I’m not happy about Facebook’s greedy terms of service, so rather than hand them content that they’re going to keep and monetize forever, I’m posting my “25 things you didn’t know about me” here…

  1. I ignore chain-letter-like things, which is why it’s taken me so long to give in and make this list (and why I haven’t tagged 25 more of my friends – you can thank me later)
  2. I started kindergarten when I was four.
  3. My partner Gina got me on Craigslist.
  4. Hearing “The Star Spangled Banner” usually makes me tear up, for about four different reasons.
  5. I’ve visited 38 states, mostly in one summer journey in my own small airplane.
  6. The least authentic of those visits was to Montana, where I did a touch-and-go at the southeasternmost airport, and only briefly put one wheel down.
  7. The most authentic of those visits was in Albany, Missouri, where I was introduced to the town doctor by his cousin who’d picked me up on the road into town (and I wasn’t even hitchhiking). The doctor bought me lunch (at one of the two open restaurants in town), showed me his restored car collection, took me on rounds at the hospital and introduced me to his patients, let me buy him & his wife dinner (at the other), put me up for the night, and gave me the keys to one of the cars to drive myself back to the airport in the morning.
  8. I can open champagne with a sword, one of many important things I learned from my father.
  9. The only times I cut class in junior high school was to watch the film & TV companies that often shot near where we lived (in a trailer park in Malibu). I was there when Fonzie jumped the shark.
  10. My first job was in the kitchen of the Sandcastle restaurant in Malibu, the blue and white building outside Jim Rockford’s trailer’s front door.
  11. I got into computers by getting lost my first time in Santa Monica, near a closed pizza place, a sketchy-looking bar, and the first computer store in the world. My first job in computers was entering BASIC programs from a book there - I never finished the book, and was never paid. (Hi Greg!)
  12. When I was into citizen’s band radio in the mid-70’s, my handle was “Condor”.
  13. I see a lot of movies: around 200 last year, around 80 so far this year (mostly at the Portland International Film Festival, underway now). The only genre I don’t bother with is horror.
  14. I value my oldest friends exceedingly highly; though I’m rarely in touch with them, I think of them often and miss them deeply.
  15. I once drove from Santa Monica to Malibu with my late best friend Lad, with my seat fully reclined and me unable to see, in traffic. I worked the pedals, he steered. This was about the limit of our high-school hijinks.
  16. My favorite movie line is when Harold gives Maude a coin stamped with “Harold loves Maude”, and she throws it off the pier and says “So I’ll always know where it is.”
  17. Everything I know about bowling, I learned from watching Dad: Get a heavy ball. Throw it really hard.
  18. My favorite film is “The Shawshank Redemption.”
  19. Baseball is pretty much the only sport I like watching, yet I don’t like extra innings; nine is enough. (Worst baseball decision ever: at a San Jose Giants game, I turned down a job offer from Mark’s friend Pierre at then-nascent EBay. I think the Giants lost that day, too.)
  20. I play guitar, but not very well. Other instruments I’ve attempted include drums, cello, piano, flute, banjo, ukulele, clarinet, and French horn.
  21. I never snuck into extra movies at the multiplex until my Dad got me to, when I was nearly 30. Now we rarely do, because we need to get home to the dog.
  22. Nowadays, I write software mostly in Ruby. Other languages I’ve been paid to use include BASIC, Fortran, Pascal, C, C++, Bourne shell, Postscript, c-shell, Perl, Bash shell, Java, Javascript, and Python, roughly in that order. Oh, also: 6502, 6800, 8080/Z80, 68000, and ARM assembly languages.
  23. I have a high-school diploma and a California high school equivalence certificate.
  24. Our dog is named after the little girl in “To Kill a Mockingbird”, of course.
  25. I own a straitjacket. Surprised?