I got tagged by Buck Hodges in the five things about me blogging game that's going around, so here goes:

1. I spent much of my youth playing music - even started college at the University of Maryland (go Terps!) as a piano performance major, studying with Santiago Rodriquez.  I don't play much piano any longer, but I recently picked up my drumsticks again to play in a band called Oscar Begat (note that the recordings on the MySpace page were done before I joined, and mostly feature the "Garage Band" drummer).
2. Between my two gigs at Microsoft, I worked on a program that the EPA uses to estimate the human health and economic impacts of air pollution.  The program won a couple of awards - the Daniel Bell award for oustanding social science research at my former company, Abt Associates; and one of the EPA's Level I Scientific and Technological Achievement Awards.
3. I am expecting a baby girl in about four weeks - the first for me and my wife. 
4. Like Buck, I came late to programming (unless you count logo - fear the turtle).  I came to it at an angle as well - mostly I was interested in Cognitive Science.  At the time I was a Linguistics major, and I had tried (and not liked) both Psychology and Philosophy as second majors.  (Philosophy I actually loved, but there were a few required courses I really didn't want to take due to the professors that taught them.  My favorite course in college was one on Nietzsche taught by Sam Kerstein.)  So - I tried Computer Science in my junior year and ended up loving it.
5. I have a really awesome cat named Rita (short for Margarita) - she's a Devon Rex, which is a great breed for dog lovers and allergy sufferers (my wife is extremely allergic to most cats, but has very little trouble with Rita).  Unfortunately for her, she's about to get demoted to "pet" (see item 3, above).

Jason Prickett, Jim Lamb, you're it.  Sadly, I couldn't come up with five people to tag who had not already been tagged...

FYI - if you hate these five things posts, apparently you are not alone.