Joel tagged me on this silly 5 things you didn't know about me meme.  Since it's floating around, and because I’d hate to disappoint a crazy Australian who’s apt to shoot vinegar in my eyes with a Super Soaker (woof, woof), I figure I'll give it a shot:

1. I played in a heavy metal band when I was a teenager.  I was the lead guitarist, and loved to shred it up, with a sort of { 80's metal, 90's heavy metal, neo-classical, blues } style, influenced heavily by Slayer, Metallica, Pantera, GnR, Yngwie Malmsteen, Joe Satriani, and Stevie Ray Vaughan.  (Odd combination?  You bet!)  Don’t ask for pictures, I have conveniently "lost" them.  I stopped playing guitar for several years, but picked it back up in the past year and have been playing daily (focusing on building better music theory technical depth, but still shredding: my recent obsession is Dragonforce).  I also created several independent industrial and experimental techno CDs.  I try again every now and again, but I seem to have lost the patience.
2. I stopped playing in the heavy metal band because I "accidentally" punched a guy in the face in a mosh pit at a Sepultura concert.  This broke my hand in several places and was quite unpleasant.  (I did stay for the whole set, I'm happy to report.  The bar was kind enough to supply a plastic cup with some ice.)  The emergency room wrapped it in a cast, and then after 4 weeks, it had healed incorrectly.  So then I had to have it manually rebroken, and spent the entire summer in a new cast.  At the end, I had no hand or arm strength, my finger was crooked (making it hard to hold a pick), and my band had broken up because we couldn't play out (and they apparently didn't have the motivation to replace me temporarily).  This was the end of my dreams of being a rock star.
3. When I was 18 years old, I weighed a whopping 260 pounds.  Most of it was muscle, resulting from me working out literally every single day, and I have the stretch marks to show it.  I was a big dude, benched a little more than my weight, and even played center for a short period in high school football (I wasn’t keen on the fact that it’s apparently protocol that the quarterback routinely lays his hands on the center’s butt).  Now I weigh about 160 and have no muscle.
4. I started programming when I was 12.  This came about because a local gaming place (Gamer's Guild in Milford, MA) had set up a new BBS system, on which they provided several MUDs, MOOs, MUSHes, etc., on their Commodore Amiga 3000's and 4000.  I became hooked, especially when I found out you could get access to the source code and actually change it.  When CircleMUD came out, circa '92 (IIRC), I got serious about hacking code, doing the bulk of my MUD programming on a hand-assembled Slackware Linux 1.0 IBM PC.  Ironically, yours truly (a Microsoft employee) did most of his learning on the Linux OS, using GNU's C Compiler.  (I actually refused to use DOS until I started doing games programming that required graphics and found some cool DOS toolkits.  I refused Windows even longer, until I got sick of using 'lynx' to browse the WWW.  I have always found Windows API programming, with UPPER_CASE type names everywhere, rather ugly and I simply didn't get it at first.)  I set up my own 8-line BBS and later in '94 converted to co-located Internet hosting, running a heavily modified CircleMUD (3.1?) for a year and a half.  There was typically around 20 players signed on at any given point.
5. I am VERY obsessive about things.  I want to buy as many books as I can get my hold on, read them all the time, write code every waking moment, drink wine every night, go out for 15 course dinners every night, play guitar and learn every scale, major and minor, mode, modification, chord, arpeggio, I like to work, work, work until I am barely awake, and so on.  It drives my friends completely nuts, but it keeps me busy.  I've been that way ever since I was a little kid, so I don't think it's going to change anytime soon.

I don't know many people, so I'm going to commit meme heresy and not link to anybody else.  Sorry.