Let’s talk about me…

[ornoth]

I agreed to play this meme, so now I have to post.

The idea is this: Ask me, and I’ll pick three of your listed interests and three of your userpics and ask you to talk about them. Express your interest in a comment on this entry.

Here are the ones greatsword asked me to talk about:

Interests: bentmen, hand_drumming, vipassana.
Images: Righteous, sunglasses, puggle

Bentmen:

Back in the early 90s, shortly after my wife and I separated, I started hanging out with friends in Boston’s music scene. There were so many great local bands back then, and we managed to make friends with a few players, including an absolutely amazing guitarist named Eddie Nowik. Usually he played with a band called Crisis of Faith at the Plough & Stars, but he also played occasionally with a band called the Bentmen.

The Bentmen are hard to explain. They play rock with disturbing, eerie overtones. There’s some MP3s on www.bentmen.com and they’re also on iTunes. But the spectacle is the live show. The stage is decorated in the most bizarre fashion, and the band members come out in the most disturbing, scary outfits they can devise. They spray the audience with shaving cream and tempura paint (sic). They hook beanbag chairs up to leafblowers and spray the audience with feathers and little foam pellets. They toss out ice cream sandwiches, severed Barbie doll heads, and anything else they can procure. The venue gets utterly trashed, left knee-deep in refuse.

But beyond all that is the music; they’re all gifted, prominent musicians. They play very rarely, but when they do, it’s chaos, and quite a spectacle. You can see a few pictures I took at their most recent show (last October) here.

Hand Drumming:

About the same time as I started getting into the music scene, I developed a passion for drums. I bought a drum set and spent a lot of time playing around, despite knowing that I have an absolutely horrid sense of rhythm. I later replaced that with an electronic kit, which I still have. And the music store gave me a credit when I bought the e-drums, so I spent that on a set of bongos, although I’d already gotten into hand drumming by then.

I’m not sure when I picked up hand drumming or how. I guess I must have gone to a Cambridge Drum & Dance and liked what I saw, because I picked up a Remo “klong yaw”, which is sort of like a djembe, only taller. You can see it here. I also took a hand drumming course with Inna. Now I’ve also got Inna’s djembe at home, and some miscellaneous stuff, including a rain stick, claves, Boomwhackers, a bottled water jug, a didgeridoo, a cheap goatskin drum a friend brought back from South Africa, and probably some other stuff I don’t have readily in memory. But I’m still just a wannabe in every way…

Vipassana:

Vipassana generally refers to “insight meditation”, a sort of non-sectarian form of meditation derived from Theravada Buddhism, which itself is based around the Tipitaka, aka the Pali canon, the oldest, seminal Buddhist texts. The other Buddhist schools all include other texts which were developed later. Theravada itself seems pretty inocuous, without a lot of the saints and mythological and ceremonial stuff and hierarchy that you get in other sects. But Vipassana is even one level removed from that, which is why “insight meditation” is more generally accepted in the west, where people are all skitchy about anything smacking of religion.

	Righteous: This shot was taken during the 2002 Dargon Summit in Scotland. We were taking a group guided tour of Sterling Castle, which was awesome, and here was this pulpit kinda place in the Great Hall. So while the tour guide was talking, I stood atop the pulpit while my buddy took the picture from below. The shot of someone (especially the editor) on a soapbox, pontificating, is a Summit standard, and I thought that’d be a good icon for when I’m feeling opinionated.
	Sunglasses: This shot was taken at the 2003 Dargon Summit in Austin, Texas. The shot was taken by my Assistant Editor as I was piloting our rented party boat near Mansfield Dam on Lake Travis, while we looked for a swimming spot. That was the largest Summit gathering of all, and the inception of DargonZine’s immense “Black Idol” story arc, the biggest collaborative story we’ve ever written. I use this photo mostly when I wanna be like Joe Cool…
	Puggle: That’s the Puggle! My kittykat! Puggle came to me along with two other cats and a four year-old when ailsaek moved in. When she moved out, I expressed the desire to keep the Puggle, and he and I lived together for a dozen years in great happiness and joy. He was a very important companion for me until his death of congestive heart failure on Christmas Eve 2005. The photo is cropped from this photo, whose caption is: So what if it’s a formal sitting? My foot itches! I used to use this one when I talked about the Puggle or cats in general.

Okay, so who wants in?

Comments

[jtroutman.livejournal.com]

ok, hit me.

[ornoth.livejournal.com]

And for you:

Interests: cef, orbital, ospf
Userpics: avatar, salisbury steak, moon

[jtroutman.livejournal.com]

cef:
Cisco Express Forwarding. An awesome cool feature that was added to Cisco routers about 8 or 9 years ago. Reduces the CPU utilization of the router when making forwarding decisions (Layer 3 IP routing) through the use of cached destination information and adjacency tables to quickly determine the Layer 2 next hop without having to discover it for each packet. Best improvements of speed come when dCEF (Distributed CEF) is running on individual line cards on 7500 series routers, so each card can make layer 3 switching decisions without having to hit the central CPU. It is like magic pixie-dust nitro fuel for routers, and like all twitchy high-performance systems, sometimes things go really wrong. CEF was buggy when released and was often been the source of really weird bugs and middle of the night "gotcha" issues.

orbital:
Orbital was a UK based techno-music band, and one of my first exposures to electronica. I think I got their first album (self-titled, but otherwise known at the "green" album) in the mid-90s, with classics like "Belfast" and "Chime". I have found their music to be a little more polished than other early techno. I always wanted to see them play live, but since they broke up in 2004, that is unlikely now.

ospf:
Open Shortest Path First, a network routing protocol that uses Dijkstra's algorithm to compute the best path between two points. It is pretty much the de-facto network routing protocol standard for interior gateway routing. Despite the fact that I have been using OSPF since 1995 or so, I still feel that I barely know anything about it. But I seem to know more than most people.

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Avatar

This icon is a screen capture from the title page to the PLATO/NovaNET classic game called "avatar", which was originally created in 1978. The game was a multi-user "dungeon and dragons" type monster killing and treasure quest sort of game. It was better than anything else available for years.

Imagine a game with 100+ concurrent users from all around the country interacting in real time in a virtual world environment (limited 3D wire frame dungeon) with text chatting, and a game design that featured hundreds of monsters and treasure types, and that required player cooperation and skill to kill the big monsters... now imagine that using 1978 level technology. The whole PLATO system was remarkable and was far ahead of its time. It was a richly interactive mainframe timesharing system (CDC Cyber mainframes originally) that used 512x512 pixel resolution monochrome gas plasma displays (and later color on PCs), had very low latency, featuring email, groupware, and real time chat.

I spent many thousands of hours (yes, thousands) playing this game during the late 80s and early 90s. I had dozens of friends who played the game with me, and we were the biggest group of players in the game (many maximum level characters with maximum possible equipment). It literally was my life for a while, and it seemed right as my default user picture. I don't regret that time, and I know now that I can never get involved in World of Warcraft or similar MMORPGs, or I would quickly become homeless.

Salisbury Steak

This is a quote from Chef from the South Park episode "Cartman Gets an Anal Probe". It just seemed amusing. Despite the fact that I think South Park is amazingly funny, I almost never get a chance to see it. The icon was created using xach's LISP based SignBot (http://wigflip.com/signbot/) website. I use this icon rarely. It is supposed to be for posts that are funny.

Moon

A generic moon picture I found. When I feel stressed out or overwhelmed by petty events in life, I like to look up at the moon and the stars and think about how none of this earthbound stuff really matters, and that the universe will go on long after I am gone. I use this icon when I am feeling stressed or reflective upon life.