“Last of all Hurin stood alone. Then he cast aside his shield, and wielded an axe two-handed; and it is sung that the axe smoked in the black blood of the troll-guard of Gothmog until it withered, and each time that he slew Hurin cried ‘Aure entuluva!’” – J. R. R. Tolkien

Internet Rule #1: Don’t feed the trolls.

Funny thing about that, sometimes you’re stuck in between thinking something was just so sad and funny, you wanted to share it, but you did not want to feed into it. I debated on this for almost an hour. Today, I was retweeted by my pal Felicia Day, and as per usual, a bunch of her followers retweeted it. One such follower decided to send me a reply instead of retweeting or leaving it alone.

Thus, this is where we stand right now. I wanted to share what this individual had to say, but I did not want to feed their illness. I did what anyone in this situation would do. I photoshop’d a picture of the tweet to remove the person’s name and handle. I also blurred some of the naughty words. This is clearly what this person wants, to be validated and to feel important, and I should just leave it be, but how could I not? You see my predicament? Anyway, I trust that no one will try to find out who did it. Trust me its not worth it, they’re nobody.

Check it out, I thought it was hilarious and was not insulted in the least. Don’t get me wrong, the person is a lowlife scum, but it did get a chuckle out of me. Made my belly rumble. You know, ’cause it’s fat.

Feel free to comment below!

Back in the day, a certain writer, producer, comedian, actress buddy of mine of whom I webmaster for on the side was having issues staying on her hosting sites. We would move on to a newer better place though money issues kept us from really doing anything permanent. She basically was Slash-dotted. Its a common term where a link becomes popular enough that way too many people click on it at the same time. Ultimately, Joyent came to the rescue and we’ve haven’t had any issues since.

Felicia would link obscure sites and proceed to down them. I figured I should be funny and so this conversation transpired:

What NOT to say...

Here is her twitter msgs:

Consequences!

Here’s how many people she basically mentioned mischief to.

That's a lotta peoples!

Needless to say, I had a night of trying to survive this. I did get a bunch of hits before I got downed so those were nice. But at what cost lol. Thing is, I linked it to my newer site, Year of the Edgar not realizing that I had not set it up with caching. Bad move. Its all set up now so hopefully I don’t get Felicia’d again. Or at least too badly.

Me thinks Felicia Day is drunk with power.

This is Nacho usual tweetup...

And thus proclaimed the great Amy J Fisher, “Let there be Nachos!” And the Nachos ran abundant for tables and tables, filled with hungry and anticipating people, ready for the bountiful delights of the Nachos.

Yeah so… We had a tweetup where we ate nachos. It was fun. Contrary to @silverbell‘s expression over yonder. A nice-sized crowd showed up and I even met some new friends. Let me just say that we all mingled very well. It probably helped that there was also liquor and it was flowing freely.

I have uploaded my pictures to my flickr so feel free to view and comment on them. If you missed the tweetup, it is but a sampling of what was missed. You can imagine what pictures I chose not to put up is all I am saying.

One of my favorite pictures, and I have many is this one of @Fitz and @LeahJones taking a picture with nachos and beer, which Leah yelled out “Nachos and Beer!” This explains the tweetup very nicely.

Speaking of @Fitz, John decided to take what’s been referred as a “sexy pose”… Being sexy is his business, and business is good!

I can sit here and post every single picture I took, but you can go ahead and view my latest set from the tweetup.

I did want to point out that I was wearing my photoshop’d shirt, which has a back-story. I watch The Guild as well as admin their website. Its a great web series by Felicia Day. She plays a gamer of an online game and finds one of her online gaming friends at her doorstep, Zaboo (played by Sandeep Parikh). Zaboo is basically a stalker and one of the things he does is photoshops a picture of him and of Codex, Felicia’s character. So, I was to meet Felicia and Sandeep last year and thought it would be really funny to make a t-shirt of me and him photoshop’d. It was a hit. Well, Sandeep thought it creepy, which made it even better. So, at the Nacho Tweetup, I had a name tag for myself and I placed it on the t-shirt me, so I gave t-shirt Sandeep his own name tag as well. You can see me wearing two name tags, because mine has my twitter handle and http://yearoftheedgar.com while the other one has Sandeep’s twitter handle and http://effinfunny.com. The great thing was that about half of the people there knew the inside joke of it, which is awesome. Lastly, Sandeep also created Legend of Neil, a hilarious web series about a guy named Neil who finds himself in the Legend of Zelda game and has to find away out.

After the gym, or a night of drinking... same look.

I haven’t been to the gym in a month. FAIL, I know… but I HAVE been doing stuff for this health goal. Since I started working at my current job, my coworkers have been very supportive and have even given me tips and suggestions about cutting out lots of things from my diet.

I started to, but I would quickly revert and indulge much too much on food. Its just so tasty! Now, I also read about it being a lifestyle change, but never really heeded it. Then I take a four-day trip out to Los Angeles to hob-nob with some celebs. Here is where I met Ryon, programmer and health enthusiast among so many other interesting things. We literally spent hours discussing health and diet and nutrition and other things related. It was very interesting too. This man can present.

I took to heart what everyone has been telling me at that point and began to actively watch my eating habits and choosing better choices. Its not perfect, I still enjoy bad-no-no food, but less so.

Last night, I went to the gym, with my coworker/gym buddy, and found out I had lost about 20 lbs. in this time. Wonderful news! My changes have now shown some success! Yes folks, this is, in fact, happening.

As 2008 ended, I thought to myself about how I could make 2009 better. This is one facet of my Year of the Edgar (all rights reserved) idea. Since its my year, I decided to actively work towards better health. Simply because I want to. Its an alien idea, I know, but I am tired of wanting to do something and then think “but I know I won’t do it.” That’s bunk and I am about to prove to everyone that if you want it, and do it, it will happen (within reason, don’t stalk someone!).

I say again, make this year as active as possible and write that script/book/whatever, or film that short/movie/skit, or get healthy/workout more, or learn a new language/an instrument/ a new hobby, or network and meet new people… whatever your heart desires is just but a “do” away.

I’ve said it before but I am a firm believer that things happen for a reason. They just do. I had the opportunity to watch a real show, albeit internet-based, filmed last weekend [The Guild]. At the same time, my wonderful cousin gave birth. Both events were in the same vicinity. I quickly bought my round trip ticket, informed my family that I would be visiting, and prepared for my trip. Three days I had.

I will talk about my experience in California at a later time. Right now I just wanted to talk about my experience on the plane to California. I had a window seat and was one of the first people to get to enter the plane.

My neighbor, in the middle seat, was already there. I will attempt to describe this individual. He was a black man. He looked distinguished and I right away though he must be a musician and/or someone of importance of some sort. He wore this gray wool cap. A wool cap like so:

Brown stressed leather jacket. Yes, I want one now. He wore a white turtle neck sweater and some kick ass jeans. This guy was swanky. I sat down and tried to position myself. I am a big guy and flights suck because of the size of those seats. I had the extra legroom, which I paid extra for. For some reason I kept peeking over to this man thinking “There’s something about him.” and I could not figure it out.

This is about the time that our final neighbor showed up. Aisle guy. This guy slammed his laptop case on the chair hard. I was shook a bit. The guy took some a magazine out and some other thing then sat down in the chair as hard as he could. It was surreal. While this was happening, I would catch the leather jacket guy tug at his cap. Total celebrity move if I ever saw one.

Here it gets interesting. I had gone to the T-Mobile store, its my carrier, earlier that day because my phone was behaving badly. I asked about the new G1 with the Android software. This guy on the plane had it and I took advantage and asked him about it. Pros and cons since I was interested in exchanging my Wing. That was it. That was all we talked about.

That is, until we were close to landing. Something compelled me to ask him what he did, after some random comment was exchanged regarding the flight. “I’m a musician.” he answered to my glee. I was right!

“What do you do, man?” he retorted. I explained that I work as a programmer for Northwestern University’s Robert H. Lurie Comprehensive Cancer Center. His eyes lighted up. “I work on an application that helps the different facilities that research cancer bill for their services. I do my part in helping fight cancer.”

He then shared a very personal thing. First, he mentioned that he plays for the Rolling Stones. Darryl Jones, bass player for about 15 years now. Whoah! Right? His mother passed away recently. Very personal. He mentioned that she spent her final days in Prentice, Northwestern’s new Women’s Hospital.

He told me about her. Typical strong-willed and minded mother. Hated hospitals and did everything wholistic. Darryl mentioned that the people at Prentice took very good care of her. I brought up a little story about my Godfather. He passed away years ago when I was very young. In his sleep. That same night, I had a dream where I stood in complete darkness. A very dark room. In the distance, I heard his voice. It sounded a little worried. He was talking to me. Giving me instructions. In Spanish. Most of all, he told me to take care of my Godmother. Watch over my three Godsisters. Even gave me an example, should I ever see money on the ground, to pick it up and give it to them. Help them out. That was the crux of my dream. Before I knew he had passed away. That same night.

I forgot about my dream when I awoke. It came back to me when I did exactly as suggested. I found some coins on the street and I picked them up and gave them to my Godmother. We happened to be together at the time. This was at the wake days later. The dream came back to me. I told Darryl this because it was a way for me to know that there is definitely an afterlife and as an assurance, his mother was in the same place. “Right on.” he said.

We began having a wonderful talk about local Chicago music. The scene. Southside still has several great locations for jazz and similar music. Surreal for sure. I highly recommend you speak to a musical legend about music in person because that is amazing.

He asked me what I was doing in California. I mentioned my cousin and Felicia Day. I asked if he’d seen House this season. Mentioned Felicia’s different works and explained that I found her working on an independent internet show and I volunteered my web tech skills to help her. I said that I have a great job that pays me and so I use my free time helping anyone that asks for my help.

This, again, tugged at him. Turns out his mother would help people in her own way. Out of the kindness of her heart. This came out after her passing and neither he nor his sibling(s) knew of this. “I am a firm believer that things happen for a reason.” I told Darryl. It was not pure chance that we sat next to each other. “Right on.”

Darryl told me another thing that happened that showed that his mother was still influencing their lives, but I will keep this story to myself. If you ask me, I will tell you privately, but I have to keep some of my experience for myself and out of respect.

Finally, Darryl mentioned that he might need some assistance with his website and asked for my business card. I gave one to him. It was a very positive experience and I am glad I was able to share this experience with others.

Something to tell the grandkids some day. I just hope I can be of help if needed. I love my life. I would love to subscribe to his blog, lets hope he starts blogging again, visit his website and comment on his blog. Tell him I sent you. Check out Darryl in action!

Darryl Jones and Keith

I’ve asked around for some fun design work and people have responded. I will discuss them all in time but I wanted to point this one out since there was a blog post with it and I can link to it.

Matt Brackney has been doing some work for The Guild and I asked if he would cartoonify me as a Guild character and he did! He’s awesome at this stuff, though I do kinda wish my character had glasses like me and maybe the braided beard was just my goatee since they tend to identify me the most (though I am not one to complain about this), its a wonderful drawing for sure! Check it out here on Squareternal.

I’ve had others work on some items for me and I hope to create a separate page to showcase some of these things. Particularly, Katie Durham‘s wonderful idea for a change in my blog.

If anyone else has anything Edgar-related they want to show me or want me to showcase please let me know… I get a kick out of all of this creativity I have been shown… especially when its about me.

Edgar

In her recent blog, This Place Looks Better! she writes about my part in updating her website once again, and if you haven’t noticed, she’s moved on up to a dot com. Not that there’s anything wrong with dot net (Ruby on Rails all the way!).

Funny thing’s that she really does it all. Heck, what little I do for her is mainly because I slowly usurped it from her. Poor woman need an assistant, she does it all. Then again, that’s her job, isn’t it? Me? I have a day job.

So how did I end up in this situation? Well, it was a crazy random happenstance.

It started off with a very strange random youtube search where I found The Guild – Episode 1: Wake-Up Call. It lead me to her website where my nerdyness found some misspellings… I emailed her, also suggested should she have “website questions” she could ask… she did.

Question answered, I conceded to being a Flog reader.  She had just started blogging. I kept commenting about getting her to install forums. She seems very approachable… since she acquiesced.  I think its partly why she is and will be a huge success.

I shortly became the moderator of the forums, then quickly admin to help her completely moderate her forums, since I asked for the forums.

From there, she needed help updating her other website, http://www.watchtheguild.com. This is how it all began. I wanted to help her however I could so that she had more time to devote to her guild project (which I loved) and to whatever other projects she had.

I like that she’s made it a fan-centric web series, and I think that helped her garner three distinct internet awards. SXSW: On Networks Greenlight Awards, Yahoo! Video Awards: Best Series, and 2007 Youtube Awards: Best Series. Not too shabby.

So, here I am, working for “the man”, “the man” being a beautiful red-head, with a genius mind, from social networking/self-promoting, to writing, producing, and starring in a hit web series. This star is rising, and rising fast. That’s a good thing, because we will be privy to some wonderful performances like her recent one in Joss Whedon’s entry into the internet web series domain that is Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog as Penny, co-starring with Neil Patrick Harris and Nathan Fillion.

In case anyone wondered, there’s my story. I got lucky, and I know that this luck can always run out. My main goal is friendships. Hers, and/or the people I have been meeting on her forums. I need to expand my friend network.