There's this "five things about me" tagging meme going around, and I've now been tagged by Bill, Craig and Andrea.

1. I grew up in the middle of Minnesota, surrounded by hundreds of acres of forest and lakes. Our nearest neighbor was a mile away. The nearest town 14 miles away, and the nearest real town over 30 miles away. The nearest city: a 2.5 hour drive. As a youth, I lived one of those lives of adventure you might read about from long in the past. I spent my time fishing, hunting, trapping, snowmobiling, boating, swimming and generally wandering through the woods and lakes of central Minnesota.

2. I love alternative metal and alternative rock. Rush, Queensryche, Godsmack, Linkin Park and so forth. Good rock, to me, requires thought-provoking lyrics, evocative sound and serious riffs!

3. I love speculative fiction (the fancy name for science fiction and fantasy). Tolkien, Asimov, Niven, Reynolds, Scalzi, McKillip, Norton and many others are on my favorites list. Between all these books, and my wife's collection of all the essays, letters and other writings of America's founding fathers (plus many random other books on many topics) we have an entire room set aside as a library.

4. My first overseas trip was to London, to attend a Babylon 5 convention to commemorate the conclusion of the show. My wife was (and technically still is) a moderator on the Babylon 5 moderated newsgroup (remember usenet? :) ).

5. I'm a would-be game developer. Years ago I wrote a MUD for the DEC VAX called Mordecai. It consumed all the resources the university VAX could muster back then, and I even ended up working with the Operations guys to build in capabilities to throttle the game so it wouldn't be playable during prime homework usage periods and that sort of thing. I've written bits and pieces of a much more ambitious .NET equivalent, but that project stalled a while back. The reality today is that game development is such a small part of building a game in total (graphics, physics engines and so forth are a much bigger part) that it is hard to get as excited about this stuff as I used to be...

Kindly enough, and because I don't have time to track down who's been tagged or not, I'm not tagging anyone, so this thread of execution ends here ;)