Time keeps flowing like a river

I've been having rough times lately, but for the moment I'm still with my son Joseph.

I didn't realise how long I've had this blog (just over two years), or how well it helps me date events in my life that would otherwise perish for lack of notability.

I feel more capable and confident as a musician, and still aspire to sing in an opera, as difficult as I realise that task is.

I've had a Slashdot account for almost five years, but never posted anything with it until late last year, and really started enjoying myself a few days ago. I recently made a first post with insubstantial comments in it that got modded up to +5, Insightful. Somebody replied and complained and I almost chimed in to gripe at the mods myself. I was honestly shooting for +2, Interesting. The trolls are also fun, as are people so possessed by their own naivete that they honestly support ideologies that one would normally assume only a troll would advocate.

My sister has a blog now - see Rachel's Art Land for the beginnings of what I hope is a good avenue for her artwork. The images on there now are somewhat tepid displays of her remarkable innate talent for illustration. I like her parchments and scrollwork the most, although she is capable of striking portraits. I hope she doesn't slack off on her weblog, as her professional goal is entirely artistic in nature and it would be a good start to career networking.

I'm still playing Dawn of War, which is up to its third incarnation thanks to the release of a second expansion in October. Command & Conquer 3 already has preorder boxes on the PC Games aisle at Best Buy, but I don't think I'll be interested in what EA has done to my beloved franchise. It's probably even worse than Generals was. I've been burned on the series ever since I spent four years waiting for Command & Conquer 2 to come out. Moderating the TiberiumSun.com WWWBoard for Felix was the first experience I had with internet responsibility, and for being the tender age of 13 I think I pulled it off fairly well. I remember a few personalities from that community, most particularly Ramrac and Anrkst.

I think I'll sign off today with a comment about one of my Christmas presents - a Logitech steering wheel with gas and brake pedals. I've always loved racing games, starting with HiOctane and Big Red Racing in DOS Land, and moving up to the Need for Speed series for PC. All 2D racing games suck. I recently purchased several racing games, including Need for Speed Hot Pursuit 2, CRC 2005, FlatOut 2, Xpand Rally, and Crash Day, but never owned a steering wheel or played a racing game with one until last week. It improved my enjoyment of these games immensely and I daresay if they made a good clutch pedal and stick shift arrangement and a racing game that worked with it I would be totally immersed.

Been a long year...

So it's been about sixteen months since I last posted - a tragic dereliction of duty on my part.

In this time period, I managed to get married, work as a street sign-waver, renew my interest in vintage computer collecting, witness the birth of my son Joseph into this world, start working for a company named trueCycle, and even get the opportunity to become a music director for a local volunteer kids' theatre group, Shenanigans. I'll post on these topics individually. I'd like to cover as much in regards to trueCycle as I can in future posts - it is a very interesting company.

Genesis - Firth of Fifth

It seems as though I am bound to spend another week under the tyranny of this illness. Fortunately it has only manifested itself as constant chest congestion...so far.

Our church cancelled its watchnight service on the 31st, so in the custom of my ancestors I heralded the new year on my old cornet, while my father blasted the foghorn. Living in a remote area has its advantages, even if high-speed internet access is still about 10 years away. On Sunday I was too sick to even get out of bed for the morning service, let alone Sunday school, so I occupied myself by priming the three metal Warhammer 40,000 models I had purchased, in anticipation of the Tau Battleforce box set I will be getting tomorrow.

The sun didn't come out today, so it's about 62 degrees in the house. I think I'll start a fire, since my father was so kind to chop wood on Saturday while the rest of us were visiting the Beswicks, another family of musicians who have been family friends for 15 years. I played the NES game Jackal with the dad of the family over and over and over when I was six years old, and we all lived in the Valley of Enchantment.

My sister's boyfriend's parents bought him a '95 Camaro, so things are looking up for them. Meanwhile, I've had a car for years but can't seem to find employment. I fear I shall be frustrated in my renewed attempts now that the semester is over, but much can be said for perseverance.

I hear honking at the gate. Farewell.

Tropical Disease

Three or four days into my busy Hawai'i trip I picked up a dry, unproductive cough that interfered tremendously with my singing voice. The low notes disappeared like water poured out on desert ground, and the high notes cut out unexpectedly, like AT&T's cell phone service. When I returned to the High Desert, I found that taking Hall's mentholyptus cough drops made the coughs MUCH more productive, but my voice is still under the weather. When you've been singing in a proto-professional setting like a college or university for more than two years it can be very depressing when you don't have control of the voice the way you used to. Last year in October I had a very bad sore throat during the college's production of HMS Pinafore, but managed to pull through our performances anyways (as Dick Deadeye). My voice has improved tremendously since then, and my mood sinks terribly when I fall ill with a respiratory disease of some kind. It seems as though singers get illnesses with negative vocal consequences more often than the average person, but perhaps the singers just notice it more?

Here's an MP3 recording of me singing "Vagabond" by Ralph Vaughan Williams in the fall recital.

I found out later that I probably acquired the coughing and chest congestion from my sister's boyfriend, Matt, who plays Warhammer 40,000. A while ago I picked up the game Dawn of War, a derivative of the previously-mentioned tabletop game, and really enjoyed it. I hadn't played a new RTS since Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun came out in August 1999. I had played others such as Homeworld but not until years after they were released, so DoW was quite a refreshing experience. Something even more interesting happened yesterday, when our nearest neighbour had a problem with his computers, and I was called over in the typical "help us computer man" fashion. The grandson in the family (they're traditional Hispanic) had purchased Command & Conquer: Generals but had not a prayer of running it on any of the five(!) computer towers in the house. I took three of them home to work on (not one over 300MHz!) and borrowed the C&C game to check it out. It was a real revelation to see how homogenous the RTS world has been getting lately. It went, of course, without saying that this is definitely a good thing. The unit-specific build and upgrade interface, in-field unit augmentation, mini-map location, and many other details were precisely the same. I much preferred DoW's left- and right-mouse button functions, as well as the impressive skirmish AI. You know how, in most RTS games, you beat back the enemy's puny attacks and slowly build a 'critical mass'? Well, the AI builds a 'critical mass' in Dawn of War quite handily, even on Hard or Harder.

Haggai 2:6,7

You should take the time to consider those numbers in proportion to any other infamous death tolls you might have heard of. 58,000 perhaps (Vietnam), or 12 million (a liberal Holocaust estimate), or even 1,328 (the latest from Iraq).

Mommy Dearest

My mother's weblog - soon to be overflowing with meticulous reports of the four hundred and eight hour period that our happily nuclear family spent on the geological-equivalent-to-an-inflamed-boil island of Hawai'i. As a matter of happenstance, some rather excellent digital photography was manifested in our adventures on this mold-infested rock.

Denarii ex Machina

This mock-minimalist stock layout should be plenty simple enough for even the most pedantic of internet users to fall asleep at their keyboards, if it were not for the magnanimously mellifluent utterings of golden literary prose proverbially spoken by my infinitely dextrous fingers!