OK - I give up - here's my five things

Now it's Oliver who's tagged me in this five things meme running rampant in blogspace. This is the third time someone's tagged me recently and, since my original response was posted on a former blog at Weblogs, Inc. that is no longer active, I surrender and will play along - to a degree (see below). So, without further ado, here are five things you may not know about me:

1. I'm a recovering graphic designer and spent the first part of my professional life working in the publishing, advertising, and design businesses as (at various times) a stringer for the NY Times, a production manager, a columnist, associate and managing editor, designer, art director, and creative director.
2. I'm a long-time Mac user. I've owned a Mac since the 512K first came out and, due to my 10-year ownership of a digital service bureau in the mid-80's to mid-90's, I've bought hundreds of Macs ranging from the Mac Plus to the early Power Macs. Currently I own a cobbled together beige G3 PowerMac, a 20" Core Duo iMac, and a 13" white MacBook.
3. I'm a graduate of Syracuse University with two degrees - a BA in English Linguistics and a BS in Graphic Design from the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications (and the irony of that degree being labeled BS is in no way lost on me). As a result I know about deep snow and great college basketball.
4. During the dot com boom I helped build and market a web-based digital asset management application that was, at one time, used by a number of Hollywood motion picture and television studios. The application was built using open-source tools and I often wonder how much easier it would have been to do what we did then with the much better tools available today.
5. I've always wanted to write a book and am 99% there. I'm in the final stages of completing the manuscript for The Unofficial Guide to Microsoft Outlook 2007 which will be published early next year by Wiley. My next book, when I make the decision to give up any notion of having a real life again, will almost definitely not be another software guide. I'd like to do a book-length treatment of the ideas I discussed in my Work is Broken essay which I contributed to the More Space project.

OK. There you have it. I said I'd play along to a certain degree and I have. Where I'm breaking off from this chain letter madness is by not tagging anyone else by name. Instead, I'll open it up to you. If you want to jump in, post on your blog and leave a TalkBack comment with a link to your post. I'll add any and all links to this post as updates. If that means, as Oliver warned, that I get seven years of bad luck, so be it.