Seven Things You May (or May Not) Know about Me

I got tagged for the “Seven things…” meme by Chris Wilson.

The rules:

1. Link to your original tagger(s) and list these rules in your post.
2. Share seven facts about yourself in the post.
3. Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
4. Let them know they’ve been tagged.

So, on to the seven facts:

1. I cut out of college partway through my last semester to hike 2,142.7 miles from Georgia to Maine on the Appalachian Trail. I proposed to my girlfriend (now wife) when she came out to pick me up at the end of the trail.
2. I hate talking on the phone and generally won’t answer it at home.
3. My undergraduate degree is in architecture, although it is officially a Bachelor of Science in Art and Design. Since it is abbreviated BSAD, and due to the financial prospects for those of us who earned it, we pronounced it “Be Sad.” I don’t actually have much artistic talent, and I got out of architecture once I realized how woefully lacking I was on that front. I have an enormous appreciation for people who have visual design skills. 
4. A play I wrote in college got produced on campus and was later included as an example for the Playwrights in Performance class included in MIT’s Open Courseware project.
5. I grew up in Sour Lake, Texas, which is where Texaco was founded (originally named Texas Company). The town’s population was at 1,807 and dropping as of the last census before I moved away, but it has been a boomtown twice: first, in the mid-1800s, as a health resort when people (including Sam Houston) came from far and wide to soak in the town’ssulphur springs (long since dried up) that gave it its name, and again in the early 1900s when oil was discovered.
6. I am a rabid amateur baseball fan — especially focused on the Texas Longhorns and any team or league in which I have a kid participating; if I know I’m going to be able to watch an entire game, I’ll score it if I’ve got a score sheet and a pencil.
7. My cousin, Chris, authored the first Windows version of NCSA Mosaic (the first real web browser) and later developed the first CSS implementation in Internet Explorer. He’s currently the Platform Architect of the IE Platform team at Microsoft.

And, the seven people I’ll tag to pass this along:

• Chris Tammen because, like my cousin, he doesn’t post nearly often enough. And, he’s one of the most spontaneously hilarious people I know (for years, his resume included “Able to change many lightbulbs without the aid of a chair or stool” in the “Additional Skills” section, as he is a very tall fellow)
• Kristin Farwell because I already know that her mother and stepfather are professional skydivers (and she’s got a half-dozen ready tales of record-breaking and noteworthy jumps her stepfather has led or participated in), because she grew up as the daughter of a quintessential free spirit, because she taught me a lot of things about the internet, and because I have two framed photos she took in Austin hanging on the wall of my office…and I suspect her list would turn up more fascinating nuggets
• Greg Phelps because he’s an English major who has spent the last decade of his career doing hardcore database work. And he knows baseball.
• Avinash Kaushik because all I know is that he is one of the most brilliant and pragmatic minds in web analytics, that he is extremely personable, that he’s got a degree from The Ohio State University, and that Google probably knows how lucky they are to have him helping drive the evolution of Google Analytics.
• Amy Bills because she is really good at what she does, but, more importantly, because her perspective on the world tends to be hilariously wry and sardonic
• Bryan Cristina because he keeps saying he’s going to blog more, and maybe this will give him a nudge to get re-started. And because the filter between what he thinks and what he says is pretty minimal, which makes for entertaining tweets, Yahoo! group responses, and conversations
• Kevin Sasser because I met him when he was trying to sell me a content management system (and almost succeeded — would have if the product had been a better fit for our needs), and who I have since gotten to know as the author of one of the most entertaining, yet practical, blogs on how to be effective in Sales.

One person I would have tagged, but she was already tagged last year:

• Connie Bensen — community strategist, mentor, friend, and former .357 pistol packer; when the meme hit her, it was an “8 things” meme, but substantially the same (and more reasonable than the “25 things” that’s making its way around Facebook!)