Twenty-Five Things

5chw4r7z tagged me, so I must succumb.

Rules: Once you've been tagged, you are supposed to write a note with 25 random things, facts, habits, or goals about you and post it. At the end, choose 5 people to be tagged. If I tagged you, it's because I want to know more about you.

I am also fortunate enough to been tagged with the 25-item version, and not the 7-item version that has also been circulating. I don't have much time, so here goes.

1. I grew up in Northern KY.
2. I spent two years in Santa Barbara, CA, getting my Masters. I really went so I could live on the beach.
3. Other than that I have lived in the Cincinnati area my entire life.
4. I last visited the Philippines in 2000. Need to make time to go again.
5. I am one-quarter Filipino and three-quarters Chinese.
6. I speak no foreign languages.
7. My research area in graduate school was in machine learning and information retrieval.
8. I once took (and passed) the motorcycle course at Great Oaks. That is the only period of time I've ridden motorcycles.
9. I have two tattoos (vagaries of youth).
10. I am an Eagle Scout.
11. I once wandered around Hong Kong for a week.
12. I love Northern KY and Cincinnati equally. (Southeast IN can suck it.)
13. I am exactly 6' tall.
14. I maintained a personal blog from 1997 to 2005, writing 246 entries. Only, in 1997, they weren't called "blogs," they were called "online diaries."
15. On that note, once I discovered "the web" in college I couldn't stop. I spent hours in the computer lab hand-coding websites in HTML, learning vi and Unix in the process. I like to think all those sleepless nights did some good for my career. It certainly did not for my social life.
16. I am a pretty good hearts player.
17. I am stalling after 16 items.
18. I have over 70 first cousins, but I don't see any of them very much.
19. I could talk about software for hours, but no one would listen.
20. In another life, I would be an illustrator.
21. I would love to write a book (but wouldn't all bloggers?). I could go fiction or non-fiction, either way.
22. I can competently water ski, downhill ski, wakeboard, snowboard, ice skate, and mountain bike. I have skydived, scuba dived, white-water rafted, and rock climbed at least once.
23. I played basketball in high school. Never started varsity except for senior night.
24. I started Make Cincinnati Weird and the Cincinnati Dealer.
25. The Dealer was a ton of fun, and, at its peak received 300 visits a day and was mentioned in several print publications and once on radio.

I'm tagging Ashish, Mike, Kevin, Maya, and Gina, mainly because they are all in my feed reader and have not been tagged yet.