An interesting challenge was thrown out to the community of students of the Alex Jeffreys coaching program. Gary Simpson tagged five people and asked them to list 25 things about themselves in the form of a post in their blogs; those five persons had in turn to tag five more each. The challenge got to me through Heidi Passey.

I told Heidi I’m taking the challenge but warned her that it might take me a while finding all 25 things in such a square character (I had a hard time before, when working on the About me page of this blog). But let’s get going:

1. Right now, I’m at the tender age of 49. Well, maybe more of age than tender!
2. I think I can say I’ve always been a quiet person. I was a dutiful student, not particularly bright, but very persistent. Yet that persistence came out of fear of failure, not of a love of knowledge, I’ve come to realize lately.
3. I didn’t start driving until I turned 21. I was just mentally blocked, I think…
4. It took me almost eight years to complete my college career, Civil Engineering, which normally goes for 9 semesters (4,5 years); oddly enough, my overall average was good, thanks to that same persistence.
5. Much more odd is the fact that after all that effort, I have never practiced CE (I took on a job in the auto industry, which I’ve kept until now).
6. I almost lost that job in 2007, when a big round of salaried cuts hit the Company; I was able to stay thanks to the intercession of my boss then, who has always been friendly to me.
7. My first date didn’t come until I was 34…
8. …and I didn’t marry until I was 39.  It was 1999, I barely cleared out the century!
9. We have three lovely boys; although they’re aged 18 months apart, everybody ask us if they’re triplets.
10. Our youngest kid, Pablo, had to stay for 26 in the intensive care unit due to a serious blood condition. He overcame it and now is a husky little guy apparently in the way to become a lawyer.
11. I like animals and always enjoy a visit to the local zoo with my kids. However, I don’t like to keep animals at home for pets, except for aquarium fish.
12. I used to be a pro football (soccer) fan but not anymore. It’s not that I don’t like to watch it every once in a while, as much as I don’t like the way this and all other sports are hyped.
13. I used to practice tennis for several years but I stopped playing after my first kid was born. I only played during the weekends and I thought I would be missing too much by not being with him, in exchange for chasing bright yellow balls.
14. I underwent surgery for both herniated groins three years ago. Very painful…
15. I like to think of myself as a practicing Catholic. I love my Church and I should get more involved in parochial activities.
16. I like languages yet I have only gotten somewhere with English. I’ve tried French also but with much lesser success, despite the similarities with Spanish.
17. Reading is my favorite hobby yet I have refrained from it lately, in part to be able to dedicate more time to IM.
18. Learning to play a musical instrument is in my wish list. If I only had had the good sense to do it in my younger years!
19. Swimming is also something I never learned to do and would like to. I am making sure my kids do learn early.
20. I once despised publicly playing the lottery. That was in my early years in the job, when my salary was still growing (and I was single too). Now I consider it a viable way to make money, to the extent that I play once, sometimes twice a month.
21. I love chocolate, whether in candy bars or ice cream! I also go nuts for nuts: peanuts, almonds, etc.
22. I wore contact lenses for many years until one day my right eye started hurting bad. I’ve been wearing eyeglasses for the last five years. They’re so annoying sometimes!
23. Speed of implementation has always been a problem to me. I mull over things way too much…
24. I also have a hard time handling more than one thing at once.
25. The doctor told me I need to exercise vigorously everyday in order to avoid problems with diabetes later on. I’m struggling to find enough time out to keep up with the routine I’m following…

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Phew! Getting to 25 was really a challenge. I started working on this list on Aug 30th and run out of gas around number 9 for the first time. But it was a good exercise, after all, except for the fact that it’s all self centered…

I’ll PM my tags now.

In a previous post I talked about the convenience of customizing the posts URL structure to make it more search engine friendly (potentially attracting more traffic to a blog).

But I had not been able to implement that desirable structure without causing my blog to crash when visitors tried to see the comments or leave one…

I digged a little into WordPress Codex to try and figure this out; I soon got overwhelmed by the technical jargon they use there! I did, however, settled down for an intermediate approach: what they call PATHINFO permalinks.

Although they lengthen the URL considerably with the inclusion of  ‘index.php’ and the post date (click on the title of any of the posts in this blog and then take a look at the address bar to see them at work), these concoctions include the post title in the URL structure and still don’t cause the blog to crash.

I have a lot of catch up to do on the latest modules of the coaching program, so I’m settling down for these “almost pretty” permalinks!