Just thought I’d let you know where I’m at.

Update: for those looking for Super Mario hints.

It’s Holiday Blog Tag time, where if you get tagged by another blogger you write five things most people don’t know about you and then tag five others so they can do the same. I’ve been tagged several times over the past week so I give in.. here’s my 5 Things:

1. I worked for Publisher’s Clearing House (PCH) back in the day of the big magazine subscription sweepstakes, before Ed McMann put his face all over an American Family copy-cat. You might say that was my introduction to marketing (although I was just a kid working the night shift for beer money). By the way, Robert H. Treller didn’t exist, and you really didn’t need to buy magazines to have a chance at winning. I learned about corporate spying while with PCH, and alot about the competitive side of marketing. I also got to see first hand how someone working in the mail room gets to know almost everything and every one in a business.
2. I started my first real job when I was 14 years old, working as a dishwasher in a French restaurant on the Miracle Mile in Manhasset, NY (Brasserie St. Germaine). I lied and said I was 16. By age 15 I was a bus boy. I remember when the waitresses would bring me along to The Chalet in Roslyn after work (after 10pm) so they had someone with them besides the fresh-of-the-boat French chef trainees, who were hard-to-handle. Beer, women, and crazy French sous Chefs in bars at age 15… is there any wonder?
3. I have shot perfect 25 while trapshooting twice in my life, both times costing my dad a round for the boys at the yacht club bar. The first time he was happy to pay the bar bill, because he was proud of his kid. The second time, I am not so sure. I haven’t been invited back for a third opportunity yet, but I did get invited on their annual Sporting Clays outing last spring. I shot the high score. And by the way, just to keep it interesting, I shoot trap and sporting clays with a made-in-Japan Browning pump shotgun.
4. I once walked 50 miles in one day. No, it wasn’t for boy scouts, but it was during high school. I earned a patch, but there was no way I’d put that sucker on my junior varsity Lacrosse jacket. I did it to show I could. In case you were wondering, the first 24 miles are the easiest. Oh, and if you ever try that yourself, learn from my mistake and do not pack a salami sandwich and chocolate milk as your lunch. There are better choices.
5. Finally, because the idea of marketers who don’t watch TV is odd but also oddly common, I’ll admit that we tossed TV out of our house almost 3 years ago. Except for pro sports and late night infomercials from which cocktail party jokes are made (”…aw honey, sandwiches again?”), I don’t miss it.

Now to pass the Holiday BlogTag baton to 5 others… I tag Susan Torrico, Chris Snyder, Jeff Loiselle, Steve McArthur, and Hans Kaspersetz.

At Pubcon I was a lucky winner of a Nintendo DS Lite from the Opera booth. I have to admit, I didn’t even know what that was, but I have always loved the Opera browser and especially on my mobile device (Windows Mobile 5). The Opera Mobile browser automagically re-renders an html page to fit the device window, which makes it virtually impossible to tolerate Pocket IE which requires you to scroll all over the place to see a page. Honestly, as I told the Opera people, Opera Mobile beta came out at the time I got my XV6700 and I use dit before even using Pocket IE. When the beta expired, I was left depending on using my PDA phone for web and had to try IE and ….. well it was minutes at most before I was downloading the full version of Opera. There was no comparison in speed or ease of use.

Now I have this cool little white clamshell “game boy” and it runs Opera Mini. Fast, easy, and amazingly well integrated with the DS, this thing detects and signs in to hot spots like I wish my laptop computer could. In Vegas my Thinkpad was sent off for IBM service, leaving me with only the Nintendo. There’s this little ice cream shop inside the Wynn that has free wifi and dang if it wasn’t just seconds to get online and browsing. Awesome. Starbucks? Piece of cake. Secured wifi at home? Just as easy… no worries, found the MAC no problem, added it to the control list and it and worked the first time I put the key in.

The holidays are coming and I can recommend the Nintendo DS Lite as a perfect gift for your kids, provided you also buy the Opera Mini cartidge and are able to confiscate the DS Lite whenever necesary for bad behavior, inadequate school performance, sub-optimal attention to chores, or even less-than-completely-respectful-comments if you are desperate enough to get online.  It just takes a “Hey. That’s your salad fork. Use your dinner fork like I taught you for the main course. That’s it. Give me that Nintendo back. You’ll get it back when you learn to mind your manners”, and that baby is all yours.