Yeah, yeah, yeah, blah, blah, blah. Here's the answers to the first Simone History Quiz that I posted over a month ago (a month and 6 days, to be exact), which virtually nobody decided to attempt to answer. :p Ah, well.

1. What is the name of the teddy bear that I brought to my first grade teddy bear parade?

ANSWER: Maurice. He was so big that the only instrument that I could hold for the entire parade was a rattle. :) When my dad, brother, and I were travelling in France on the TGV, a nice lady gave Maurice to us, and we've had him ever since. He's really funny looking because he's so pink.

2. What is the name of the band that I recently discovered, which is composed of three sisters and a brother, and who like to cover and remix a WHOLE bunch (much to my dismay)?

ANSWER: The Corrs. The violins in many of their songs is a nice touch, but sometimes they revert back to normal pop-style music, which kind of annoys me. They really need to start making some of their own songs, though, even though their remixes are often better than the originals.

3. Who was my first math teacher at Los Altos High School?

ANSWER: Mr. Cochran. This was kind of a trick question, as I mentioned, because I was actually going to the high school for math during 7th grade at Egan. I actually hadn't done the first semester of geometry, but math at the junior high wasn't challenging enough -- so I studied my brother's geometry book and got into the class during the 2nd semester. Funny thing, because I actually was IN my brother's same class. :p My first teacher at Los Altos High School when I was actually a full-time student there was Ms. Strauss, who taught trigonometry.

4. What was the first Mac that my family ever owned?

ANSWER: Mac Plus. I used to play Dark Castle on that thing. :) What a great game... what's up with Delta Tao Software taking so long to finish their Dark Castle/Beyond Dark Castle port to Mac OS X and Mac OS 9, anyway? Regardless, we got a Macintosh IIsi after that, which I used up until I got my first iMac (the original bondi blue model). My dad was using a few Powerbooks in the meantime, so he didn't use the IIsi that much, but my brother and I used it all the time for games and stuff. It actually was quite a workhorse, except at the end it started eating up floppies and damaging them like there was no tomorrow.

5. What was the name of my friend who used to live in my apartment complex during elementary and junior high school?

ANSWER: Mavrick Goodrich (I hope I spelled that right -- I don't think he spelled his name with an 'e'). We used to play hide and go seek and have water balloon fights in the complex, since there was a whole network of passages and stuff that connected the different sections of the complex; this was perfect for making getaways and stuff. :) My brother and I used to play all the time with him and his sister, Malana. I'm pretty sure he went to Egan, but I'm not positive. They moved out of the area, though -- I haven't heard from them since.

6. Where was I born?

ANSWER: San Luis Obispo, CA.

7. How long have I lived in Mountain View?

ANSWER: Quite a while. We moved into Mountain View when I wasn't even a year old: in the first half of 1985. We rented out a small house, and then moved to the apartment complex near downtown Mountain View where we lived for 10 years, and then into the house we currently live in. I can't really imagine living outside of Mountain View.

8. How many different countries have I visited? Bonus points if you can name them.

ANSWER: Let's see... United States, Canada, Portugal, Spain, Andorra, France, Monaco, Italy, Belgium, Netherlands, England, Switzerland, the former Czechoslovakia (now split up into The Czech Republic and Slovakia), Hungary (I think), Austria (I think), and Germany (I think). So that would make 16 countries (or 17 if you want to count the split country).

9. What was the first book I ever read?

ANSWER: The Knights of the Round Table. It was a big, hardback book that I always carried around and read, but I was about 5 years old and probably didn't REALLY understand a thing that I was reading.

10. What was the first year I ever attended a MacWorld Expo keynote address by Steve Jobs?

ANSWER: I'm pretty sure it was the MacWorld San Francisco keynote in 2001, where Steve introduced the PowerBook G4. My dad claims that we had been going to MWSFs before that, but hadn't been going to the keynote -- if so, I don't remember.

11. When I got my first paycheck, where did I work?

ANSWER: Egan Intermediate School, during 8th grade. I was doing admin work on the computers (haha, this after I had used AppleScript to get around FoolProof, and I had briefly looked at the server computer to figure out the admin password ;) ). The principal (Brenda Dyckman) actually hand delivered my paycheck during 7th period yearbook class. It was for something like $300.

12. With whom did I used to be good friends with in junior high school, who went to Menlo High School (is it called Menlo College or something?), and who I just recently re-encountered at college?

ANSWER: Woodley Packard. We used to be pretty good friends, and we would go to his house in Los Altos Hills and play on his computers there -- there was one role-playing game that we always used to play, but I can't remember the name of it now. In any case, he recently transferred from Princeton to Stanford, and I recently re-encountered him in one of my math classes. It was kinda fun to see him again. :)

13. What game did Duncan, Bryce, and I (along with a few other kids) used to play at lunchtime during high school?

ANSWER: Duke Nukem 3D. Heehee, I started the tradition of annoying everybody by rushing towards the exit as fast as possible, since people started playing on the annoying levels (like the very first one). Duncan, Bryce, I, and another guy named Ross used to play all the time until we got kicked out for being noisy. :p (Maybe there was another person that played, too, but I don't remember.)

14. During what grade was the first time I ever skipped ahead in math?

ANSWER: Second grade. I tested out of second and third grade math, and so I went to Ms. Benedict's fourth grade math class. My mom always tells me that Ms. Benedict was the first to teach me to put space between my math problems, since I would always try to scrunch them up -- of course, my mom says that she herself had always told me to do that, but I didn't listen until Ms. Benedict told me to. :p

15. Name, in order, the teachers that I had during elementary school, starting with first grade. Only last names are required. Bonus points if you can name the two teachers that later changed their names because they got married (you must name both their original name and new name to get the bonus points). Partial credit will be given for this question.

ANSWER: Lau (who changed her name to Arnold), Chequer (who changed her name to Reid), Horton, Reid, Shupe, Kirby. Funny thing: about a year ago, I saw Ms. Arnold and Ms. Reid again, when I went to Bryce's graduation. They recognized me immediately, and I vaguely recalled who they were, but I couldn't place them until they told me. That was fun to see them again. I wonder how many of them still teach at Santa Rita.

16. What was the name of the typing program that was part of my elementary school curriculum?

ANSWER: No, it was not All The Right Type. It was called Talking Fingers. ATRT was the successor to Talking Fingers in the Santa Rita (and Almond) curriculum, but it wasn't in place when I was taught typing. It used 5.5" floppies, and you had to constantly swap out the program floppy for your trophy disk, where it would show a little animation for all the trophies you got after completing the exercises. I remember that you'd get gold nuggets, and when you got enough gold nuggets, they turned into a trophy, and you ended up getting five trophies by the end of the whole program. I think I was the first to get there. :)

17. What did I used to tell everyone that my name meant?

ANSWER: Haha, this is really funny. I used to say that my first name meant "rock" in Latin (not sure if this is true or not), and that my last name meant nunchuck (is that how you spell it? -- I think it's actually "Manganello" that means nunchuck).

18. What are the REAL names of my two cats?

ANSWER: Bercino and Taddeo. As I said before, Bercino (the real name of Baby Kitty) means "whiner" in Italian, and Taddeo (the real name of Fatty) is the name of an opera singer.

19. What was the nickname of the first online friend (i.e.: I first met him online) I met in person?

ANSWER: Erik the Red, from Erik's Place on the Hotline server network. I think Erik's Place is still up, but there are usually not many people there anymore. Hotline used to be pretty active, but I think it's dying out after the whole banner thing and paid versions of Hotline. IRC also seems to be more popular, although it's not as easy to find servers on the network (and none of the Mac OS X IRC clients are any good).

20. What was the nickname of the online friend, who I met on GameRanger, with whom I still converse on AIM a lot, but who I have never met in person?

ANSWER: His name was "iria" when we still went on GameRanger. Nice guy, fun to talk to. We used to play StarCraft with a bunch of other GameRanger members, but it almost always resulted in some sort of stupid fight over something. During one game, I kept lifting off my Terran command center and going to another location to save myself, and everybody was so annoyed at that even though I was trying to save myself (and it's not like I didn't have any minerals to keep going). *sigh* Incidentally, the immaturity of GameRanger is what made me stop going on there -- as of this month, I've officially not been on in over a year. :) (Not having a Mac OS X-native GameRanger client was the other reason, but that's been remedied now.)

Well, that's all for today, folks!