I was tagged by
Joe Duck in the
blog tag game (
Technorati), and while I haven't generally written much about myself, I'm happy to share a few details. Here are five things about me which most people probably don't know.
#1 It's shumans.com because shuman.com was taken
I was unsuccessful in several attempts to acquire shuman.com while it was sitting unused with a company called NetIdentity. If you browse through the links on NetIdentity's home page, you will find various explanations of why they register other people's names in order to "share them with the world". They ask "why should one person use a great domain like that?" Why indeed. They do currently appear to have other Shumans renting out subdomains on the site however, so it looks like they found others who agreed with them. Other options such as shuman.net and shuman.org were available, but let's face it, dot com is king. When you're at a dot com address, visitors just need to remember everything before the dot com. For all other addresses, they must remember the correct top-level domain as well.
#2 I still hand-code most web pages
I use Dreamweaver and other tools for simple edits, site-level changes, and organizational functions. But when mixing PHP and HTML, or even laying out tables and CSS, I find myself hand-coding nearly all of the time - including on this site. I'm sure that will change at some point, but probably not until HTML can be rendered as consistently across browsers and platforms as Adobe PDF or Flash, so the cleanliness of said HTML will cease to be an issue.
#3 Shuman wasn't my original first name
I was born in Stuttgart, Germany (West Germany at that time), where I understand everyone was required to name their children immediately so that births could be officially announced in local newspapers. My parents did so, and then a few weeks later switched it to Shuman. That's all I'm saying on that.
#4 I don't have HDTV service
Considering my love of electronic gadgetry, it's sometimes puzzling even to me that I don't have HDTV service. The truth is that I don't watch that much television, and I just haven't gotten around to it yet. I do have an HDTV set paired with an upscaling DVD player, and movies look great. But I have also not yet adopted Blu-ray or HD-DVD technology. It also doesn't help that initial demonstrations I've seen of many Blu-ray movies look just good enough to reveal the defects of the source material. That is, they look like DVDs with a sharpen filter enabled. Of course, the main reason I haven't upgraded yet is the fact that neither side is winning the format war.
#5 It's pronounced GOES'-MUH-JUHM'-DR
The preferred pronunciation of my last name is essentially how it looks like it would sound as an English word, with a hard G, silent H, long O, silent E, hard J, and emphasis on the first and third syllables. Despite the first-time pronunciation barrier (which by the way is an effective shibboleth), there are advantages to having a long last name. In computer science terms, it has built-in error correction; several letters can be misspelled, and yet it's still unmistakably me. And yes, it's all one word, the spelling is unique, and I know of no other Ghosemajumders in the world who are not directly related to me.
