Introduceyourself - Dream Steem

Hi esteemed Steemians, as is traditional my first proper post is an introduceyourself one. I like that idea, it forces the more introverted amongst us to take that first initial leap. A bit like mother bird giving a shove to that fledging who just doesn't want to leave the nest and take that first flight. I kind of know how that feels, my first reveal is that I've got a bit of a fear of flying myself. Ah, I hear you say, I know how to cure that, take some flying lessons, that will sort you out. Ah, I say back, it was taking flying lessons many years back that gave me that fear of flying, I was fine until I took them, I loved flying. I'll leave that story for a later day. I don't want to use up all my great stories in post #1.

My name is Max Bullion. Of course that's sounds a bit ridiculous and it's not my real name. It's my old bitcoin nom de guerre (apologies to any real Max Bullion's out there, it's not that ridiculous a name, I now have alienated five potential followers living in greater Paris). I was into bitcoin early-ish. Not quite as early as @jeffberwick, but certainly before the rush. You'll be jealous to know I bought my first 22 bitcoins at $16 each in early 2013, but I'll allow you a little bit of schadenfreude when I confess that due to the demise of Bitfloor, Mt Gox and my own stupidity transferring into a sexier altcoin which promptly dived, I now own a small fraction of one bitcoin. Grrr. One interesting thing that came out of it was I started my own buy gold for bitcoin website, it was huge for 3 months. It still exists, just no one goes there any more.

I've created a few websites in my day. I created an insurance sales website in my spare time back in 2003. Interestingly I was making more money from that site that I was from my day job in an IT company within a couple of months and after thinking about it for another a month, I decided to leave the day job and concentrate full time on the wild west that was the internet in those days. I've been involved in the internet to some degree or another since 1993 when I'd been seconded to my local Belfast based telecoms company's head office in Ottawa, Canada. I came back after a year full of ideas about the internet and setting up an intranet for the local office. Back in 1994 my director just wasn't having it, I tried to reason that allowing me to work on this in my lunch hour would be great for the company. He just didn't get it. The internet wasn't too exciting back in those days and I was trying to excite him with crazy talk about online phone directories and seating plans and he was coming over all, "I've got a perfectly serviceable paper phone directory on my desk that I can look up much faster than this witchcraft". In the end I just did it anyway.

I'm still doing pretty leading edge science stuff working for a scientific camera company, the kind of cameras that go on telescopes and microscopes, we do neat stuff for NASA and other leading edge universities and institutes. I was in this cool room with work last week, it's an anechoic chamber .

My most crazy holiday ever was to Venezuela. Why go there I hear you ask, surely no one goes there any more (a bit like my bitcoin to gold website)? Well it was slightly less loco back in those days and the main purpose of the holiday was to see the amazing Angel Falls, but I still just managed to escape with my life after surviving two bus crashes (the buses were both write offs though) and a near plane crash.

I love food. I eat out a couple of days a week and I'm going to be sharing lots of my food outings. I love skiing too, my skiing buddy is head chef in a 2* Michelin restaurant, so I'll probably get on to talking about that too at some point. Actually I love food so much that I've been forced into my first ever diet. I've been doing the intermittent fasting thing and it's amazeballs.

So what do you want to hear about first? My fear of flying, leaving my job for the lure of the internet, the crashfest Venezuelan holiday or the intermittent fasting or endless foodie stories? I'll let you decide by commenting below...