What are some cool or interesting facts about yourself?

Some trivial facts about me: 

* I've got a video and a picture of me from October 1998 of when I was in the womb. So I have physical evidence of me from before the year I was born.  

* I went to my first proper concert when I was just 8; I saw Linkin Park at the Sydney Entertainment Centre.

* I had a black front tooth until the age of 7.

* Until four years ago, I was the first and only "only-child" in my entire family, and i'm the only person on my Dad's side of the family not to have blue eyes (my eyes are hazel).

* I refused to accept Santa isn't real until I was 15, lol. 

* I've always had a huge interest in council projects and town planning in general. When I was a kid, I used to create fake map books in scrap books and by the time I was 12, I regularly sent off typed-up articles to the editor of my local newspaper. I did it so often that I even received a phone call one day from the editor of the paper himself telling me how impressed he was that someone so young had such a huge interest in that sort of thing.

* I started recording myself singing and playing the drums on a portable cassette recorder back in December 2004. I was into music so much that I received a $400 drum kit for Christmas when I was 8 and an electronic keyboard (which I still have) the year before.

* When I was 9, I created a scrapbook made up of newspaper clippings so that I could one day look back and see what the "world of 2008" was like. One of the clippings I kept was an ad for a new iPod Touch for $75. I've still got the scrapbook. flic.kr/p/2kpW5mv

I appeared on-screen on American Idol: Live on Stage at Disney World in 2011.

Also, I still believe in Santa Claus. Not doing so just ruins the whole magic in my mind.

Did it take a lot of practice?


That's actually the exact reason as for why I continued to believe in him for as long as I did. By the time I was 13, it started to change from me fully believing in Santa to trying to convince myself that he was in fact real, but I didn't want to stop believing as it felt as though a part of my childhood died the moment I did. I didn't want all those happy memories I have of Christmas Eve to have been in vein. 


You're lucky you don't live in Australia, where we actually do have real monsters which sometimes go underneath our beds.

I believe in most mythical ish. I really feel like there's more out there.
When I was a child, I got stunk by a caterpillar. I remember having blurred vision over it, but that was it. I was in 4th grade and I didn't report it.

* I casually read textbooks for fun. Yuppp

* My hobby when I was 12-14 was editing Wikipedia. My dad would drop me off at the library on the weekends and I would read books that I could transcribe into Wikipedia article. That's how I would spend the entire weekend.

* When I was 14/15 I had this strange obsession with Japanese video game sales data. I made a database to keep track of it all. I even made up my own fictional country with fictional video game sales chart. It went weekly from the late 1980s to present day (2008) with the thousands of video games that released in between then, so it was quite exhaustive and detailed. I credit this obsession for the job I have now (data engineer) and the decent job I had out of high school (in the middle of a recession too) so it was not entirely a waste of time!

* Thanks to the above obsession, I have a fascination with a lot of Japanese video games that no one (not even Japanese people) have heard of like Ikaruga, Toki Doki Majou Shinpan, Roommania etc.

* Thanks to the above obsession, I embarked on learning Japanese when I was 14. I learnt a decent amount, including the 2,000 Japanese characters. I got sucked into learning Korean (thanks to K-Pop) when I was 16, and then French when I was 21 (on a whim). My French and Korean are OK-decent, unfortunately I forgot most the Japanese. (Still remember the characters though thanks to Korean, and know what longaotian 's name means. )

* I have an obsession with "mechanization" (automating, but mechanizing sounds cooler) every little thing in my life. I genuinely enjoy programming and do it in my spare time. It's hard to give concrete examples because I've done it to almost every nook and cranny of my life. Like I made an app that reminds me if I haven't texted a friend in a while, and what the best rate to text them is (if I text them too often, the conversations are shorter, it predicts a "sweet spot")

* I was unique (at the time) in how obsessed I became with politics and international news at the age of 12/13. I read the BBC online everyday, and was very anti-Bush. Most people I talked to about it said they couldn't think of a more boring topic than politics haha. Nowadays politics is more entertaining and low-brow thanks to YouTube and Twitter but wasn't always this way.

I vaguely remember you mentioning this. How did this happen again?

That's right. You were born for television a day old even. Did your parents think to record this awesomely famous event (you beat Adam to fame too!)?