I've been "tagged" - Five Things you didn't know about Gary Angel (and we're afraid to ask)

I was "tagged" by Dave Bascom on Wednesday. If you don’t know about "tagging," then join the club. Neither did I. But here’s the scoop as Dave (http://www.searchtrends.org/2006/12/ive-been-tagged5-things-you-didnt-know.html) lays it out:

"I was excited to see that I was tagged by Ryan Williams. It's this virtual chain letter thing going around the blogosphere lately where you say five things that people might not know about you and then tag five more people to do the same."

This is a terrible double dilemma, first to come up with five interesting (and not too embarrassing) facts about me and then to choose 5 innocents on whom to inflict a similar pain. But since it’s Christmas – and since the blog almost never has anything personal – I think the time is right. So thanks Dave – and here goes!

1. My degree is in philosophy. I was a terrible, lackadaisical college student with a none-to-serious major in Poli-Sci and Economics when I tumbled into a humanities requirement on, of all things, Medieval Philosophy. Taught (uncharacteristically) by the head of the department – a great bear of man who spoke French, Greek and Latin – all with a New Jersey accent! "Today, we are goin to read Sint Thomas A-ck-quInaas." Great professor. Would have been great on the Sopranos too! I ended up a philosophy major and still dream about writing a good book of philosophy!
2. I'm one of those crazy serial entrepreneurs. I’ve only had one or two (short) "real" jobs in my life – everything else has been starting a business. I did real-time trading software way before the stock market boom (back in the first days of Windows before 3.0). I did one of the first winery internet sites (back before the dot-com boom and the brief insane interest in online wine sales) and, of course, I was doing web analytics back in the days of "hit reporting." All of which reminds me of a short story from Tom Wolfe called "The Man Who Peaked Too Soon." If you haven’t ever seen this – check it out in the 'Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test' collection. It’s a ten minute read and it’s hysterical – story of my life.
3. Combine an avid reader, two young daughters and an opinionated blogger and what do you get? 1001 Dad’s Nights (http://semphonic.blogs.com/kidsbooks/) – my brand new book children’s book blog. I haven’t been very good about posting so far – but my New Year’s resolution is to do much better. I know from conversation that’s lots of my web analytic peers have young children as well so check it out. Bonus news – that Blog will post comments and suggestions so send me your picks!!
4. I’m actually by trade a programmer. When I left college with my degree in philosophy, the only work I could find was in computers. I taught myself on an archaic HP mini-computer (there was a single teletype terminal connected by acoustic coupler – you put the phone receiver into a couple of rubber cups - to the real computer) during High School by getting the only programming book (on BASIC) from the main library. I owned one of the original personal computers – pre-Apple, pre-IBM PC – the 8080 Altair computers (16K of memory), and I’ve been programming ever since. To me, programming is the last great craft – or perhaps the first great craft of the modern age. I wrote the bulk of our CampaignTracker SEM software and I miss programming if I don’t do it regularly.
5. When I was a boy my brother (Mark Angel) and I were crazy into horse racing. We nagged our parents into turning many family vacations into trips to Saratoga, Belmont, Aqueduct – even Keeneland for the auctions. We had ludicrously complicated systems for picking winners and we even did statistical analysis on racing form data. Of course, we were only betting $2 at a time. When you get right down to it, life hasn’t changed much! Merry Christmas Mark – I still think about those days!

Now comes the really hard part. I’m going to tag Eric Peterson (http://www.webanalyticsdemystified.com/weblog/) who I think of, in the words of Anne Shirley of Green Gables - a book I just read my daughters – as a "kindred spirit." Marshall Sponder (http://www.webmetricsguru.com/) , whose been covering my stories regularly and well but didn’t reply to my email – I’m hoping it got caught in a spam filter! I’m also going to tag Matthew Hurst (http://datamining.typepad.com/data_mining/) – who doesn’t know me from Brett Favre – but who writes a blog I really enjoy on data mining. I’m going to tag Paul Bruemmer (http://www.reddoor.biz/intelligence/bizblog/) at Red Door Interactive. Paul shares the blog there. I’ve been working with Paul this year and I think he’s a really interesting guy. I know he was a firefighter for a long time – which I think is pretty "cool." Yes, sad fact number #6, I am an ardent student of bad puns. Finally, I’m going way outside the box and tag Will Wilkinson (http://www.willwilkinson.net/flybottle/) who writes a Philosophy blog. I love it – his posts are even longer than mine. I doubt, however, that he shares a reciprocal interest in web analytics.

Sorry guys – feel free to ignore the chain – but I have to admit it’s been fun.

I would have tagged David Byrne (http://journal.davidbyrne.com/) as well, whose Blog is one of the most interesting I’ve ever found, but what are the chances of David Byrne noticing?

Whose life is this anyway? Oh well, just letting the days go by...

Merry Christmas everyone!