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Real content coming soon, meanshile, a content generator stolen from kitanzi, who got it from tigerbright:

I want you to ask me something you think you should know about me. Something that should be obvious, but you have no idea about.

Then post this in your LJ and find out what people don’t know about you.

Also, if you’d like me to interview you (3 questions), let me know as part of the comment.

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33 Comments

  1. Hey! I did this one too! 🙂 I like this one.
    Hmm… something that should be obvious… ok -- how about this, pick your favorite:

    How did you discover filk? or -- How did you discover fandom?

    What shaped your musical interests? (for example, many of my favorite groups I learned about by friends or lovers, my mom was a big influence as was my brother etc…)

    When or how did you realize that polyamoury was a choice that would work for you?

    • Oh and yeah! Ask me. 🙂

      • 1. What’s a song you’ve always wanted to do for a recoding but never have, for whatever reason.

        2. You can perform a duet with any one living musician. Who and why?

        3. What do you find most challenging about being a parent?

        • 1. What’s a song you’ve always wanted to do for a recoding but never have, for whatever reason.

          Ooh! Well -- “A Healing in this Night” was going to be on Current Obsessions but we just didn’t get a good enough version -- I wanted it with Ed’s gorgeous piano accompaniment and a killer chorus and the chorus never happened because of the way we had to record. It is a song I introduced to the filk community (as far as I know) and one that is very special to me, I sang it at my father’s memorial service. “Roses Blue” by Joni Mitchell was also on the long list and didn’t make the cut. There are so many songs I’d love to record. Just today I’ve been toying with the idea of a jazzy acoustic piano and solo voice recording of “The Long and Winding Road” sort of like the version of “Here COmes the Sun” that I did. (probably because I was listening to the Beatles “Let It Be -- Naked” album I just got for my birthday. 😉
          I’d also love a chance to sing more rock, more jazz, and more early music.

          2. You can perform a duet with any one living musician. Who and why?
          Argh! Who… hmmm… Let’s see -- well -- I sound similar enough to Sally Rogers (and like her music a lot) that I think it would be interesting and fun to perform with her. I’d love a chance to sing with Claudia Schmidt or Holly Cole. Argh! Just one? 😉 Ah, I think I’d sound very good with James Keelahan or Dougie McClean… Of course, Pete Seeger is one of my absolute heroes. Ah I dunno -- so many singers, so few opportunities! 😉

          3. What do you find most challenging about being a parent?
          Getting enough sleep. er… well…Being consistent and firm with rules. It is really hard for me. (although the book “123 Magic” has helped considerably and made life MUCH less stressful around here for all of us I’m happy to say).

          The problem is that I really do see children as people. And that is good. But, they aren’t adults. And in a way I forget that at least on some level. I try to rationalize and explain and convince when much much more often -- most of the time really -- I should just set reasonable limits and rules that make children safe and teach them social boundaries. I think I’m learning this but slowly.

          Another book that is helping is “Teaching Children to Care” “Classroom management for ethical and academic growth”. It’s a theory often called “The Responsive Classroom” and it is gaining popularity I hear. Because it works, it places responsibility for good behavior with the students, and it creates a democratic classroom more conducive to real learning.

    • How did you discover filk? or -- How did you discover fandom?

      I discovered filk in the mid-1980s at a convention in Virginia. It was the only thing going on late at night, after the convention hall shut down. Three guys in a hotel room with guitars, and they let me sit and listen. I didn’t become *active* in filk until 1998, at which point monthly housefilks in Atlanta had begun.

      Fandom I’ve been involved with in some fashion since about 1980 or so. My mother started taking me to cons because they looked like fun. Starting out it was mostly little comic book cons, but we eventually started going to bigger cons further away. Magnum Opus Con in Georgia was a frequent destination. Of course, I was already an SF nut before that, having gotten sucked into Star Trek and Doctor Who and comic books and Danny Dunn novels and all that sort of thing. 🙂

      What shaped your musical interests?

      Wow, big topic. I’ve always loved music, of all different kinds. From my mom’s old record collection, I got all my old Motown and Beatles records. From my great-aunt Hazel, my love of Classical music. My ex introduced me to Horslips and Kate Bush. I cannot recall a time that I wasn’t interested in music, and especially in lyrically engaging music, which is one of the things I love about folk and filk — they tend to feature songs where the words matter.

      When or how did you realize that polyamoury was a choice that would work for you?

      I’ve always had the capacity to be in love with multiple people. I realized this a long time ago, when I found out that falling for person X didn’t mean that I had stopped loving person Y. Back then, I just figured there was something wrong with me.

      Meeting people who were actually living openly polyamourous lives, such as and , gave me an insight that there was a “third way”, as it were. At the time, I thought it was a curious and interesting notion, but one that for various reasons, largely involving the person I was then involved with, wouldn’t work for me.

      Then I met . I fell for her the moment we met (and, unbeknownst to me, she for me) right about the time that my relationship with was starting the inevitable downhill slide toward its ultimate dissolution. When we saw each other again, some 10 months later, it became obvious to us both that we fancied each other and that something between us was a good idea. At the time, she was still living with F. and had no intention of not doing so, so I had to wrap my head around the idea of being the secondary in an actively poly relationship. The more I considered it, the more comfortable it seemed to me. At this point, i cannot really imaging not being poly…it allows me to be myself and comfortable with myself in a way I never could before.

  2. This may seem banal, but I am curious: How did you come by your LJ name, and what is its significance?

    I’d be happy to answer 3 questions.

    • Not banal, though by this point certainly a “Frequently Asked” Question:
      I was at a Flash Girls concert several years ago, and during a re-tuning break, Lorraine Garland mentioned that they were going to pass a hat around after the show, because if they couldn’t raise enough money to pay for their trip home, they’d have to sell their cats. Everyone went “Awwwww.” Emma Bull looked up from her retuning and said “Oh, stop. It’s not like anyone would WANT them.” I replied “Well, maybe if you autographed them.” Much laughter. Later, while exchanging e-mail with Lorraine, I mentioned this conversation and she said “Oh, I remember you! You’re the autographed cat guy”. Seemed as good a nickname as any, and it’s always available when I need a screen name. 🙂

      Three questions:

      1. How did you get involved with the zoo project?

      2. Of all the photos you’ve taken, what’s your favourite?

      3. Who is your favourite songwriter to borrow from?

  3. What kind of music do you like best to write, and what kind to listen to?

    Feel free to ask back. 🙂

    • I best like to write music that is entertaining in some way. Mostly, I write things which are either amusing to me, or which say something that is important to me. Generally, I am not the sort of person, like is, for instance, who can just say ‘I’m going to sit down and write a song today’ and produce anything of quality. So i wait for inspiration to strike me and follow it where it leads.

      Three for you:

      1) Are you still in contact with anyone else from the old UMNews days?

      2) How did you end up working for Microsoft?

      3) In your LJ interests, you list “jobs daughters”. What is that about, and why do you list it as an interest?

      • 1) Nope. Only current UM contact I have is my wife, and she was pretty much too late to be involved with UMNEWS.

        2) I’m not entirely sure. 🙂 I had been a Microsoft MVP for a while, which is an award they give for volunteer peer support. Since this “volunteer” support usually happened at work when I was supposed to be doing other things, there was a certain amount of tension there. 🙂 One day I thought to myself, “Self, wouldn’t it be neat if you could get paid to do this?” and sent a resume off to Microsoft support. Shortly afterward, I got a call from a contracting agency asking me if I would be interested in a position that bore a definite resemblance to the one I had just applied for. So, I don’t know if it was a coincidence, or if MS sent it to the agency.

        After less than two months, I was hired on full-time, and stayed there for almost three years, before they let me go because they didn’t like the way I was (not) doing my job. After delivering pizza for a living for a few months, I was hired on as a contractor (again) by the group that produced the product that I was previously doing support for. I did that for a full year, took the mandatory 100-day break to prove I was a temp and not a permatemp, and was hired back.

        3) Job’s Daughters, like The International Order of the Rainbow for Girls, is a fraternal service organization for teenaged girls which is affiliated with Freemasonry. Donna was a Rainbow Girl when she was growing up, and remained involved after she became a majority member. I joined the Masons to be able to work with her in Rainbow and Eastern Star. For some reason, there are no Jobies in New England, so we didn’t know anything about them until we moved west.

        The name of the order is a reference to the last line of the book of Job: “And in all the land were no women found so fair as the Daughters of Job; and their Father gave them inheritance among their brethren.”

      • Oh, btw:

        FLAME SNED

  4. Sure, interview me.

    Do you like your job?

    • I tend to like my job, on the whole. It has its own individual stresses, and at times I wish I could be independantly wealthy and purue a life of leisure, but until that happens, this suits me better than anything else I’d ever put a hand to.

      Three for you:

      1) What have you found most rewarding about being a parent?
      2) If you could go back to school, what would you study?
      3) Given the ability to do so, what is the one thing you would most like to do right now?

      • 1) Watching her be happy and knowing I did something, whether it’s changing her diaper or just smiling and talking to her, to make that happen.

        2) Something that could make me a living. I’m still trying to figure out what; when i get that sorted out, I *will* probably go back to school. Right now, I’m thinking sign language, because it is incredibly cool *and* if I get good enough at it, can make me a living; I don’t find there to be much overlap. If I were just going back to school for the fun of it, with no intention of getting a job from it afterwards, probably history.

        3) This minute? Have Grace fall asleep on my shoulder the way she did when she was two or three months old.

  5. How did you and Kitanzi first meet?

    And yes, please interview me.

    • We first met back in January of 2001, when she came to Gafilk with her then boyfriend, who was an online friend of mine. We immediately developed a huge crush on one another, only we were both under the assumption that it was entirely one sided and the other didn’t possibly feel the same way. We chatted a lot on ICQ and #filkhaven over the course of the next 10 months, and then finally bumped into each other again at OVFF, where we finally realized that the attraction was mutual. We got together at the end of the weekend.:)

      Hrm.

      1) What’s surprised you most about being a parent?
      2) What’s your favourite work related project you’ve ever worked on.?
      3) What’s your all-time favourite synth model?

      • Wow. Some good thought-provoking questions here.

        1) What’s surprised you most about being a parent?

        That I can hold my daughter and not be afraid of dropping her. And that I can change a poopy diaper and not toss my cookies while doing so.

        2) What’s your favourite work related project you’ve ever worked on.?

        Probably the virtual prototyping initiative for AFRL back in ’97. The goal was to enable the sharing of 3-D data between government and industry partners. The problem we were trying to solve was to enable CAD programs (e.g. CATIA, AutoCAD, Unigraphics) to share their part data between the systems. We used VRML as the lingua franga between them. I wrote a couple of the translator programs, and got to see the results in a standard web browser with a special plug-in. Unfortunately, a manager was assigned to the project that didn’t have a grasp of the technical challenges, and eventually, the project died. Now it’s commonplace.

        3) What’s your all-time favourite synth model?

        My “I happen to LIKE old technology!” bias is showing here: The Minimoog.

        If you’ve seen the control panel, the sound generation moves in a logical left-to-right, top-to-bottom manner: oscillators, mixer, filter and contours, loudness contour. The modular systems were more versatile, but you really had to know what you were doing in order to use them effectively. Many new synths feature press-a-button-and-get-a-canned-sound. Bore-ring. Plus the Mini had the pitch-bend and modulation wheels — great for performance. I’ve yet to figure out how to do the same thing in CakeWalk Music Creator. It’s a MIDI function, but I don’t know which one.

        ARP may have had the better oscillators, but the Moog filter rocks! Very steep low-pass cutoff at -24 dB/octave.

        Sequential Circuits used a similar layout for the controls of their Prophet-5 and subsequent synths. I looked at the control panel of a Yamaha DX7 — great sounds, but how the hell does someone program that thing? I said the same with some of the other newer synth workstations, like the Korg Triton and Yamaha Motif.

        Runner-up: The Kurzweil K2000 series of synth workstations. I saw the K2000 at a local music store in ’93, and it was love at first sight. I’ve been lusting for one ever since, even though newer models have come out since. (The late Lloyd Landa played a K1000.)

        Oh yeah….another reason I like Moogs so much is that they made them in Cheektowaga, NY — not far from my home town.

  6. What has been the most rewarding thing about working on the administration for JediMUD. The most frustrating?

    And you can always ask me anything you want, but this time you get a pretty gold embossed invitation to ask me any three questions. 🙂

    • The most rewarding thing has been the deep friendships I’ve managed to foster there — even a couple of true loves. The reason I stay is because of the people.

      The most frustating thing is the inability to do anything there without having to endure a vocal chorus of complaints from people who don’t like whatever the change is. If we gave away free gold, someone would complain it was undermining the economy. 🙂

      Hrm. Three questions for you…

      1. What do you like best about living in Michigan?
      2. What did you most enjoy about living in Tennessee? (There had to be SOMETHING!)
      3. What’s the most embarassing thing that’s ever happened to you that you’re willing to admit to in public? 🙂

      • 1. Being near my friends. And at times, my family. 😛

        2. I know this is going to sound horrible, but the best part of living in Nashville was probably OpryMills Mall, just because it had -everything- you could ever want, including an IMAX.

        3. Happened to me, or that I did to myself? When I was 19 and newly old enough to go to Canada to drink, I had a couple of beers and then somehow managed to get myself into a wet teeshirt contest and flash the judges up on the stage. I was a lot thinner than I am now, but still not incredibly thin. I didn’t win. 😛

  7. Too many questions -- I only bearly know you. (though I do think you’re neato).

    What do you do for a living?

    And yes, please interview me.

    • I am the Senior Systems Administrator/Systems Team Leader at an ISP in Alpharetta. Over the last year I’ve been slowly transitioning more and more towards a managerial role and away from a technical role, but due to the nature of the department I lead I have to keep my technical skills current.

      Questions for you:

      1. What do you want to be when you grow up?;)
      2. What is your favourite 3WS song? Why?
      3. How did you find your current spiritual path?

  8. How did you go from being an English major to a sysadmin?

    Btw, do go ahead and ask me something; I’ve already ganked the same meme from .

    • I never finished my English degree, and was having trouble finding the financial stability necessary to get back into school. My computer skills were mostly self-taught but very solid, and I ended up lucking into a job as a teacher at a business school in Athens. During that time, I had become friends with the founder of an ISP in Atlanta while negotiating with them to host JediMUD. When I got fed up with corperate politics at my teaching job, I quit and eventually went to work for that ISP in tech support, working my way up to the Network Ops department.

      3 for you:

      1. What’s your dream broadcasting job?
      2. Do you ever do serious songs? (I’ve only ever heard you do comedy.)
      3. What would be your dream lineup of guests for a filkcon (either as an organizer, or an attendee. Or both.)

      • 1. My own TV show where I could do what I want, no holds barred. It’d be a combo of news and entertainment, but with much sharper breaks between the two than something like The Today Show or Good Morning America.

        More realistically, I’d love a radio news job where I could earn enough to live comfortably. It’d be nice to be able to work in broadcasting and have my weekends back.

        2. Yes, albeit very rarely. When I do funny songs, folks laugh. When I do serious stuff, they cry, squirm, and I get lukewarm applause. Oddly enough, Dr. Jane/James’ favorite song of mine is one of my few serious pieces.

        3. Me as GOH. [g,d,rlh]

        Seriously, I don’t dare answer that one out loud. As someone who runs a con, I feel it’d be undiplomatic to say it; note that I duck behind the comfort of pointing out that the Consonance concom votes on the GOHs and TM. Besides, I know there’d be someone I’d inadvertently leave out because I wasn’t thinking, and there are folks I’d leave out on purpose who other folks would notice were conspicuously absent, and that would be even more embarassing.

        Another thing: Some of what makes a filk con for me are the other attendees, rather than the big-name guests. There are folks I look forward to seeing and hanging around with at different cons who aren’t performers. For me, half of the experience of going to a con is just plain hanging out with folks.

  9. What would you like to be reincarnated as (after a good long run in this life, of course), presuming reincarnation exists?

    And sure, interview me. 🙂

    • A girl. And after that good long run is over, the memories of both so I can compare and contrast the experiences, assuming that I’m not allowed to keep memories into that experience. 🙂

      1. How’s married life treating you?
      2. If you could change one thing about your current job, what would it be?
      3. If you had to leave Boston, where would you most like to live, and why?

      • 1. Our relationship is still marvelous; our deep understanding of each other didn’t vanish overnight, nor did we suddenly start becoming more demanding. Problems that existed before have not magically vanished either, but we’re still pretty good on working on them.

        2. Er. *thinks* Having my workload magically fit into 40 hours, so that I would actually finish my to-do list and not have things fall off to be remembered by me or my bosses a month later, would be great. That would probably require several things changing, though.

        3. Hard to say. I’ve been hearing marvelous things about the Pacific Northwest, but I’ve never been there, so I don’t know for sure that it would suit me. I really liked London, but like NYC, it’s more a place to visit and live *near* than live *in*, and I don’t know much about the suburbs. I very much liked the feel of Cardiff when I was there, but I was only there for a few hours. I don’t think I could live anywhere in the South for long without getting into frequent political arguments with coworkers and PTA members (presuming I managed to have a kid) and fellow synagogue members (and that would hurt the most). I wouldn’t be able to live in New Hampshire or Colorado for the same reason. Toronto would suit me politically, but it’s *flat*; I have the same problem with Michigan (except the UP, which has serious economic issues) and Ohio and several western states. I also don’t like extremes of climate, which is one of the reasons I really want to investigate the PNW.

  10. I’m having too much fun reading other people’s answers to come up with any questions myself (yet); but feel free to interview me.

    • No fair! If I don’t get questions, how can I generate content without coming up with my own ideas? 🙂

      1. How did you come to start the Filk Foundation?
      2. What’s your favourite memory in filk?
      3. How are you adjusting to having your daughter off in college? (And how’s she doing out there?)

  11. Hmmmm… questions questions…

    1. Where do you purchase your Personal Technology ™?
    2. Is it true you were once almost involved in an actual kidnapping?
    3. How many Marillion albums do you own?

    And interview me if you want -- although I think you already know too much!

    Your old pal,

    K

    • Re: Hmmmm… questions questions…

      1. The Love Shack in Norcross is my current supplier, though I’ve been known to drop in on other vendors if I happen to be passing them. 🙂

      2. Yes, I was. It taught me a valuable lesson, too: Make sure you have a dedicated accomplice who won’t back out on you at the last minute!

      3. At the moment, five. None of which, astoundingly, are _Misplaced Childhood_. I simply must correct that.

      Questions for you:

      1. What did you enjoy most about grad school?
      2. What are you going to teach in LA?
      3. When are you coming to visit me? 🙂

      • Re: Hmmmm… questions questions…

        Oooooo… being difficult, eh? Hrm… ok then… 😉

        1. Yikes! Enjoy? Grad school? You’re kidding me, right? 😉

        Seriously, though, I think what I’ve enjoyed most about grad school, aside from picking up my brilliant husband-to-be, has been the chance to be surrounded a group of very smart, quirky people with significantly fewer twits among them. (Of course, when there are twits, they are twits, but that can’t be helped 🙂

        2. Math, of all things! Be very very afraid 🙂

        3. Hmmm… good question. I have been needing to get down to Atlanta for some time now, and still haven’t done it. Afraid it’ll have to be after next year, though 🙁 Bad Krista. No cookie.

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