A few things about me

Awhile back, Scott suggested I add a bio of some kind to this page. Well, in honor of my birthday, this post is it. If you’re curious about some possibly interesting but mostly obscure facts about me, then please click on the More link.

• I was born in Staten Island, New York. My parents and all four of my grandparents were also born there.
• I attended Sacred Heart Elementary School until the sixth grade. My paternal grandmother was my second-grade teacher.
• I’ve worn glasses since I was 10. I’ve never worn contact lenses, and have never wanted to. I’m considering Lasik surgery, but I’m not ready to do it yet.
• In sixth grade, I transferred to William A. Morris Intermediate School because they had advanced classes. One of the things I got to do there was to join the band. I learned to play the saxophone, and I still play today.
• I attended Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan. In four years of taking the subway to school (plus two additional summers after high school when I had a job in the city), I never saw any crime. I’ve been mugged twice in my life, both times within sight of our house on Staten Island. The first time, coming home from school my watch was stolen. The second time, walking home from the local pharmacy, I wasn’t carrying any money or wearing a watch, so they let me go.
• One of my schoolmates at Stuyvesant was Lucy Liu. To the best of my recollection, I never knew her then. She doesn’t appear in my Class of 1984 yearbook.
• One of my teachers at Stuyvesant was Frank McCourt. He wasn’t famous then, but he was a pretty cool English teacher.
• Despite growing up in New York, I’ve never been to the Statue of Liberty. I did get up to the observation deck at the World Trade Center once, but it was a cloudy day so I couldn’t see very far.
• The first baseball game I ever went to was at Shea Stadium in 1974. I saw a lot of games at Yankee Stadium over the years because my dad’s law firm had season tickets. I saw the 1977 All Star Game, a few playoff games and one World Series game, and the infamous 1983 Pine Tar Game. I’ve seen games at the Astrodome, the ballpark formerly known as Enron Field, Qualcomm Stadium, Wrigley Field, and Jingu Stadium in Tokyo, plus minor league games in Oregon, Montana, Wisconsin, and Indiana. I’ve written up some of these experiences here.
• In 1984, I headed off to college in San Antonio at Trinity University. My Stuy classmates all thought I was crazy to go to Texas. One of them signed my yearbook with the words “Remember, once aboard a Texas filly, no other filly will do.” 1984 was also the last time I was completely clean-shaven, on Graduation Day. I’ve always had at least a mustache since then. The current variation is a goatee, which I’ve worn for about eight years now.
• Early on in my freshman year, a writer for the now-defunct Houston Post came to campus. She was doing a story on National Merit scholars at Texas universities. The dean of admissions asked about a dozen students, including me, to meet this reporter for lunch and talk to her. I must have made an impression, because I was mentioned in the opening sentence of her article, which ran in the Post‘s Sunday magazine. Unfortunately, I no longer have a copy of this.
• I joined the Trinity newspaper, The Trinitonian, in my sophomore year as a sportwriter. Midway through the year I was given a sports column, as the previous columnist graduated in December. That column was called “Off the Kuff”. I wrote it for two more years at Trinity, then for two years while a grad student at Rice. I won the Texas Collegiate Journalism “Best Sports Column” award for a small-college paper in my senior year. I’m more proud of that than any other academic achievement.
• One of the quirks of being born in 1966 had to do with the drinking age in Texas. It was 19 when I started college, meaning that I became a legal drinker during my freshman year. On September 1, 1986, the drinking age went up to 21. There was no grandfather clause, so after almost 18 months of being legal I once again was not allowed to drink. Fortunately, my roommate’s 21st birthday was in early November. We stocked up beforehand, then held on for two months.
• My paternal grandmother, Jessie Kuffner, passed away in October, 1986. When I went home for Christmas that year, I was presented with her green 1969 Nova, the car on which I learned to drive. I drove it down to San Antonio with the help of my roomie Greg, who’d come along with me to New York. It had 53,000 miles on it when I got it, and had 50,000 more when I finally had to get rid of it five years later. It had no air conditioning, an AM/FM radio (an upgrade from my parents, as the car originally only had an AM radio), and most importantly came equipped with Our Lady of Automatic Transmission, still the coolest car accessory I’ve ever had.
• After graduating Trinity with a BA in math, I came to Houston to attend Rice University as a grad student. Graduate school was not a good choice for me, and I quit after 2.5 years. I did manage to get a job thanks to a couple of classmates who were working for a small software company on the side. That was my entry into the world of information technology.
• I worked for that small company for three years, getting briefly laid off at one point due to their cash flow problems. Eventually, one of my laid-off-coworkers, who was the same former Rice classmate that had helped me get that job to begin with, gave me a lead on another one. That was with an outsourcing company that put me on a consulting gig at the large multinational firm where I now work. I did three years with the outsourcing firm, then jumped to the multinational. I’ve been here for nearly ten years now.
• In 1996, I attended nine weddings, including weddings in Montana, Ohio, and New York.
• In 1997, I changed jobs (from the outsourcer to the multinational), got a dog, met and got engaged to Tiffany, and bought a house. It was a very busy year.
• Tiffany and I met through a mutual friend, Nicole, whom Tiffany knew in elementary school and whom I knew at Rice. Nicole brought Tiffany to a show at the Mucky Duck by the now-defunct Celtic band Ceili’s Muse. Tiffany wound up sitting next to me. I called her first, to invite her along to the Houston International Festival to listen to Marcia Ball. She called me a few days after that to invite me to a movie (we wound up seeing Inventing the Abbotts).

That’s about all I can think of right now. Any questions?

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