I’m honored to have been given license by Kevin Barnes to indulge in a brief egotrip, as one more felled by the infamous 5 things you might not know about me meme which is, evidently, still making the rounds. I’ll save you the complicit rhetoric regarding the justifications for partaking in this exercise in mutual self-aggrandizement, and, without further ado, just proceed to divulging five random, trivial tidbits about yours truly:

1. The header photo (above) on my website is of the Atlas mountain range in Africa, as seen across the Strait of Gibraltar from the Pillars of Hercules . For all those who have asked about it, that’s your geography lesson for today.

   Costa del Sol, where I’m located, runs along the Mediterranean coast towards Gibraltar, and picturesque sights are the norm in this landscape. Looking out from my office window on a clear day, those same African mountains are quite discernible on the horizon — I really can’t complain about the view.

2. Though I live in Spain, I’m actually of Finnish origin. Apparently the notion of mobility within the EU isn’t all that widespread yet, as people often enough make the obvious, but incorrect, assumption that I’m a Spaniard. When you’re talking about Costa del Sol, all bets are off: this region is as cosmopolitan as it gets.

   Not that I’m at all bothered to be mislabeled, as I don’t particularly hold any irrational nationalistic sentiments towards the country that I happened to be born in. To me, Finland is merely an authoritarian, anti-entrepreneurial backwater welfare state, located quite literally at the edge of the world, and chained at the hip to Nokia, with which the country’s fortunes will rise and fall. Like many young ex-Finns, I was born with an instinct for an exit strategy.

   Still, if I must be categorized based on national origin, I’d prefer to simply be called European — a term suitably vague and all mixed up, yet more accurate as a descriptive label than either of the aforementioned monikers.

3. I built my first own, top-of-the-line PC at age 11 with the money I earned from trading second-hand computer hardware.

   Basically, I struck good deals on heaps of “scrap” hardware (motherboards, casings, expansion cards, hard drives, monitors, and whatnot) at bankruptcy auctions as well as from computer shops’ trade-ins and with private sellers wanting to get rid of “broken” or “outdated” computers.

   I dismantled what I bought, and reassembled any functioning components into the semblance of proper computers, selling them at a profit in the local classified ads paper. While it was a fair bit of work, it was also worthwhile enough to subsidize purchases such as the kiloeuro I dropped on a then-impressive 32 megabytes of RAM (perfect for playing Doom).

4. As it happens, I’m entirely self-taught: I learned neither English nor programming at school. Blame a voracious literary appetite combined with strong streaks of independent hardheadedness and disrespect for established authority — not traits predisposed for survival through the snail-paced, conformist machinery of public school education in Finland.

   In fact, I dropped out of the system a bit early on: 7th grade. I wanted to dedicate more time to my budding computer business, which by that point had expanded to include creating websites and custom applications for local small businesses, so I sat in on only the final exams that were compulsory, by law, in order to finish up the 7th to 9th grades. Major time saver: three years compressed into some two dozen exams.

   I did enroll at an evening high school for a couple of years, but, amidst long and much more interesting work days, never quite found the time to jump through all the hoops needed to obtain the final diploma. Can’t say that I’ve needed it.

5. I’m something of a modern-day nomad. At last count, I’ve lived in 28 locations in 4 countries — that’s more new addresses than I’ve yet accumulated revolutions around the Sun.

   As a result, I’ve developed a casually cavalier attitude towards unnecessary material possessions — do you actually own your stuff, or does it own you? — and would consider an ideal mode of living to be an RV parked on a sand beach by the Mediterranean Sea. The sun, the beach and, when you want it, the open road — what more do you need? (Well, mustn’t forget the satellite net connection, of course.)

That concludes my exposé for today. Lest I become a leaf node for this experiment in contagious media, I’m hereby passing the torch on to José Antonio Ortega Ruiz, Jens Axel Søgaard, Alejandro Forero Cuervo, Roman Menyhart and Matt Henderson. Gentlemen, you know what to do: five facts, and tag five more people — or else…