Five Things You Don’t Care To Know

January 13th, 2007 • General Hilarity

Coty, you are a rat bastard for doing this. You, of all people, know that I’ve got a zillion things going on and I have no time for such a game. Sigh. I almost didn’t play along when I read Jeff Pulver’s original post about this and saw a glaring grammatical error (try and find it). But heck, I’ll play along. Here are five things you may, or may not, know about me.

1. I read a lot (at least I think I read a lot).
   Not in the conventional sense of novels and books. I read a lot of magazines (and blogs too actually). Right now the list of magazines includes: Atlanta Magazine, Business 2.0, BusinessWeek, Discover, Fast Company, Foreign Affairs, IEEE’s Spectrum, Newsweek, Popular Mechanics, Popular Science, Technology Review, The Week, Wired, and occasionally Reader’s Digest. Most of these are monthlies with a few being weeklies (BusinessWeek, Newsweek, The Week - notice a common thread?). Two are quarterly (Foreign Affairs and Technology Review). So if you do the math, that comes to an average of a little over 21 magazines a month. Mind you, I don’t read them cover-to-cover but I do more than a casual skim. The subjects are diverse because I like to know about a lot of different things. This is also reflected in how many feeds I currently track in my feed aggregator (a little over 200 feeds). Yeah, I should maybe pare this list down some.
2. I played the cello for eight years from third grade through tenth grade.
   For most of my playing career I had one music director - Ms. Kathryn Drydyk. She was an absolutely wonderful teacher and the Kentucky school system lost a great teacher when she recently retired. Although I’m happy to know that she still substitute teaches when needed and continues to play with the Lexington Philharmonic. The reason I quit playing the cello was because of the horrid music director I had once my family moved to Atlanta. I was in orchestra for exactly one semester because I couldn’t stand his teaching “method” or abysmal attitude. In fact, I can’t remember his name and yet I still keep in touch with Ms. Drydyk.
3. I skipped my senior year of high school and went to Georgia Tech a year early.
   Since I had done tenth and eleventh grade in Atlanta, I really wasn’t too tied down to the high school since my circle of friends was so small. So when Georgia Tech offered me the option to enroll early, I jumped at the opportunity. My high school required me to take three English classes in my first year at Georgia Tech in order to graduate. I seriously considered blowing that off (you were only required to take two English classes at Georgia Tech back then) so I could say I graduated from college but not high school. In the end I did take the required classes and graduated from high school (although the school, Henderson High School, no longer exists as a high school). Funny story, I went and walked at my high school graduation but then had to rush home to study since I had a final exam the very next day.
4. I’m still driving the first car that I bought myself.
   Soon after graduating from college, I was driving a hand me down 1986 Chevy Nova. The air conditioning died that first summer and rather than fix it, I decided enough was enough and I was buying a new car. That car, a blue (not purple as some color blind people believe) 1996 Toyota 4Runner, is still the same vehicle I drive today. I might trade in for a new 4Runner once Toyota starts producing hybrid 4Runner but my car still has some pretty good life in it (aside from the dent recently caused by a driver who gave me and their insurance company false contact information and has now disappeared… grrrr…).
5. I used to be a big fan of sumo (get it?).
   Right after graduating in 1996, I joined up a new Nortel Networks/ANTEC joint venture called Arris Interactive. A few months after joining up, they asked me to go to Tokyo for three months to support two new customers who were testing out the company’s cable telephony equipment. So two weeks after I had gotten my new car (see #4 above), I packed up and left for Tokyo. Mind you, I didn’t (and don’t) speak, read, or understand Japanese. But when did that ever stop me? For three months I lived in the Westin Tokyo (nice hotel, but not for three months). On television, there is only one channel in English - CNN International. Now trust me when I say this - after about a half hour, the news doesn’t change that much. So I resorted to watching things like Jackie Chan films in Japanese. I knew most of the dialogue but it still wasn’t the same. So I eventually discovered that a sumo basho is broadcast every other month for two weeks in both Japanese and English. Score! Back then, we had two American sumo wrestlers as well - Akebono (who was then a Yokozuna) and Musashimaru (who was then an Ozeki, he later became a Yokozuna). So not only was it in English, I had two people to cheer on. Once you understand the intricacies of sumo, you realize it is a lot more than two big guys just pushing each other. And by the way, both Akebono and Musashimaru have retired and we no longer have any Americans in the top ranks of sumo (Akebono’s ceremony and Musashimaru’s ceremony). I don’t follow sumo that often now because getting information (let alone actual video) of bouts is difficult to do outside of Japan (ESPN used to have an unsatisfying 30 minute clip show but they don’t seem to do that anymore) although SumoTalk does a pretty good job.

So herein lies the other problem with getting tagged for this so late in the game. Nearly everyone I know who blogs has already done their five things - Susan, Nabeel, and Ethan (who is also a fan of sumo) all have. So I had to dig deep to find folks to tag. Here are two people I’ll tag: David Ratajczak (whose blog has nothing on it - maybe this will help) and Xavier Cassanova. I know a lot of people who I think should blog but don’t (like Barrett Comiskey - I’d love to read about his efforts in getting small and mid-sized U.S. businesses to outsource manufacturing to China).

Tags: Barrett-Comiskey, cello, David-Ratajczak, Ethan-Zuckerman, five-things, Georgia-Institute-of-Technology, magazines, Nabeel-Hyatt, sumo, Susan-Wu, Toyota-4Runner, Xavier-Cassanova

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