• One summer in high school I sailed from Long Island to Detroit with my dad and brother. It took around 8 weeks, I think. We had moved from New York the previous summer, and we were bringing the boat with us a year late. It’s a 1977 Ranger 33, which my dad restored beautifully, but it’s just about the smallest boat you’d consider taking such a long trip on. There were quite a few (mis)adventures. Back then, the boat didn’t have radar or GPS, so fog was scary whether we were in the Atlantic circumnavigating Nova Scotia or dodging gigantic tankers, sailing against the current in the St. Lawrence seaway. One stormy night my brother and I puked over the side 7 times, cumulatively. Good times. It’s one of those adventures that seems fantastic in hindsight!
• I jumped out of a perfectly good airplane near Jackson, MI with my college roommate one spring. It was a great experience. People are usually surprised to hear that you don’t perceive the ground rushing toward you. We jumped from 12,000 feet, and at that distance it’s so far away you can’t really tell you’re accelerating toward your death. It’s more like sticking your head out a car window. I didn’t get nervous at all, actually, until after the parachute opened. At that point everything slows down enough that you have time to look down at your dangling feet and ponder the fact that you’re 5,000 feet from sweet terra firma.
• Long ago I auditioned for and was accepted to The American Boychoir. I didn’t attend, mostly because going from public schools in St. Paul, MN to a highfalutin boarding school in Princeton, NJ was terrifying. Plus I was a little too old, too close to puberty, at which point you’re no good to them.
• In high school I ran a BBS in the 313 area code. (That directory is from 1987, but it lasted through my time: the early 90′s.) I paid for the phone line and various upgrades out of my Arby’s paycheck. It ran T.A.G. 2.6, which was written in Pascal by some Detroit-area hobbyists. I wrote a handful of door programs for it, first in Pascal and eventually in C. I credit landing my first computer-related job, in part, to the fact that during the interview we discovered that the interviewer frequented my BBS.
• In 1996, working as a summer intern, I wrote one of the first browser-based home banking systems. It had all the same features I use today at chase.com, and had cutting-edge HTML features, like frames! In those days, we installed servers at banks that included direct dial-in access because internet access was relatively scarce and direct dial-in was theoretically more secure. My employer’s primary product was audio banking systems, (“Press 1 to hear your account balance…”) and they’d been doing that for decades. Sadly, they only half-heartedly entered the newfangled internet market and lost to companies like Digital Insight. That was as close as I got to the .com mania in Detroit.

Because I’m late to the party, and in an (admittedly lame) act of protest against these sorts of things, I’m not tagging anyone.