Dodge Story

Well, it's been... a while since I've posted. Honestly, though, I haven't had much to say. Life's been rather busy lately. Of course, with the new semester of school starting tomorrow, I suppose it'll only get worse. I've got English and Civics/Economics coming up this semester, and I'm really looking forward to both of them. I'm expecting excellent grades this semester - with the sole exception of Geometry. Regardless of the amount of work I put in during that class, I don't seem to get any of it. Speech and Debate went fine - that was one of my semester classes. I got a 97 on my final project. As for Biology, my teacher called to inform me that I got the highest grade in the class, and she'd like to see me on Monday. Looking forward to hearing what she has to say. (AP Bio, here I come?)

Trans-Siberian Orchestra's doing a spring tour for the first time! April 11 in Washington, D.C. is when I'll be going hopefully. They're going to play all of the songs from Beethoven's Last Night, which is probably my favourite album that they've made. I won't get into a long rant about them, since I've probably done that a thousand times on the thousand blog designs I've had.

You know, I haven't posted in about two months? Hopefully that'll change soon. I've got a couple of ideas that I'm going to be bringing you people up to speed on. In addition, be sure to check out my links page coming up - since I'll be adding a couple of sites that I've been reading lately.

On a final note, OBX-Forum.com expires soon. If anyone wants it or can think of a decent use for it, let me know, and I'll get everything set up. I can install any open-source forum software or CMS and manage the databases for that, so if you're up for community management, feel free to give me a shout and we can talk about it.

So ends the longest blog post I've ever written. Hopefully I'll be writing more often - but I suppose it all depends on how my new teachers will treat me. No homework, plz? Kthxbye.

Well, that was amazing. Absolutely amazing. The Trans-Siberian Orchestra is my favourite band, and seeing them live was an awesome way to spend my sixteenth birthday, which was today. (Erm... November 25th, anyway.)

They started off with a mix of Night Enchanted (below) and The March of Kings. And the lights, oh the lights. Absolutely amazing. I can't even completely write a blog post about it!

Anyway, the first half of the show was the entire "Christmas Eve and Other Stories" album, which was great. I think my favourites would have to be "First Snow," "Christmas Eve / Sarajevo (12/24)," and "This Christmas Day." Afterwards, they played music from their new album, Night Castle, and other songs. And for the finale, they even came into the stands, and played. Then, they went onto a riser, and went up into the air.

I'd suggest that anyone with any good taste in music go see them. I'm not exaggerating, either. Anyone will love this music. Just as a warning, though, they use some very bright lights and strobe lights and lasers and even fire that shoots up five feet into the air.

Well, I recieved my free copy of Windows 7 in the mail this Saturday, and I waited until yesterday to install it on my laptop. It's now running Windows 7 without any major problems ... well, one.

Would someone at Microsoft care to explain why Windows 7 took eight hours to install? Honestly, on a powerful Vista HP laptop, it should have taken an hour and a half. But eight hours? Ridiculous.

However, that being said, Windows 7 is amazing so far. It's a vast improvement over Windows Vista, and I'm glad that I got it for free. (Note that the only reason that I did get it for free was because I bought an HP laptop in July. Win? I think so.)

I think one of my favourite features is the new taskbar. For one thing, it's completely customizable. Plus, it's not nearly as annoying as the Vista taskbar was. It certainly takes some getting-used-to. A lot of getting-used-to. But I'm okay with it now.

Anyway, I'll probably post a few more things about Windows 7 in the future -- be sure to bookmark this.

Well, November 25 is going to have two important birthdays - one of them being my own (16th birthday). The other is SendItHome's first birthday!

You know, SendItHome grew off a subdomain on this very website - it was originally just intended to help a few people in my English I class, since some of them kept forgetting their thumbdrives. Eventually, however, it grew into a killer application for students. Randy Nance and I have been interviewed multiple times about the subject, a story about the site has been run in multiple newspapers, and eventually, we were interviewed by our school district.

All in all, SendItHome is used to transfer a large chunk of files every day. And even though its parent company is going under, Randy and I have pledged our support for SendItHome for the forseeable future.

It's also worth noting that Randy and I had never even been in the same room with each other until we were interviewed by Dare County Schools. All of our work was done using Google Docs, Facebook, and Skype.

So, have you got a few minutes? Wanna help me out a little? Well, even if you don't, there's no reason that you shouldn't sign up for FicSpot! It's a free, community writing site. Plus, no advertising! There's no catches, either.

The entire site is advertising-free, absolutely free. There's no catches, no fine print, absolutley nothing wrong with the site in any way. 'Sides, what can it hurt to register?

Well, that ends this edition of Shameless Plug. Until next time, I've been your host, Dodge Story, and remember... catchy tagline goes here.