Next weekend, Tony and I and a few other Gnomes are going to be at Starfest in Denver! Here’s the info: Giant Gnome Productions at Starfest!

We’ll be showcasing how to make an original audio drama ON SITE using two Blue Snowflake microphones to record a scene from Star Trek: Outpost.

Hope to see you there, but if you can’t make it, we’ll release the fan drama on the Giant Gnome site as well as here on mine

Here’s how the old one looked:

The old one was super-wide… 1200px wide. This one is under 1000px and uses the space more efficiently, I feel. Much less clutter.

Update to the page content is coming soon, but you can look forward to (at least) weekly blog posts on:

• Freelancing and Employment
• Community and Fort Collins
• My Projects and Events
• Digital Gunslinging, Marketing, and Business
• Sci-Fi and Star Trek

I dare you to spend 5 minutes in a room with Bill Tucker.

Not only will you learn something new, you’ll likely make a new friend. Bill Tucker is undoubtedly one of the smartest people in Fort Collins. Don’t believe me? Check out Bill’s presentation on Six Thinking Hats from Ignite Fort Collins #4

One of my best friends, Kevin Buecher, before I knew him as well as I do today, stood in front of 50-60 inspiration-seekers – showing them that they had the tools they needed all on their own.

I was inspired… Kevin had done what I was hoping to do; he beat me to it, in fact – starting LaidOffCamp in Fort Collins. But I wasn’t mad or jealous; I wanted to help. So I dove in to see what it was all about first-hand.

I led two sessions: one on how to write a better resume and one on how to use social media to expedite a job search.

A month before LaidOffCamp Fort Collins #2, Kevin asked me to come back and lead a few more sessions. He asked because my name kept coming back on the evaluations as the most helpful session. After a successful LaidOffCamp Fort Collins #2, Kevin invited me over for lunch and asked me to help him facilitate LaidOffCamp Fort Collins #3 by kicking off the event.

The evaluations from LaidOffCamp Fort Collins #3 asked for Kevin to kick off the event (haha). I wasn’t phased. Neither was Kevin.

Kevin and I opened LaidOffCamp Fort Collins #4 together; hosting the largest LaidOffCamp in Colorado yet with close to 200 people in attendance. There were so many ideas and so many people wanting to learn or share something new that we filled up two idea boards. That’s never happened before.

LaidOffCamp Fort Collins #5 is just around the corner – March 29th, 2009, and if you’re wondering if you should attend or not, consider the picture below:

This is Si – another of my other best friends. Si is 24. In this picture, Si was entrusted by these folks to facilitate the Job Seekers Over 40 session. Guess whose name was on the evaluation forms this time around?

Si owns his own business, as Kevin and I do. As many of the people in attendance are trying to do (or dream of doing). We’re here to help.

LaidOffCamp is perfect for anyone who needs a little inspiration. Join us!

That’s right. Two separate people Google’d “fatass on a wii fit” and got my site (one came back twice).  Not only that; they stayed for a whole three and a half minutes.

Other popular search terms: patrick stewart bald, skittles porn, sexual candy hearts, and fit ass.

If you ever had any question about what I’m all about, that list pretty much sums it up. Bwahaha.

During this time, I’ve discovered some things that you just shouldn’t do and have compiled a list for your convenience.

1. Ask cute girl to dance.
2. Tell said cute girl that you want to have her babies.
3. Tell a knock-knock joke.
4. Speak Klingon.
5. Ask the bank teller for money.
6. Do voiceover work for daycare center.
7. Ask the kids at said daycare center to “keep it down”.

On day one, just before we left Fort Collins for Grand Junction on our way out of Colorado, Liz turned to me and said, “I think the only thing I forgot is a towel.”

I froze in mid-step down the stairs.  ”I’m sorry, I have to go back.”

“What?” she said.

“One second.”  I returned with a bright green towel.  ”Never leave home without your towel,” I said.  ”Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy.”

The first thing I did when I realized we were actually going to make this trip from Fort Collins, CO to Seattle, WA happen was contact @Brady from Ignite Seattle.  He was more than willing to meet up with us and discuss some of the cool things we’re doing with LaidOffCamp and Ignite Fort Collins.

At the same time, Kevin had phoned his friends Marc and Clint from StartUp Weekend – who would meet us there.  As an added bonus, my friend Rob – a Seattle native, and our friend Cassie from Portland and her business partner Lisa, would join us as well.

If you’re not aware of who any of those people are, just think of it like a meeting of the Jedi Council… all bad-ass with a lightsaber and all somewhat ninjalike.

Before we could head to Seattle, though, we had a quest to complete.  While in Oregon, Brady phoned us and let us know that he was in the process of making bitters, something which requires high-alcohol content grain alcohol.  Brady had effectively turned us into bootleggers, a task which we giddily subscribed to.

A few phone calls and two jugs of grain alcohol in hand, we departed Portland for Seattle, sans Liz (and the Voodoo Doughnuts) who would remain in Portland until the morning and ride the train to Seattle the next day.

We hadn’t showered that day; though Xena was a lovely host, we had only my towel and one for four people just won’t suffice.  There just aren’t enough corners.

The level of intellectuals we were meeting demanded less grime, so at the last gas station out of Oregon, we pulled over and I ran in to the only “functional” restroom – the women’s.  Functional isn’t exactly the right word, because while it had all the elements of a traditional bathroom, it had none of the actual usability.

The door “locked” by way of a duct-taped latching mechanism which was clearly invented by drunken MacGuyver.  The toilet didn’t flush – at least, not with the handle.  You had to use the actuator inside the tank.  The paper towels were few and far between… so the counter was soaking wet.  Somehow I managed to clean off a bit, change into nicer clothes, and escape in one piece with both the bathroom and myself nicer than I’d started.  Still, somehow less creepy than the bathroom in Vail.

Rolling into Seattle right around 6PM, we met up with Brady and some of the Ignite Seattle team.  Seattle’s streets, by the way, are tagged all around with sticker graffiti (some of them benign, some a little less – those were my favorites).  A fun dinner ensued with lots of ideas being exchanged and as the night came to a close, Lisa and Cassie arrived – kicking off a brand new dinner and a brand new conversation.

Rob, my friend in the red jacket in the picture above, is a quiet genius.  Having been unable to find a company in Fort Collins smart enough to hire him, he moved to Seattle to pursue other job prospects.  In an economy where people are settling for work as Walmart door greeters, Rob kicked some serious economic tail and landed himself an amazing job and a plush apartment in a beautiful part of Seattle.  We didn’t get to spend nearly as much time with Rob as we wanted; he had to work the next day at 5, but he shared with us a few things.  First, the view from his roof:

Here we are, looking out over this huge city, filled with the noises of a huge city, when all of a sudden, a couple is walking past on the sidewalk below.  The girl stops and sort of fiddles with her shoe for a second.  Her companion turns around without missing a beat, gets down on both knees, and ties her shoe for her.  Like it was nothing… this incredibly tender, human moment in this monument of stone and metal and manpower, had been offered just for us to witness.  We were floored.

Rob also shared with us one of his favorite places in Seattle – Alki Park.

Alki Park is a dock on West Seattle’s eastern coast.  From there,  you can see… well, I’ll let the pictures tell the story:

These pictures can’t possibly do this moment justice… as Kevin, Si and I looked on over the city, each of us had a moment when we realized that our day is coming.  We’re going to change the world. We can do it – we were standing in Alki Park, only four days after leaving Fort Collins with one day of notice.  We’re going to change the world.

I wasn’t fair.  I haven’t been entirely fair to anyone or myself.  I’ve been bitter and brooding – weighing on me was the need to return my ex’s stuff and the lingering hurt of the implications of that relationship ending.  The way it ended left me hurt and vulnerable to the actions of others – which, unfortunately, haven’t been the best on me, either.

Tonight I returned her things, to her best friend.  But I also lashed out at my ex, who didn’t deserve to be lashed out at.  A sum of all the frustration and hurt I’d been brooding on for the last three weeks detonated like a text-messaged nuclear bomb.

I was out of line, it was a dickish thing to do, and I’ve since apologized, but that doesn’t make it right.

I like who I am and other people’s fuck-ups are not my problem, even when they hurt me horribly.  That doesn’t mean I have the right to be mean in return.

I’ve got an opportunity to seek out the things I’m looking for.  I aim to take it, by owning my faults as well as my virtues.

I’m Nick Armstrong.  That has to mean something more than rationalizing dickish behavior.  It has to.

In my haste and sleep-deprived delirium, I completely forgot to write about one of the most surreal moments of the trip – day 2, leaving Utah for Portland.  Having traveled to Promontory, UT for the Spiral Jetty, we were subsequently turned away because:

1. they wouldn’t lend/tour us in a government vehicle,
2. they wouldn’t give us the names of local farmers who might be willing to tour us for a fee, and
3. they suggested our car might explode should we proceed.

As an aside, Promontory, UT is the spot where at 12:47 PM on May 10, 1869, the trans-continental railroad was completed with a golden spike.  Beyond this amazing achievement, we thought, Promontory is smack-dab at the crossroads of Nowhere and Nothingness, having not spurred on any sort of initiative to grow beyond a museum.  As we began on our journey back (the same route) and fully expecting to see the same amount emptiness as before, we were instead greeted by this:

Being from Parker, CO, I’m not new to cows (or cows are not new to me, that is) – but the fact that we somehow missed an entire herd of cows on our way in was somewhat astonishing, considering they weren’t freaking there – there was nothing freaking there. We saw maybe 3 people this entire leg through Utah, and suddenly we were smack-dab in the middle of a herd of cows with a cowboy wrangling us and the herd.

This was a truly humbling experience.  Here we are, four relatively slick city dwellers, going 2 mph through a herd of cows, pretending that we were just another cow – albeit a really fat, really blue cow filled with 24 year olds.

Having cleared the cows and onward to continue our journey, we discovered that “nothing” isn’t always what it seems.  Shortly before entering Idaho, there’s a space and rocket facility called ATK.

What does ATK do? Well, they make freaking rocket boosters.  See?

Right.

The juxtaposition between being herded around with cows to rocket boosters that fly to the moon and put satellites in orbit was incredibly surreal and made for an amazing experience for a town filled with “nothing”.

We came through Promontory to see the Spiral Jetty and thought we’d failed, having not been able to achieve what we’d set out to do that day.  Instead, we left with one of the coolest and most memorable legs of the trip.

Proof that even when things don’t quite go your way, it’s still worthwhile to keep your eyes open and on the horizon for the next best thing.