I Have Been Tagged (Twice) Friday, April 06, 2007

I have been tagged twice recently. First by Jason and now by James. I suppose I need to be a good citizen and play along. :)

I am not really sure what the rules are here. I know that I am supposed to list several things that you probably don't know about me. I don't know if these things are supposed to be funny, embarrassing, personal, impressive, inspiring or what. I don't know if knowing the rules would help me figure out what to write anyway so I am just going to jot out some facts and hope that I don't suffer some sort of penalty for any violation I might commit. :)

I am a member of The American Go Association. I love playing Go, although I am not able to make as much time for it as I might like. My commitment to Go seems to come and go with periods when I will play a lot and periods when I don't play much at all. My friend Lianzhou Yu moved out of state a couple of years ago and that has affected my playing time. Lianzhou is one of the top players in The United States and was a great mentor to have access to. A few years ago my friend Brian Gilstrap and I got together in his wood shop (which I am envious of) to build a couple of Go boards. I am pretty happy with the way my board turned out. I wish I played on it more often. As it is, most games I play these days are played on my laptop against GNU Go.

I won the first large poker tournament I ever played in. The tournament was a charity event to benefit The National Alliance For Autism Research (now Autism Speaks). Having an autistic son, I was happy to contribute and participate in the tournament. There were about 130 entrants. When I heard about this event I gathered up the group of guys that I played cards with regularly and we ended up with 11 of us in the tournament. The final table at the tournament (final 10 players) included 4 guys from our group. In one of the final hands I made a mistake and then ended up getting pretty lucky to beat my friend Paul Jensen out of a big pot and that piece of luck put me in a position to win the tournament.

My name is Jeff, and I am a metal head. There, I said it. I am a fan of heavy metal music. Black Sabbath, Iron Maiden, Slayer, Sepultura, Opeth, Lamb Of God... all guilty pleasures.

I enjoy fly fishing. I tie all of my own flies. I fish mostly for trout in the cold water streams and rivers in Missouri. My late father-in-law introduced me to fly fishing more than 10 years ago. I find less time for fly fishing these days but I really enjoy myself when I do make time to get out in the water.

There was a time long ago when I really, really, really needed a haircut. Why didn't anyone approach me and say something like “friends don't let friends have mullets”?

Now I am going to throw to Dean, Lance, Brian, Eric and Nate.