Don Xml's Grok This

The blog tagging meme thing has been traveling around the blogsphere and I've been tagged by Jerry Dennany.  If you haven't run across it yet, this is how it is supposed to go.  You give 5 things that people in the blogsphere probably didn't know and about you, and then you tag 5 other individuals.  I'm guessing that the idea here is to help your readers see more of your human side, and offset some of the persona stuff.  Plus, you can tag 5 others that probably don't know that you read their blog, thus helping to promote the different blogs that you read.

Here's my list

1. Bill Gates and I have one small thing in common.  Both of us have credits from Harvard University, but not a degree.  The big difference here is that I was never accepted into Harvard as an undergrad student, but did go there as part of their summer program for high school juniors and seniors.  I spent the summer of 1984 (in between my junior and senior years) taking two 4 credit, undergrad level, classes, Astrophysics and Frontiers of Science (a humanities class on the ethical issues facing scientists).  I took the astrophysics class because that is/was one of my favorite topics, and the humanities class because it was a required class for the Radcliffe young women in science program (hey, I was no idiot, if there was going to be a class of all girls that like science, I had to take it).  I thought that taking this summer program would help me get into a better school, as my SAT scores were nothing great.  But I didn't get into Carnegie Mellon's Institute of Technology, and never did finish my undergrad degree (which I started at Colorado School of Mines but never finished).
2. Anyone that is a regular reader knows that I like the harder (metal) music, but not many people know that the first concert I ever attended was for Tom Jones at Nassau Coliseum with my parents.  I must have been around 12, and my parents had tickets for this show, but one of their friends was sick, so rather than waste the ticket, they brought me along.  I think Tom Jones was more of my mom's scene than my dad's, as he is a big Beatles and Rolling Stones fan.  But as a kid, my parents played a lot of Tom Jones, Barry Manilow and Engelbert Humperdinck (along with the normal top 40 radio).  To make up for this egregious start to my concert experience, my first "real" concert (where I didn't attend with a parent) was Black Sabbath with Dio in 1982 at the Brendan Byrne Arena (aka Meadowlands) in NJ, when I was 15.  I have an uncle who is 3 years older than me, and we went and scalped tickets at the last moment.  He also took me to my first club show that summer.  We went to see Twisted Sister at some bar/club in Staten Island.  I think the drinking age was 19 in NYC at the time, and there was no such thing as all ages shows in those days, but I don't remember actually getting ID when we went to the show.  This was way before Twisted Sister was popular, and they were just breaking out of the NYC club scene.  They had just signed their first independent record deal, and just recorded Under The Blade.
3. I graduated high school with Artie Lange (comedian/actor and regular member of The Howard Stern Show).  We had a class of over 500 kids, and we weren't friends, so I didn't really know him.  But one of my best friends still talks to him occasionally.  I seem to remember that he overdosed at party "down the shore" after the senior prom, and the senior class president saved his life.  But I wasn't at that particular party, and it was over 20 years ago, so I can't be sure of this info.  Knowing Artie's reputation, it wouldn't be hard to believe, but someone else would have to confirm it.
4. During my college years I worked as a "wine maven" for a local chain of liquor stores.  The first couple years I was under age, but that didn't stop me from selling wine to people that were "looking for some red wine that wasn't sweet".  Actually, I really enjoyed it, and was mentored by a couple others about all the different varietals and regions.  I did learn that working as a salesman really wasn't for me, and working in retail is the pits.  This is the same period that Kevin Smith was working at the Quikstop and those experiences turned into the movie Clerks (btw, I swear I met Kevin Smith at a party at Rutgers back in those days, but, it was a party, and I had been drinking, it probably a non-event.  After seeing Dogma, I remembered talking to someone that looked like me at a Rutgers party about those very same topics in Dogma, but maybe it was just coincidence).  But, as for the wine stuff, I still enjoy the hunt to find a really good wine bargain.  Lately, I've been able to get some good deals on Spanish Grand Reserve Riojas.
5. I got into programming (information technology) because I found it easier than engineering.  I never took a regular comp sci class in college, but I had to take some supplemental stuff for an engineering class.  After I dropped out of school, I worked as the wine maven for a a couple years, and then took a job at an insurance company, knowing that I could request a transfer to another area after a year, and that they were desperate for IT people and had internal training classes.  So, after I year I talked myself into a position in production support.  Basically, I was the guy that made sure that the nightly batch jobs were setup and ran to completion.  I got to learn how to develolp "systems" by wiring together "jobs" using JCL on the IBM mainframe, which is probably why I have a top down view on how to build computer systems.  Most people learn to write a program, and eventually leanr how to group them together to create systems.  I learned the opposite way, how to group programs together to create systems, and then how to write a program.  I worked so much overtime my first year in that job and saved a lot of it, that when management didn't want to send me to their internal programming class, I decide to quit and take a 6 month program at a local technical school, and the rest is (mostly) known history.

Now for my tag victims: Dave Laribee, Marc Adler, Drew Marsh, Mike Champion, Scott Bellware