Eight Things you didn’t know about me

I was tagged by both Maggie and Shiv to share eight things in this meme, it’s an interesting way to learn about folks, so here are 8 things you may or may not know.

1) I used to be a music major: Being creative has been threaded through my life, I started playing piano at age 4. I eventually picked up trombone, and started to play jazz in junior high; won a bunch of awards. In college I continued this and was a jazz performance major then realized that unless you were really exceptional (I wasn’t) then I had to find another career. I found the web, and I never looked back, it met all my creative desires. I’m listening to all the music that I love often while I’m writing, researching, or working, it hasn’t gone away. Rather than the 88 keyed piano keyboard, I’ve just found a new one, the qwerty.

2) I was born and raised in Fresno, the bible belt of California. I always felt a little out of place in Fresno, it’s certainly not as diverse and open minded as the bay area (although it’s changed now) and my roots are of a rural boy.

3) The first website I made was for a college project: And it involved me wife, we were in the same BICS (Business Information Computer Systems) class and were tasked to build a working HTML model of an eCommerce site. The products we were assigned were Lladro and Disney collectibles. I gleefully did all the work, and she didn’t seem to mind. I think we got a B.

4) My first task at a real company was horrible. My first task as an intern was in IT, I had to scrub the employee directory database and look for inconsistencies, holes, duplicates, and correct them. I screwed it up, as I got my revisions wrong, and had to redo it all over again.

5) I thought my career was going to be intranet focused: For a long time, I thought I was going to be developing web strategies for intranets, when I ran really hard into social media in summer of 2005 I knew that was it, I never looked back since.

6) My family and friends are surprised: I was a wild and crazy boy, and didn’t seem to have the responsibility in school to succeed in the workplace. In retrospect, as much as it was my energy of a youth, I also realize now that structured school systems aren’t for everyone, I thrive in creative environments, not forced learning and forced exploration.

7) For our Chinese wedding we did a Salsa dance. It’s true, we shocked our entire family by doing a salsa dance at our wedding, it was choregraphed by a local instructor, we took over 100 lessons over a few years, and went to salsa clubs, it was our hobby for a few years. As a result, the party was so energized that even the oldest aunties and youngest cousins were excited to dance the night away.

8 ) I was very nervous on my first public speech. In 2005, I gave my first presentation at the Marketers’ creativity event, and I was nerve wracked days before the event, overplanned, and had a hard time relaxing. Over time, you just get used to it, and now I really look forward to most public presentations.

I’m supposed to tag other folks for this meme to spread, but I’m going to try something different. I’ll let YOU decide to share your eight things, just link to this post, share your eight, then link to eight others. If you don’t have a blog, feel free to share in the comments of this very post.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 7th, 2008 at 6:05 am and is filed under Ruminations, Social Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.