It's been a while.

Well, I haven't posted here in forever. This is mainly because I realized I shouldn't struggle to think of stuff to write -- that just makes for crappy posts. In any event, I popped back in to disable comments because I was tired of getting emails telling me yet another d-bag had posted a spam laced comment.

Anyway, I'll leave all this garbage here for historical purposes. Not because it's good or anything, but because it may be useful for me or others to get a glimpse of this little snapshot of my life.

Well, I'm out. I have a wedding to go film. :-)


Vorondil signing off.

"It's Like A Party In My Fingers!"

Holy crap.

It's been a while.

Well, PianoFest was last week. For those of you that don't know, PianoFest is a summer camp for piano students run by Vicky McVay and Cathy Rowland and supported by the University of Kentucky School of Music. It's non-competitive, so it makes for good times all around during one week every June. Anyway, I had the privilege of being a counselor this year. (In past years I've been a camper ['02] and a "Keyboard Assistant" ['04].) Specifically, I got to be assistant percussion teacher this year. That was very, very fun -- might I even say fun^3? Although, my hands have been a little tender from whaling on the conga drums, it was totally worth it.

Oh yeah, and this year was the tenth year of PianoFest ('96-'05). So, without fail, something odd just had to happen -- and it did.

To set the stage, we were all staying in Blazer Hall on the UK campus. If I remember correctly, the plaque on the exterior of the building says the building went up in 1961. So this isn't an ancient building, but certainly not a new one. As a result, the elevator is, shall we say, not quite a state-of-the-art piece of equipment. This elevator is about the size of a large, but not quite a walk-in closet. So it's crowded with four adults on it. Anyway, It was late Wednesday night, and the Senior campers (high-school-aged) were hanging out in the basement of the dorm. They'd ordered pizza and it was going to be delivered later than their normal lights-out time of 11:30pm so naturally, they got an extention. It was about midnight when they finished up. Details are scarce, but at least one camper suggested they all get in the elevator to get back up to their rooms. Before the doors closed, they packed ten adolescent bodies into about a 8'x3'x7' (LxWxH) space. Keep in mind, this elevator is just big enough to get a wheelchair on (which is precisely why it's there), and has a weight capacity of 1200 lbs. Well, with this elevator with ten teenagers on it doesn't even make it all the way out of the basement. Before it reached the ground floor, it stops and is stuck.

Meanwhile, some of the other counselors and I are playing Hold 'Em in the lobby. Out of nowhere we hear an odd ringing sound. Here's about how it went:

Briiinnngg! Brrrriinngg!
One of us: "What was that?!?"
Guy at front desk: "I dunno... never heard that before..."
Brrrrrriiiiiinnngg! BRRRRIIINNG!
Guy at front desk: "Lemme get the R.A."
*Gets R.A.*
BBBRRRRIIIIIINNNNNG! BRRIINNG! BRRING!
R.A. : "Hmm, that's the elevator alarm. Somebody's pushing the button in the elevator."
BBRRINNG! BRRINNG! BRING! BRIING!!!

So at this point Landry and Jon head over to the elevator door and talk into it saying, "Anybody in there?" Several frantic, but giddy voices stream from the beige door.

Eventually, somebody went up and woke up one of the PianoFest directors and the camp's Dean of Women. First they called UK Physical Plant, who said they could have an elevator guy there in ~30 minutes.

Whilst this was going on, at least one of the kids in the elevator called 911. If you were a 911 operator and got a call from a cell phone, in the middle of the night, during the summer, from an adolescent voice telling you there are ten people stuck in an elevator at a University dorm -- what would you do? Well, you don't count, because the 911 guy ignored them. Comforting, isn't it? Eh, I don't blame 'em -- it does sound pretty ridiculous (mainly, because it is).

Back in the lobby, the Dean decided to do the same thing. She called 911 and was a little more effective persuading the operator to send emergency personnel.

It would be nearly 45 minutes from the time the elevator stopped to the time two fire trucks, two UK police cruisers, and the fire marshal's suburban come rolling up Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd. with sirens blazing. The fireman came in and used the key that fits into those little round holes you always see in the top quarter of most elevator doors to try to open it. Unfortunately, they couldn't get it open. So one of them goes out to their truck and he walks back in with what looked like a 6" crowbar. Now, you've got to remember, this building is pretty hot to start with -- and the elevator is probably one of the warmer spots in there. Put ten breathing bodies in it, and you've got yourself a sauna. Anyway, they jacked the door open with the bar, and the hot, humid air that rushed through the space between the top of the elevator and the floor forced the fireman to take a step back. The firemen muscled the elevator up far enough to allow the kids to step up and out of the elevator. They were all hot and sweaty, but glad to be out of it. In the eternal words of Female Senior Camper Julian: "Eww, I feel all sticky..."

So after almost an hour of hot, sweaty, air-rationing, ten PianoFest campers were saved from the death trap elevator of Blazer Hall by the valiant men of the Lexington Fire Department. We all applauded and everybody went to their room/home/fire station. The End.

Well, that was really long, and it's too early in the morning to proof-read it. Ya know, just so you know...

In other news, without Skype, I would never have known so many lovely European ladies adore me so.

Maybe that was inappropriate -- oh well -- too late now.


Vorondil signing off.

I Am Now Skype-able.

Let it be known to all God's creatures: Skype rocks the booty-hole.

Yep, I downloaded Skype earlier today. I'm all for being cutting edge and stuff, but I never jumped on this boat mainly because I had no real need for it. Well, that changed a little while ago. A friend of my dad's lives on the west coast and they're currently collaborating on a project of their's. In this case, realtime communication is a must. However, over such a geographic space, the PSTN tends to require users to sacrifice their first-born. So we looked into some VoIP-based solutions including Skype.

Anyway, I tested it only minutes ago and I was quite pleased with it. I tested it with David (on his Insight Cable) and my dialup. Not only was it smooth, but better quality than any PSTN land-line I've ever used. The one noticable difference was the round-trip latency seemed to be about 1.5-2 seconds which is probably not much higher than our combined buffer sizes. I then proceeded to let eMule upload with the bandwidth throttle above what I know the link's upstream speed to be, and set Firefox to auto-reload two or three pages at 5 second intervals. The stream got a little choppy, but still usable.

Anyway, you can Skype me on "vorondil28" (what else?). Gimme a call!


Vorondil signing off.

We're Only Potholes If We Wanna Be

This will be a slightly more personal post than normal, so here goes.

I've had to make my share of difficult decisions along this crazy Interstate-O'-Life. Two of these decisions were made tonight. If these matter to you, you'll know -- other than that, you'll just be reading-on to enjoy my flow'ry prose. ;)

Both these decisions stem from one, common issue: a young-man's quest for employment. This quest is, as I like to say, laced with hidden potholes. Besides the thermodynamics of freeze/thaw, potholes have many, many causes including: externally-human, spiritual, and internally-human.

I write pertaining to the alpha and the omega.

• Α - Priorities come into play here. As much as it pains me to say it, you may not sit at the top of the totem pole. (Depending on who you is.) Don't get me wrong, the fact that you don't come first doesn't diminish the fact that I care for you -- because I do. When it happens that you get superseded, there's two things that happen: I give you my decision, and the reasoning behind it. Straight up, black-and-white, what-you-see-is-what-you-get. If you don't trust me enough to take it the way I give it, that's something you must deal with. I stand by this now, and I will stand by it until the day I die: feelings are choices. If so-and-so feels angry/sad/betrayed, that's a decision that so-and-so must be responsible for -- whether it's accurate or not. There is no such thing as, "...but you're making me feel this way." The fact, as much as you may not want to admit it, is, "I've make the decision to feel this way." Just keep in mind, if you get trumped, I'll make it a point to make it up to you -- that's a guarantee. I have my principals, but that doesn't mean I'm a prick.
  


• Ω - This is as plain as day. An important man once said, "The man who says he can and the man who says he can't are both right." It's taken me a while to take that to heart, and it's something I've had to deal with myself. I'll leave it at that.

When it comes down to it, I hate to feel hated. It hurts -- a lot. As long as you know I'll still be here for you no matter how long you decide to stay away, I'll be able to sleep at night.



Vorondil signing off.

Star Wars, WoW, And The Banjo

Well, I saw Star Wars: RotS on Thursday. The opening day showing was sold-out and we (Chris, David and myself) were in line nearly 30 minutes before the 6:30 showing (and the 7 o'clock performance had a line almost as long as ours). Anyway, we spent around five minutes in line with two or three full-fledged Darth Vaders before being seated. (Other than a simple padawan plait tucked being my left ear, I didn't really dress up.)

As far as the movie goes, no exhibition of kickassery crafted by mere motals could top this one. Albeit, we all (myself included) gave Lucas lots of crap for the rather annoying characters such as kid-Anakin and Jar Jar Binks, but this time I really think RotS is worthy of the Star Wars brand. The action to foot-of-film ratio is definitely much higher in Episode III than any of the previous movies (classic trilogy included).

That being said, this movie is a massive downer. I mean, we all knew how it would turn out, but there's no triumphant ending to this one -- at all. Typically, a Star Wars film goes: action, action, story, story, story, funny droid, story, action, funny droid, action, happy, end. However, RotS went more like: action, action, funny droid, action, action, action, story, action, action, story, sad, end. I'll be honest, I teared-up more than once during Episode III and when all was said and done, I missed that I'm-a-better-person-now feeling I naively hoped for.

However, I can get that feeling from a few hours of World of Warcraft (which I'm installing as I type). After both David and Chris got so deep in it, I figured it's worth a shot, and we'll find out over the course of the next ten days. I'm not really big on MMORPGs, and never have been. I played PlaneShift (a F/OSS MMO that was in open beta) for a while. It was cool until camping rat-spawns in the sewers lost it's appeal.

In other news, I found out Steve Martin plays the banjo. That's badass with a capital AWESOME!

Eh-hem...


Vorondil signing off.

Below The Belt

In my on-going search for employment, I ran across CareerBuilder.com the other day. Like most Internet career tools, the listings were pretty crappy -- except for one. An "IT apprenticeship" they called it. It seemed to be a good fit for me: "Certifications not necessary, but a plus." However, the company's name was kept confidential. "Eh, whatever, sending my resume into a blackhole can't hurt," I said. So off it went, that little PDF braved it's way across the treacherous Internet to Career Builder's remailer and from there, away to a seemingly dark abyss.

Then today, I got word that the little email that could reached it's destination unscathed. Here is the reply:

To: "Me"
From: "RESPOND"
      <careers@microsoftapprenticeships.com>
Subject: IT APPRENTICESHIP

PLEASE DO NOT REPLY TO THIS EMAIL!
Thank you for applying to the I.T.
Apprenticeship program.  Someone will
be in contact with you shortly.
Note:  If you have your MCSE, MCDBA,
MCSD, CCNP or security certification,
please send your resume to
certified@microsoftapprenticeship.com.

Not cool, M$, not cool. Why would Microsoft, one of the most renowned and recognized names in technology keep it's company's name confidential on CareerBuilder? This only means one thing: Microsoft's market research tells them that the IT community dislikes them so much, if a job listing has the Microsoft name attached to it, the number of applicants falls through the floor.

So thanks Bill, for misleading me into a Microsoft job application. Thanks, but no thanks, I think a Cisco Certification is Borg enough for me.


Vorondil signing off.