Well I just got tagged by my friend Arpan Shah in what seems to be a blogging pyramid scheme, where the recipient has to reveal five things most readers wouldn't know about them (and then tags 5 other bloggers). While I normally resist the chain letter thing, this IS a good excuse to get back to blogging after a long hiatus! So here are five things about me… I'd mention my love of music but I already said that in my opening post, so here goes!

1. OK, I'll expand on the love of music thing – in college I managed the campus radio station and hosted two shows… "Jazz Spectrums", which covered everything from Dixieland to Fusion, and "The Jungle Bob Show" which was all rock and roll. I bet you can guess what my college nickname was?
2. Part of the nickname story was because I grew up way out in the country, in the Berkshire mountains in a little town called Cheshire. It's beautiful country; I still go there to visit my family, and the dairy cows still outnumber the people.
3. My wife, Kate, and I have a great garden in our small back yard, which we inherited when we bought our house several years ago, and since have taken to another level. In fact, we had greens out of the garden tonight for dinner. This is unusual because it is January and I live near Boston, MA, so it should be a frozen landscape! Yesterday it was 70F (21C), and the pac choi I cut down in October had all grown back. Go figure!
4. For many years early in my career, I worked mainly in assembly language developing device drivers and protocols to run in front-end processors. It was a lot of fun hand-compiling the code and debugging with a logic analyzer, and I learned a lot about performance and concurrency. I sometimes feel spoiled to have .NET and Visual Studio to work in!
5. I grew up in a house of writers; my parents wrote or co-wrote over 40 books plus regular newsletters and magazine articles about banking and personal finance. I've always liked to write – you'd think that I would blog more often! ;-)

As I said, I usually don't go for these chain letter things, and was debating if I should continue it, but I can't resist -- I tag Rich Crane, Bob Goodearl, Ed Hild, Scott Jamison and John Pelak!