Awe, Christ. I knew this would come around to me eventually. Let’s get it over with then:
5 Things you didn’t care to know about me:
1 - I had a running relationship with several police departments during my youth; some pro, some con. It started when I got arrested for ‘phreaking’, or essentially making free phone calls to BBS’s when I was thirteen. 26 people came to my house, CIA, FBI, Secret Service, cops – you name it. I was at Karate at the time, and they were very surprised to find out my age. They spent the next several hours trying to use my computer (an apple II at the time), and since none of them had ever seen an Apple computer before, they claimed “I had it protected!”. Since I didn’t store anything relevant on my computer, I showed them how to type “Catalog” instead of “dir” and watched them mumble about my secret hacking program, which was actually just a game called “Elite”. They packed everything in my room up and left.
A few weeks later I was pulled out of school by another police department. A man had been stabbed 26 times by some teenager, and when they went to his house they found tons of pornographic pictures of little kids. They also found an Apple computer, and apparently one of them knew my mother and had heard I knew about the secret ‘Catalog’ commands and such. I spent the next few hours looking over his files until I found a listing of names and dates which seemed relevant. Funny thing was, he had actually protected the data.
Next thing I know every news channel is at my door. An Amtrack train had crashed that night killing several people, yet for some reason my story was on ahead of this news. Every station wanted shots of me working on a computer, but my room had been stripped bare, so they’d take me to the news station and have me type on some unix terminal that fed the news reader machine. I’d make a few harmless edits to the night news cast while they taped me, and watch hours later to see if the changes made it on air.
I didn’t receive my stuff back for about a year – and by then was spending most of my time playing music and getting involved with various bands. On the third day of my senior year, I was tossed out of school and arrested for possession. The entire way to the station I had to listen to some moronic cop tell me how ‘I must think I’m real cool’, and generally slight my intellect with his limited vocabulary.
2 – I used to build guitars for famous people. Right after being thrown out of high-school I spent about 2 years working as a luthier at PRS guitars. They were a much smaller company then, so you got to work a lot of different jobs. While I was there, I worked on guitars for Santana, Ted Nugent, Eric Lifeson, The Doobie Brothers – all kinds of people. More importantly, I made a few nice ones for myself which I enjoy to this day.
3 – My sister and I were bore 5 years apart, on the same day, hour, and minute (1:15am on Tuesday, July 18th). When I was really little, I used to wonder why such and such’s little brother wasn’t having a birthday when they were.
4 – I’m a terrible, terrible artist. My background is actually in music. But somehow I made my living doing art for like, 7 years, or so. Luckily for me, there’s a lot of art which requires as much a technical eye as a steady hand in the games industry, so I was able to be pretty successful despite my inability to draw a stick figure. I’d say I still spend about half my time mucking about in art related tasks, mostly animation related these days.
5 – I love to cook and bake like a mad man. It’s something I seem to have gotten from my mother. I never measure anything, which is apparently suicide in baking, but no one told either of us that. I rarely make the same recipe twice, to the endless frustration of my wife who cooks Italian quite well but has yet to master simple cookies. I’ll occasionally screw something up by trying something really off the wall, but that’s fairly rare. When I cook, it’s either fine dining or cereal – and I’m actually pretty happy with either. My favorite ingredients of recent experimentations include Green Tea Powder, Brown Rice Syrup, raw cocoa in things you wouldn’t expect it, and using various tea’s as flavorings in baking.
Just to continue in the tradition, I'm going to hit up the
Captain, who worked on one of my favorite games, and
Dan, who's blogging I'd recomend to anyone..
