Archive for April, 2007
Silence
So, I haven’t written in a while, I guess I’ve been going through the rotations around here. Classes are winding down faster then expected, I went from having five exams to two, and now I only have one. Campus is seeing an exodus of students and classes are seeing fewer and fewer of it’s registered number. Nothing like good weather to bring people out of classrooms and onto quads, lawns and sidewalks.
In other news, I won’t be writing anything for the site tomorrow. And, to some degree I hope you don’t either. It’s the One Day Blog Silence event in respect for events on the Virginia Tech campus. I guess this is a small condolence to truly affected students, but in my mind it’s something a lot of people can do.
We Will Prevail
A lot of people have called me, sent me e-mails, left comments on my blog and otherwise made sure that I was still living and breathing. To all of those people, thank you. It’s good to know that there are people out there that actually think about you.
We began our first day of school here at Virginia Tech very tentatively. Some people were still afraid, some people needed a shoulder to cry on. Yet we still went about campus, weaving between the buildings and uneasily looking at Norris every time we stepped foot near it. I wish I could say class went on as normal, that we went to class just like we would every other Monday morning. However, class was different and most certainly not nearly as well attended.
Virginia Tech Shooting
This post is mainly for family and friends.
In case you haven’t heard anything, there has been a series of shootings on campus today (Monday April 16th 2007). So far there has been one killing. I wanted to let people know that I am safe and from what I hear so far so are my friends.
There have been a few emails so far:
The Value of Doing it Yourself
There are some people who I keep close to me that seem to use me as their own personal search engine. This didn’t just occur when I came to Virginia Tech, it’s been happening since high school. People will pop up and ask me about something that could take five seconds to find on Google. At some point I tried to reason out why someone would do this and it’s fairly simple: it’s seemingly faster and easier to find better results.
Yet, I (and anyone else you may depend upon) won’t always be there. True, there are some fairly obvious exceptions to that rule, but even those select few (family and significant others) can be busy for the brief moment you need the answer. So I think that you should spend the time to learn how to find the information you need. I once had a professor tell me that Google was inferior to the boutique search engines he seemed to prefer that had “better listings”, yet I had to argue that it’s not that Google is inferior because of its listings, its because people don’t generally know their way around it. So the next time you are thinking about asking your friend for help on something that might take five seconds of effort on Google, don’t waste his time.
Your Gateway to Psychobilly
I have found the perfect gateway drug into the world of psychobilly, an interesting standoff in the punk world. The psychobilly community decided early on that they would avoid all things political to avoid the problems that plagued the politically charged punk world. Also, they found one common theme to unite around: cheesy horror movies. The sound of psychobilly is also very different from what you might expect, they include the standing bass from the genre that formed their name: rockabilly.
After that little introduction to the genre, let me tell you about The Peacocks, a Swedish psychobilly band. I randomly picked up their album when I saw it was getting popular and quickly found out why. They manage to stay true to the sound of psychobilly without alienating new listeners to the genre. The sound is pure bliss to my ears and just seems happy and energetic. This will definitely end up in my CD player for the summer as it just has that quality to it that screams summer. They have a few tracks up on their website, so I’d give them a listen as the sound isn’t for everyone.
