I was five when my family moved from there to Colorado.
  49. My wife and I lived in Central Florida for five years.
  50. My son was born there.
  51. My wife loves the climate there. I hate it.
  52. I love the climate in Colorado. She hates it. (I could handle a little more rain, if it didn’t mean increasing the humidity and the bugs.)
  53. Only in my early twenties did I finally start eating hamburgers with cheese on them. I’m just now starting to experiment with tomatoes and onions, but mushrooms and ranch dressing are welcome additions anytime.
  54. Only in recently have I developed a taste for Asian food.
  55. People of informal theological education would call me a “Calvinist.”
  56. People of formal theological education wouldn’t use the term without the quotes.
  57. I believe that God freely and immutably ordains all things that come to pass from all eternity.
  58. I believe that I am always free to do what I want to do.
  59. I believe that I am never free not to do what I want to do.
  60. I believe that negative consequences obtain if I do things that are unethical or illegal.
  61. I believe that I have a duty to do what is right.
  62. I believe that I wouldn’t have wanted to follow Christ if God had not specifically enabled me to want to.
  63. I am an amillennialist, although hardly the best-informed one in Christendom.
  64. The label “complementarian” applies fairly well to me.
  65. Yet I would also be okay describing my union with my wife as an “equal regard marriage.”
  66. This is a labeling problem, not a self-contradiction, nor even a significant internal tension.
  67. I do not prefer the label “traditionalist” or “phallocratic misogynist.” (I’m just saying, is all.)
  68. I do not use the term “traditional” as a pejorative.
  69. I have been known to teach adult Sunday school occasionally.
  70. I think the Calvinist doctrine of the Lord’s Supper is a basically a good option.
  71. In the past I have been disenchanted with all known theologies of baptism, but I’ve finally allowed myself to be a paedobaptist. It’s a huge relief.
  72. I did kind of wait until all of my children profess faith to make this change, so my conversion isn’t exactly the weightiest ever.
  73. I take a fairly sacramental view of worship.
  74. I think the Emergent Church movement does a decent job identifying some of the problems in evangelicalism.
  75. But it has no clue what the solutions should be.
  76. Yet it pretends to.
  77. And its positive philosophical program is straight from the Pit.
  78. I am a foundationalist of one kind or another.
  79. I know this makes me uncool in some circles.
  80. I am pretty experienced at being uncool.
  81. I do not recall ever having voted for a Democrat.
  82. I believe that party trumps person in the two-party system, so I’m not too upset about the previous point, nor do I think it is indicative of an insufficiently reflective political mind. Quite the contrary, in fact.
  83. I look like my father. Especially with the beard.
  84. I was a pretty little girl. My youngest daughter looks a lot like me.
  85. Her sister looks a lot like her mother.
  86. I’m not afraid of the color purple.
  87. I do not see dead people.
  88. I generally like open-source software. Given the choice between open source and a proprietary solution, I’ll probably want the open-source one, all things being equal.
  89. Of course all things usually aren’t equal. But when it comes to software components of interest to enterprise software development, open-source solutions usually have meaningful qualitative advantages over their proprietary counterparts.
  90. I am almost never interested in modifying the source code. Life is too short.
  91. Life is, in fact, short.
  92. My affinity for open source software is not because I’m a Marxist.
  93. I am a capitalist. This means I believe that private property traded in free markets is in general the most just and efficient means of allocating scarce resources and creating and distributing wealth.
  94. It seems to me that capitalism requires some public-sector regulation in order for markets to remain free. Antitrust laws, workplace safety laws, and environmental protection laws may be good examples.
  95. I expect that the project of strong artificial intelligence-the creation of a sentient computer program-will result in a perplexing failure.
  96. But I’m excited to see how close we can get.
  97. I believe big-bang cosmology is fairly easy to integrate with the evangelical faith.
  98. I do not believe evolutionary biology is as easy to integrate.
  99. Absent the assumption of naturalism, I don’t think evolutionary biology is all that great of an account-although it is not as laughably bad in all cases as some may suppose it to be.
  100. In any case, I’m not on board.
  101. I don’t always mind anticlimactic conclusions. That’s just how it is sometimes.
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  • Posted by Tim on Thursday, March 17, 2005 at 1:49:23 pm PST
  • Category: Miscellany
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12 Responses to “101 Things About Me (Now! 1% More!)”

  1. Adeodatus says:

    Now I’m just sitting here wondering: if only we knew one hundred and TWO things about Tim. That would be cool. Because, you understand, one hundred and one just whets the appetite/piques the interest/etc.

    Just for the curious, what would 102 be? Here’s my guess:

    102. Brian McLaren is Real Ultimate Power.

    Comment Permalink | Posted on March 17th, 2005 at 5:09 pm |
  2. Tim Berglund says:

    Which reminds me, Adeodatus…which reminds me.

    Comment Permalink | Posted on March 17th, 2005 at 5:14 pm |
  3. Ben Messer says:

    That just takes guts to post a picture of yourself like that on the web. Wow! I’d say #102 would read something like this: I am secure in my masculinity. :) Gotta give ya props for being willing to post the photo Tim. I am, of course, referring to the photo on #84. Gotta give ya props.

    Comment Permalink | Posted on March 17th, 2005 at 7:33 pm |
  4. pentamom says:

    1. I’m nothing if not predictable, but #47 is OF COURSE the best one on that list.

    2. However, #41 has its points, as well.

    3. Unfortunately, #64 either contains a mispelling, or indicates that you feel the necessity of labelling yourself in terms of how frequently you say nice things about folks.

    4. Which would be odd, given your complex feelings about labels.

    Comment Permalink | Posted on March 18th, 2005 at 8:18 am |
  5. Tim Berglund says:

    Heh. A funny misspelling, at that. Which is now corrected.

    And yes, Ben, I’m the man.

    Comment Permalink | Posted on March 18th, 2005 at 8:51 am |
  6. virtualgenius says:

    Nice list. You’ve come a long way since #84. But Adeodatus is wrong…

    #102. I’m still a girl.

    &ltgrin&gt

    Comment Permalink | Posted on March 18th, 2005 at 10:21 am |
  7. Jim says:

    The girl picture needs the beard or the beard picture needs the girl hair.

    Comment Permalink | Posted on March 23rd, 2005 at 10:38 am |
  8. Tim Berglund says:

    Good thinking, Jim. Maybe I should grow my hair out a bit.

    I narrowly averted posting a mullet photo from high school. “I used to have a low-grade mullet” is, in fact, a Thing About Me, so it would be fair game.

    Tim

    Comment Permalink | Posted on March 23rd, 2005 at 11:08 am |
  9. Sciolist says:

    Ah, yes… LEFT$(), RIGHT$(), and MID$(). Had endless fun as a kid using those in my BASIC code to make cheesy little Commodore 64 adventure games.

    Comment Permalink | Posted on March 25th, 2005 at 9:54 pm |
  10. JC says:

    Tim!
    Just thought I’d comment on your page, I haven’t read it in a long time, and it looks like you haven’t written in a long time either. Must have wore yourself thin with 102 things about yourself, anyway, drop me a line sometime alright, oh by the way, I’m visiting Colorado next weekend, see you then man, peace.
    JC

    Comment Permalink | Posted on April 15th, 2005 at 12:37 pm |
  11. helene says:

    how do i get a copy of your FULL MOON photo?
    Thank you

    Comment Permalink | Posted on December 17th, 2006 at 11:58 am |
  12. Tim says:

    Helene:

    Thanks for asking! The post with that picture is here. There are some links in that post that let you download a couple of different sizes of the image. There are also some usage guidelines there, although they’re pretty loose. Mostly I just want links to the site, but not direct links to the image. And my feelings would be hurt if you took it and made money off of it without sharing. :)

    Enjoy!

    Comment Permalink | Posted on December 17th, 2006 at 2:00 pm |
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