I dislike auditioning. It's a necessary evil if you want to perform in the world of theatre. But it's a brutal process.

I recently auditioned for "The Man With the Pointed Toes" at the Hale Center Theater in Orem, UT. It was a rather spur-of-the-moment audition. I hadn't actually planned on auditioning, but I ended up going anyway. Unfortunately, I didn't get cast.

But I still want to be in a show, so tomorrow night, I'll be auditioning for the musical, "Lucky Stiff" at the same venue. I've never worked with this particular director or music director before, so I'm rather nervous. They want auditioners to come prepared with 16 bars of two contrasting songs. I'll probably be singing the first part of "Suddenly Seymour" from Little Shop of Horrors and "Lost in the Darkness" from Jekyll & Hyde. We'll see how it goes.

The part I hate about auditions is that once your audition is over, there's nothing else that can be done, other than to wait.

...and wait...

...and wait.

If you finally get a phone call, you rejoice. If that call never comes, you wonder.

...and wonder...

...and wonder.

The phone call doesn't always mean that you are being offered a role. It usually means you're being called back for more torture. For plays, they want to see how you read and interact with other potential cast members. For musicals, they'll want to see the same, but additionally, they usually want to see how quickly you can learn choreography.

It's draining.

But as much as I hate auditions, I have some sort of sick, twisted need to perform, and without auditions, I can't fill this need.

Of course, I'll be back to tell you how auditions went. Hopefully, this time will be better than last time.

Since I had to move this site because someone is a filthy spammer, I decided to check my spam folder in my gMail account to see what it is that spammers are trying to tell me.

Today, they are telling me that I need product X so that I'll fit into a bikini and that I need viagra, cheap and with out a prescription. WHAT?? Um... Generally speaking, I would need either one or the other, wouldn't I? If I were the type to wear a bikini, viagra wouldn't really help me with a problem dealing with parts that generally aren't found under bikinis. If I need viagra AND I'm into wearing bikinis, then I have a feeling that I might actually go to the viagra SPAM site, because I'll need to spend time with a shrink, not a physician...

This morning, we did the big 50-mile bike ride for the cycling merit badge. About 5 scouts came along as well as three leaders. We even had a truck that followed us the whole way, so we had plenty of water, food, and mechanical support.

BYU had there homecoming celebration today, so I picked a route that would keep us FAR away from Cougar Stadium. We rode all over American Fork and Lehi.

After about 32 miles of riding, we stopped and had lunch. I SO enjoyed sitting with my son, eating a Gandolfo's sandwich, and talking and laughing. He was REALLY enjoying himself, and it was obvious.

After lunch, we set out again to finish the ride. But my son's experience changed during the next few miles. At about 38 miles into the ride, he started falling back a bit. His legs were KILLING him. He was riding along, tears in his eyes. I was pretty worried about him.

We stopped for a break and he and I talked about what to do. He said his thighs felt like they were tied in knots and that someone was sticking needles into them. I had him drink more water and stretch out, which helped a little bit. We were only about 2 miles from home at this point. Our route would take us within a mile from home before heading away from home one last time. I told him it was his decision--that he could turn for home when we got to the closest point.

And then he made me incredibly proud. He told me that it would be a shame to ride this far and not finish. I told him that I would be right by his side the rest of the way. (I had been in front, setting pace and navigating the route up to that point.) I told the other leaders the route we would take for the rest of the ride and explained that I needed to be there for my son at that time. They completely understood.

The hard part ahead was a nearly-four-mile climb from American Fork all the way up into Highland. I rode by my son, encouraging him the whole way. He was in pain and we stopped a couple of times to stretch out his legs. But he kept pedaling. He made it to the top, and when we turned the corner at the top of the climb, I congratulated him and told him that he had made it and I told him how proud I was of him.

The downhill ride back home from that point was a triumphant ride for my son. He was laughing and joking and couldn't quit smiling.

I still haven't quit telling him how proud I am of him for the decision he made to continue.

It's what every parent hopes for--that their child will see the difference between alternatives and choose the better way, even if it's the more difficult path. It was a learning and growing experience for my son, and a wonderful experience for me to see him grow in that way.

On Saturday, I rode 25 miles with some boy scouts.  Well, TWO boy scouts: my son and one other.

About 7 miles into the ride we had a close call.  A man driving a van didn't see my son.  He pulled out of a parking lot and clipped my son's back tire.  Fortunately, my son was watching what was going on and did everything he could to avoid getting run over.  The back of his bike got knocked about a foot sideways, but there was no damage to either bike or to son.
The van just kept on going.  I don't think he even realized what he had done.

If I had been closer, I would have chased him down and given him a piece of my mind.

I ended up having to hug my son and hold him close to me while the tears came spilling out of his eyes.  I'm sure he didn't want to cry in front of the other boy scout, but the experience freaked him out and the tears helped him relieve the stress of the experience.

It was just the beginning of a ride that didn't go well at all for him, but I'm very proud of him.  Despite the problems, he finished the ride.

On Saturday, I finished turning my back on something that I used to love.

Since I was in High School, I have loved barbershop music. I went to a party where the Northwesters, my High School's barbershop quartet, sang. There was something about 4 men ringing a chord that I loved. It was a unique sound, blended with fun and humor, that I had never heard before.

Later, in my High School choir, I sang with 15 other young men in a chorus that my choir director humorously called the "O.K. Chorale." We were better than okay. We scored a perfect score at the state music festival. I also organized a quartet of my own and we scored high enough to make it to the state music festival, but decided against it because we didn't really feel we deserved such a high score.

In the years since, I have tried again and again to organize quartets. Once in a while, I would succeed for a short time, but I've never been able to get a quartet to stay together. Someone would move or completely flake out. The last quartet dissolved when the tenor came out of the closet.

I sang for almost three years with the Saltaires Show chorus. I drove to Salt Lake every week for rehearsal. I traveled to Ogden and St. George for district competitions. I traveled to Anaheim, and Atlanta to compete in international competitions. I even went to Kansas City, just to watch competitions.

Later, I was even named the director of the Utah Valley Skyline Chorus, a position that I thoroughly enjoyed until bursitis in my shoulder made it necessary for me to resign.

I've spent countless hours in travel, rehearsals, preparation, personal practice. I've spent thousands of dollars on travel, membership dues, concert tickets, and recordings of quartets and choruses.

It's no stretch to say that barbershop music was something that I really loved.

In recent years, the disappointment of not being able to keep a quartet together along with the increased demands of growing boys have made me distance myself from barbershop music. I didn't have the time or the energy to invest in something that wasn't bringing the level of fulfillment that I hoped it would bring.

On Saturday, I finally reached the point where I have completely turned my back on barbershop music. I won't sing barbershop music any more. I won't listen to barbershop music any more. I want nothing more to do with barbershop music or the international Barbershop Harmony Society.

The cause? On Saturday, someone that should know better turned his back on his own family. He sang in a district competiton instead of going to a family member's once-in-a-lifetime event. There will be a district competition next year and the year after that. It's not like the group he was singing with had a prayer of winning the competition. (As a matter of fact, they came in dead last) But this event in the family member's life will never happen again.

Any group or organization that exerts enough pressure upon someone that they forget where their priorities should be is evil in my book. Any group that will pressure someone into choosing the group over their own family, especially on important occaisions, will have no support from me.

Now, instead of being music to my ears, barbershop has become revolting to me.

It's a bit of a bad thing when you wake up in the morning and find that a rather important email bounced.

Every morning when I'm snuggled deep in my warm bed, an automated process launches itself, backs up all of my databases, and emails the resulting file to my gmail account. Gmail is a good thing. As soon as the email arrives at Gmail, I have a rule that deletes the email immediately. I can hear you now. You're saying "What the?? Then why even BOTHER sending the email in the first place?!?" Well, there's a reason behind this seeming insanity. Gmail keeps deleted emails for 30 days. So what I end up with is a 30-day rolling backup in my Gmail trash bin.

I created this little system back when I had a problem with my web host. Someone hacked their server and put an IRC bot on my account, so they banned me without warning. Normally, I would just switch providers, but unfortunately, I didn't have a recent backup. Once I explained to the web host what I thought had happened, they were (fortunately) very nice and reinstated my account. That's when I decided to DO something about the lack of backups and the above-explained backup system.

Long tangent. Sorry. But it's the backup system that alerted me to a new problem with the web host. My email with the backed-up database files is the important email that bounced. Here's the message that was reported:

This message was created automatically by mail delivery software.

A message that you sent could not be delivered to one or more of its
recipients. This is a permanent error. The following address(es) failed:

@gmail.com
SMTP error from remote mail server after end of data:
host gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com [72.14.205.27]:
550-5.7.1 Our system has detected an unusual amount of unsolicited
550-5.7.1 mail originating from your IP address. To protect our
550-5.7.1 users from spam, mail sent from your IP address has been
550-5.7.1 rejected. Please visit
550-5.7.1 http://www.google.com/mail/help/bulk_mail.html to review
550 5.7.1 our Bulk Email Senders Guidelines. e13si3902388qba

In other words, Google is blocking email originating from my IP address due to SPAM originating from my IP address. GREAT.

The web host I'm in the process of dumping has been pretty good. The problem is that I'm only paying for shared hosting. This means that there are probably umpteen gazillion web sites on the same server as my web site. All umpteen gazillion of them share the same IP address. This means, in effect, that someone else on this shared server probably WAS sending SPAM, and that caused the IP address to be put on the Google blacklist. I'm probably not the only unhappy camper in this situation.

I think I've found a cure to that problem, and for only $3 more per month than I was paying. I'm moving to something called a "Virtual Private Server," or VPS. A VPS still puts a lot of sites on one server, but from both inside and outside the server, it looks like it's its own separate machine. They use Virtualization Technology to make it appear as if my site is the only site on the physical machine. I will also be the only one using the IP address assigned to my account, so if there's SPAM, I know that I've been hacked or someone is spoofing, not that some other JERK using the same IP address is actually spamming. At that point, I can use my knowledge of network security to fix the problem.

So... If you're reading this article, the DNS has resolved and everything has switched over. There will be glitches here and there, but I'm sure to be happier in my new corner of the Internet.

Remember back in June when I received that audit notice from the IRS? Well, it's been resolved.

I ended up paying $62, not the $8620 that they thought I owed. Today I received notice that I had overpaid by $14. This means that I sent the proper documentation to the IRS and that this mini-audit has come to a close. I think I mis-calculated interest, but fortunately I mis-calculated it in the IRS's favor. I should be getting either a deposit in my checking account or a refund check in the mail to bring my account balance with the IRS to zero.

I like it when a bill for $8620 is reduced to only $48.

*WHEW!*

In my old house, replacing my furnace filter was a breeze. I simply removed the old one and put a new one in its place. If I was out of filters, I would open up the furnace, take a look at the numbers on the side of the filter, go to my local Home Depot, drive back home, look at the numbers again, write them down this time, go BACK to my local Home Depot, find that the only size of filter that they didn't have on their shelves was the size that I needed, eventually find the filter at Wal-Mart, Lowes, or the other Home Depot in the area, and then replace the filter. I would even buy several at a time to make it less likely that I would have to travel to and fro, looking for the right sized filter.

Not so easy in my new home. I went to change my air filter, preparatory for the upcoming heating season and in the place of one of those familiar cardboard-framed furnace air filters, I found a strange-looking blue filter with no frame and with a couple of metal rods to hold it in place. I couldn't find the dimensions written ANYWHERE.

Apparently, this is something known as a "washable" furnace filter. It comes as standard equipment with my Bryant furnace. Every so often, I'm supposed to hose it down and put it back in the furnace. I noticed that it would probably filter the air a lot better if a section of it wasn't covered in paint. It was also extremely dusty. We're not talking dust mice, or even dust rats. We're talking full-grown dust wolves or dust bears here. Apparently, the people that lived here before us didn't know about washable furnace filters either. I should have checked THAT out before now. Hopefully, the furnace's life wasn't shortened TOO much by trying to suck air through several dozen pounds of dust for the summer months.

I don't like washable filters though. They appear to let too much dust and stuff through. Since my son has asthma (or something very closely-related to asthma), we need something that won't let as much dust through.

After much searching, I found the owner's manual to my furnace. Fortunately, there was a table that showed what size filter I should use. Of course, it wasn't as easy as just looking at the table. No, I had to know such things as the width of the furnace and whether the filter was located on the bottom of the furnace or to the side of the furnace.

I took a trip down to the basement (loaded for bear, just in case) to measure the width of the furnace. I could then decipher the table in the furnace user's guide and I came to the conclusion that I needed a filter that was 24 inches by 25 inches by 4 and 5 sixteenths inches.

I wrote the measurements down and headed off to Home Depot, which is fortunately right by my new place of employment. There were no filters anywhere CLOSE to those dimensions. I hadn't actually ever seen a 4-inch-thick furnace filter before.

After some Internet searches, I found the filters I needed. Although not very expensive, they wanted a LOT of money for shipping. I searched some more and found the filters I needed from a place that only wanted to charge a few fingers instead of an arm and a leg for shipping. I think I'll send 'em the ones the bear already chewed on.

Yes, I have them.

I know that other people have lives that do not revolve around me. I think that's good and normal. I wouldn't think it healthy for others lives to focus on me. I don't even think that would be desirable. Maybe it would be nice for a few days or a few weeks... OK... Not really.

However, it would be nice to not always have to be the one that initiates all of the contact. It would be nice to not CONSTANTLY be the one that seems to be doing all of the work to keep a friendship from fizzling out. It would be nice to feel like people actually think about me once in a while.

I know, I know. It sounds selfish and whiny. It probably is. I probably should just shut my whiny mouth and count my blessings instead of sheep and I'll fall asleep counting my blessings.

Yet I can't help how I feel. I feel like I'm a pest. I feel like people are nice to me out of some sort of obligation to love one's neighbor. I feel like the undue pressure society puts on us to be "nice" makes these people tolerate my clumsy attempts at friendship and they're relieved when I finally DO shut up and go away.

If you're one of those people, stop being nice. Just tell me that you'd rather not have me around and I'll go away. I won't drag things out. It'll be a lot less painful for both of us. You won't have to put up with the annoyance of me and I won't have to waste my time and effort trying to maintain a one-sided perceived friendship. Don't let me down gently. Just tell me to bugger off. I can take it.

If that's not the case, then please, once in a while, initiate some contact. Otherwise, I'll be forced to continue dealing with these abandonment issues. I'll have to keep wondering whether or not I'm just bugging the crap out of you. If I have to wonder too long, then I'll end making assumptions. When I'm at that point, I'll assume the worst and decide that you'd rather that I just left you alone.

*heavy sigh*

Sometimes it SUCKS being a "people person."

It's hard to believe that it's been five years since the worst terrorist attacks on the United States. In some ways, it feels like it was forever ago, yet in other ways, the wounds still haven't healed. Some of the emotions I'm feeling today are as painful as they were five years ago.

I was on the first business trip of my career. On Sunday, 9 September, 2001, I had flown to Orlando, Florida, and I had driven across the Florida panhandle to St. Petersburg. I was there for a beta test of the next release of the software I was working on for Symantec, Corp.

Everything was new and exciting. It was fun to travel and not worry about the cost. I was in a place I had never seen before, doing things I had never done before. I suddenly felt all grown-up and professional. I was representing a company that I believed in, working on software that would improve the network security of the United States Navy and Marine Corps.

On Tuesday, September 11th, however, my feelings would change. My co-worker and I were just arriving at the Raytheon facility where we had worked the day before to get systems up and running. We were planning on executing the test plan we had been given before we left our office in American Fork the week before. As we turned left into the business park containing the Raytheon facility, the first news broke: an airplane had crashed into one of the World Trade Center towers in New York. There were few details. They were assuming at the time that it was a small airplane that had gotten lost or confused.

My co-worker and I went into the lab where we would be working that day and started working on our test plan. It wasn't until some hours later that we realized that nobody else had come into the lab. We were working there alone. We went upstairs to find out where everyone was and we found that nearly everyone in the building was in a conference room watching television. I looked at the television just in time to see the first World Trade Center tower fall. People were screaming and crying and I had absolutely no idea what was going on. I had been in a computer lab with no cellular phone coverage, no television, no radio... Because it was a secure lab, it didn't even have Internet access.

After a brief explanation of the morning's events, I immediately called home. It was my first reaction. My wife was in tears. She hadn't been able to reach me and had assumed the worst. She was incredibly glad to hear my voice. We had no idea what was going on and what would happen next. I wanted more than anything to be at home. I had no idea how I would get there, but my number one goal was to get back home.

We called the home office and we were instructed to go back to our hotel room where we would have a conference call later in the day to figure out what to do. By the time we had the conference call, it was determined that we would stay and finish the beta test. It appeared that the attacks were over and we weren't in any imminent danger. We decided that it would be best to continue on in our lives.

For the rest of the day and into the night, I watched the events of the day as they were replayed over and over. I was numb. I didn't know what to feel.

I ended up going home on Saturday, September 15th, arriving home a little less than 24 hours after I had originally been scheduled to return home. I felt blessed to be HOME at all, and a day's delay seemed so minor after the events of the week.

Now, five years later, I still don't know what to feel. I feel a mix of anger and hatred, sorrow and pain. But most of all, I realized then and continue to realize today how important my family is to me. Events like those of September 11, 2001 helped me realize what things in my life are important and what things don't really matter.

I hope the wounds of September 11th never fully heal. I hope that they help us, as a nation, continue to fight for the principles and ideals that are important--that really matter.