Guess I'm in the blog tag club, Greg Linden called "you're it" on me.
Since, I'm going to run off at the mouth, let me get to the five folks I'm tagging: Dan Ciruli (Go Bears!!), Alex Halavais, Josh Lucas, Adrian Holovaty, Lucas Gonze
Here's five things you probably couldn't discern just by reading this blog. Apologies for being a bit more expansive than most, but I'm in a divulging mood. More after the break:
1) MIT's Walker Memorial Hall provided two formative experiences. First, as a freshman, I bussed tables in the dining hall to make some spending money. My family had just enough resources to pay the tuition, room and board, but I had to come up with my own party dough. Second, I did a hip-hop show on Walker Memorial Basement Radio (WMBR) called "The Dope Jamz", in that prime spot of 11:00 PM on Friday nights. My partner, and the real instigator, was Philadelphian Larry McKay, aka DJ Chameleon, self-described friend of Jazzy Jeff and acquaintance of Will, Fresh Prince, Smith. Chameleon always claimed that Smith did get into MIT but wasn't "all that."
2) House music is my listening form of choice, particularly DJ mixes. Concurrent with being a big hip hop head in the late 80's, I caught an even worse house music bug. In parallel with hip-hop, house and Detroit techno were exploding in the northeast US. When I got to UC Berkeley in '89, the rave scene blew up and sucked me in. I still have a pair of Technics SL 1200's, a couple of Stanton cartridges, a mixer, a lot of now classic 12" vinyl, and know how to use them. For a while, under the watchful eyes of Rob Doten, I got to abuse the tables at the now defunct Primal Records store, a central East Bay DJ hangout. Brush with greatness: Curtis A. Jones, aka Cajmere/Green Velvet did one year of chemical engineering grad school at Berkeley, before launching his recording career. We used to frequent a lot of late night SF SOMA (pre-ballpark) spots together.
3) I was a passable ultimate frisbee player, never quite being serious or athletic enough to join a "real" open team, but always being a solid grinder and role player. At the hat tournament, I was the guy who would make a couple of big plays, throw to the rookies, and wouldn't complain about PT. When I was at the top of my game, I mainly played coed before coed was cool. Peak moments were playing C bracket finals on a Sunday at Potlatch 1996, rushing to SEA-TAC, flying a redeye back to New York, going to work, and then playing in the Westchester Ultimate Summer League, which featured some of the best players in the country, followed by the 2001 Monkey Foo tournament in Grenoble, France. I was in the best shape of my life, my team, the Geneva Wizards won the spirit award, and my flight back from that trip landed on September 10th. I also played in 10 Hats, Hops, and Hucks.
4) I was a barista at Nefeli Cafe in Berkeley, CA for a little over a year, surrounded on either side by a couple of years of steady patronage. I caught the cafe bug a few years earlier in Berkeley, and to this day I am a complete cafe slut, doing my best to scout out coffee shops in whatever cities I visit. I don't think Pascal, one of Nefeli's two Greek owners, took to me until we had a spot inspection by an Illy coffee supervisor, we might have been the only place serving Illy coffee in Berkeley at the time, and I managed to make a cappucino to his satisfaction. Creamy not frothy foam!!
5) I'm a bit of a sports junkie. Not a rabid sports fan, but my background noise of choice is sports talk radio and ESPN. I freely admit that this is a harmless, but horrible vice. I think the seed was planted by my dad listening to Ken Beatrice (YOOAH, NEXT!) but I got really hooked on KNBR. Heck, I even enjoy Jim Rome's radio show, a very acquired taste. The only show I had to give up on was Scott Ferrall's KNBR travesty. God was that unlistenable.