Tagged

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Jetpacks tagged me yesterday afternoon, which means if I feel like playing nice and not being a dick, I have to reveal certain facts about myself that folks might not ordinarily know.  Here goes:

  1. I grew up in Wading River on Long Island, a hamlet that bills itself as "The Gateway to the Hamptons."  Really its claim to fame was that it was the site of the former Shoreham Nuclear Power Station.  The SNPS pumped a lot of money into the local school district in the form of PILOT payments.  This enabled my little public school to do insane things like send middle schoolers to Hawaii to study flower bulbs, have a circus arts program, and own a state of the art mainframe in the early 80s.  This is the genesis of my interest in computers - I learned to program in BASIC, Fortran and Pascal there, and even took the AP Computer Science test in Pascal back in the day.
  2. In addition to being a marketing guy, I am a fairly decent plumber, owing to having spent every summer from 1983 until about 1994 working for my dad's lawn sprinkler business.  I like to keep that quiet, because when people find out I know something about their pipes, they call me at 2 AM when their toilet breaks.
  3. I took classical piano lessons from the time I was five until I left for college.  Like most kids, though, I rebelled.  After switching teachers, I started learning popular music of the day.  So the 13 years of piano lessons my parents paid for leave me only with the ability to play cheesy heavy metal ballads after I've had too much to drink.  I have perfect pitch, so even to this day you'll see me listening intently to something on the radio, coming home to my piano, and playing a reasonable facsimile of what I heard earlier.  I also taught myself how to play guitar when I was in high school.
  4. I am a geek of the first order.  I played Dungeons & Dragons for years growing up.  I love video games.  I'm a member of American Mensa and very frequently geek out with crossword puzzles, Sudoku and other brain teasers.  Back in the early 80s, I trolled the original Compuserve BBS on my Commodore 64 trying to figure out ways to break the copy protection on C-64 games.
  5. I am a reformed conservative, having graduated (barely) from one of the most conservative schools in the country.  Upon returning to New York, I gravitated back toward my liberal/libertarian roots and became a Democrat again.

Okay, I tag the following bloggers:

  1. Brad Berens - Because we're getting to be great friends, and we'll be better friends when he reveals some embarrassing facts about himself.
  2. Rick Bruner - Because the guy rides a unicycle, and if he's willing to reveal that publicly, he'll probably also reveal some other interesting stuff.
  3. Rob Burke - Because he's a new client and needs the blogging practice.
  4. Tig Tillinghast - Because Tig is interesting as hell, and I want to know more.
  5. JTA - Because we were childhood friends, and I have no idea what he's been up to since, oh, 1989 or so.