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Thursday, January 29, 2009

25 Random Things About Me

This idea of sharing 25 random things about yourself is going around facebook right now. Here's my 25 things. If you would like to join this festival of oversharing, please consider this my invitation to you to reveal mundane and wonderful things about yourself and your past.

1. When I was little, we had a neighborhood band. I'd play the records and my friends would mouth the words.

2. I loved riding my bike around the neighborhood. I got an odometer for it and tried to ride a certain number of miles each day.

3. I bought a little suction cup microphone from Radio Shack and recorded phone calls with random people I'd call from the phone book. I'd interview them about hockey.

4. I liked to remix albums with questions I'd ask about news stories. So I'd ask a question and then play some record lyrics as an answer. I'd spend hours doing this.

5. I was the yearbook photographer for my high school.

Rock and Talk - WMWM Salem

6. Prior to going to college I volunteered a Salem State College's radio staion WMWM and learned how to be a DJ.

7. I was the yearbook photographer in college at UMass Amherst and got some great shots of the Talking Heads. I'll have to see if I can find those.

8. I saw Elvis Costello on his first US tour.

9. Lynn had a huge downtown fire so I went down to take photos. I ended up helping the local news station, WLYN-AM, with their news reports.

10. When I went to UMass Amherst I couldn't get on the college radio station so I did a shift at Smith College. The girls all ignored me.

11. Later on I get a shift on Friday's at Amherst College's WAMH. Jeff Berlin, now of KISS 108, was the DJ before me and taught me a lot of great DJ techniques. I enjoy listening to him when I'm down in Florida. He's 'the DJ' on a lot of stations nationwide.

12. I was also the UMass Daily Collegian school newspaper photographer. One time I had my camera and took a photo of Penn Jillette in the school cafeteria when he stood up and started eating fire to promote a local show. The lesson the newspaper editor told us was to always have our camera on us. It paid off.

13. My first computer was the Macintosh 128k. I bought it while working at a computer store in downtown Boston after seeing Steve Jobs introduce it on the East coast at the Boston Computer Society. We got to buy it for something like $995.

14. I was meeting co-ordinator for the Boston Computer Society Macintosh users group for 2 1/2 years. We had some fun trips to MacWorld SF.

15. At WLYN-AM in Lynn I was the morning news reporter. I was training to be the weekend DJ on WFNX-FM, and ready to go, when the station was sold to WFNX.

Kathy Griffin at Eagle 93.7

16. At WEGQ - Eagle 93.7, I was a producer for 2 1/2 years and wrote jokes for the morning show team of Karlson and McKenzie. I learned how to edit audio really well there.

17. One of the guest comedians at Eagle 93.7 introduced me to the head writer for Jay Leno and I became a monologue writer for a few years.

18. At the Boston Phoenix I worked as a front end developer and user interface designer on their dating site. It was white labeled to a number of big media companies and I handled the customization with a great graphics team.

19. I also spent some time at WFNX with the morning show team of Greg Wymer, Neal Robert, and Henry Santoro. Lots of fun.

20. The Democratic Convention in Boston in 2004 rejected me as a blogger, but I went anyway and video blogged activities surrounding the convention from Boston each night.

21. I was a DJ at Boston College on WZBC. Peter Choyce got me in.



22. I have a button collection.

23. I was in Jason Scott's BBS Documentary. [ video clip ] Sometimes people recognize me from that. Last time it happened was at MacWorld Boston.

24. I was the first to pay for a Pro Blogger account. They don't have those any more.

25. I taught Ryanne Hodson how to videoblog.

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