More "Vighpyr" trivia

My "logo". This was a gift from a friend some time ago that's on the wall in my office. It's an ink drawing made of little dolphins and fish and pandas... Cute, huh?

"Vighpyr", revealed!!

vighpyr [vahy-per] - n

A unique spelling for the pseudonym used by this blogger all over the Internet.

Here's the explanation. I've had numerous pseudonyms in my techie life. My first was when I ran a bulletin board system many moons ago. At that time, I went by the nick, "Silver Shadow". That one, I actually stole from a student who used to play a lot of rpg (role-playing games). It wasn't copyrighted or anything like that so there was no guilt. Some time after that when I became addicted to the game "Quake", I used the name "Shadow Assassin". That was pretty cool because I kept "Shadow" which I thought was neat, and of course, since the main focus of Quake was to run around like crazy just chopping and hacking and slashing and otherwise blowing people up, the moniker "Assassin" seemed appropriate. But when I 'grew up', I decided that I wanted to have a more 'sophisticated' name.

When I was on the AVP circuit for a bit less than 9 years, I was called "Viper" because I was fast and was very quick off the sand at the net. Also, one of my favorite movies, "Top Gun" features one of my favorite actors, Tom Skerritt. And his callsign in the movie was "Viper". Since the normal spelling was practically on every site on the net and I could never get that name, I developed this spelling that apparently, isn't anywhere else on the net. But if you do a Google Search of it, you'll see my electronic footprints all over the place. Every occurrence that you see is somewhere I've been. So that's the origin (and the pronunciation) of "Vighpyr".

"The Spot" (A little piece of serenity)

'Nuff said.

Time has been kind...

Over the weekend, I carved out some time to go through a couple of storage containers so that I could finally get rid of a bunch of stuff that had been long ago relegated to "pack rat" status. And even though I don't like throwing things away until they either turn to dust, or I see them listed on the Attorney General's list of potentially toxic waste products, I figured that this was a good time to divert from that normal path. Generally, I try to keep things in order, but that normally means that somewhere, there's a pile of shit that I've stowed out of sight, and out of mind.

So I pulled out the container and started diggin through it. Wow. Cool. A picture frame with some other guy in it. If I was more in touch with my feminine side, he might be attractive. Otherwise, he's just a face in a frame that I didn't put there. I'll keep the frame. Dude's gotta' go. And here's a bag of black plastic checker pieces. Why black pieces? Where are the red ones? Where's the board? Why in the hell would I want to save black checker pieces? Trash. And what do we have here??? A photo album... Okay, let's see what we have here... I opened the album and could tell it was really old. It was one of those photo albums with the clear plastic covers that got yellow and brittle over time and stuck to the pages like some type of ancient super glue after a few years of being tucked away in the far reaches of storage land. So I opened it and saw that it was a bunch of pictures of me from way back in the day. Waaaay back in the day. They were the kinds of pictures where I was too old for mom to be dressing me and therefore, not young enough to blame the fashion on her.

The first couple of pages were cute; baby pics (damn, I was cute!) and a few pre-pre-pubescent shots in which one could just look at my face and tell that the only care that I had in the world was whether the coyote was actually going to catch the roadrunner the next time it came on T.V. But then I turned the page and there it was. My picture. circa, 1978. I was standing there, as cool as cool could ever be. I'm wearing a rust-colored three-piece suit. Somewhere tucked under there was a silk, big-print shirt. I knew that because the big-ass dumbo-ears-like collar was prominantly displayed above the lapel of the vest. I was wearing platform shoes at least 3 inches tall and I must not have been quite steady on them since I was copping this wicked gansta' lean on a big speaker by the door that MUST have been because I was feeling unsteady on the big shoes because there's no WAY I thought I was that cool! And the piece de resistance; a medium-height, but neatly trimmed afro that was connected to a set of sideburns which eventually formed a perfectly positioned mustache. In the picture, I could only imagine that the crucifix that my mom fastented to the wall by the door served not only to bless the entrance to our home, but I'm sure it also had to be a conduit via which she prayed that I would grow out of this stage in my fashion life. See below? First person to laugh gets kicked out of the blog!

Time to bring my baby out...

Well summer's here and it's time to take my baby from under wraps and get her ready for the open highway. Well, maybe not the open highway. Her days of zipping around at 85+MPH are long gone. But for zipping around the city or cruising on the open highway, she's still more than capable. She has 248,000 miles on her and still purrs like a kitten. It was somewhat of a difficult winter, however. She spent more than a little time covered in snow and ice when i removed the cover to replace a pretty bad rip.

I think that it was more than a month before the weather 'warmed' up enough for me to get the bottom layer of ice off so that I could replace the cover. You can see what kind of shape she was in below. Ouch! You can see how the snow and ice was in the pic below. The bad part is that the layer of "snow" on the car is actually a layer of ice. So it took me a little while to get the ice off without damaging the body even after the temperature rose a bit. But for the most part, she came out of it unscathed. This wasn't the ideal snow story for her...

...that would be the picture below. Doesn't it look like she's just having a good time? Now, the reason I refer to the car as "she" and "her" is because this was one of the models that has the female voice which tells you of critical conditions like low fuel level, open doors, lights left on and keys left in the ignition to name a few. So I've always referred to her as "her". And she'll be 22 years old in September!

So next week I'll be taking her to get the exterior done and after that, I-95 here I come!