5 Things You Didn't Know About Me

OK, I guess it's my turn to play. Randall Newton of AECnews chose to tag me from his personal blog for the "5 Things You Didn't Know About Me" meme, so here goes...

1. Although I've always lived in the Pacific Northwest and love the four season climate, I'm not a big fan of snow. A few weeks of it around Christmas is more than enough for me. Any more than that is overrated as far as I'm concerned.
    
2. I used to be a volunteer bugler for veteran's funerals.
    
3. When I was about 10 or 11 years old, the local art museum had an exhibit of Frank Lloyd Wright's renderings for the summer. Two or three times a week I made the long round-trip walk from home, just to stand and stare at his work. At that point, my plans to be either a truck driver or cartoonist went out the window in favor of becoming an architect.
    
4. From college on, I wanted nothing to do with computers at all. I hated them. Punch cards convinced me that computers were worthless compared to creative people. Then while working as a mechanical designer in my twenties, they brought in a computer running AutoCAD, and told us we'd need to start time-sharing it because that was going to be our future. At first I simply avoided it. I gave my time to everyone else, and I just kept my trusted manual processes that had always worked so well for me. A few months into it, they told me if I didn’t change, my job would be at risk. I didn't take it well, and I decided I'd prove them wrong. Let's just say that not only didn't my plan work as intended. It actually had the opposite effect. It convinced me that not only was *I* wrong, but that I needed to be less resistant to change in my life -- a fact that has been reconfirmed over and over again. Later when I was teaching AutoCAD, I'd often tell the long version of this story. It was especially valuable with older students with a chip on their shoulder about CAD.
    
5. My first work computer was an HP 150. An XT-class monochrome system with a touch screen. The first computer I bought for home was a 286 10mhz with 2MB of RAM and XVGA graphics. That along with a license for AutoCAD R9 from my local AutoCAD dealer ran me $9,000 in 1989.

Now a quick one for extra cedit...

• Despite the social climate of the late 60s and early 70s, I wore a crew cut until Junior High School.  My dad wasn't a fan of long-haired hippies.  Despite wearing the right nehru jacket and Beatle boots, the crew cut never let me pull off the look.  To this day I still only get two haircuts a year at most.  Come to think of it, I'm actually overdue now.

Now, to pass the torch... I'm tagging David Cohn, Robin Capper, and Matt Softich. David is a friend and colleague in the industry, Robin is a someone I respect but haven't been fortunate enough to meet in the industry, and Matt is a long-time friend completely outside the industry.