The Well XLIX: Halp, I need a finger extinguisher!

[FretFire]

Alright, I'm all yours, pardon the lame title!

[Robert S.]

Re: The Well XLIX: Halp, I need a finger extinguisher!

How long have you been playing and who are your influences?

[FretFire]

Re: The Well XLIX: Halp, I need a finger extinguisher!

Okay,so why fretfire?

I was listening to a lot of Steve Vai, Dream Theater, Yngwie, etc at the time I signed up and remembered having a conversation with some friends that involved someone saying "man he's playing so fast it sounds like he's going to catch the neck on fire..." I tried adding fire to a few words and "fretfire" was the only thing that sounded halfway decent.

[FretFire]

Re: The Well XLIX: Halp, I need a finger extinguisher!

How long have you been playing and who are your influences?

I've been playing for 9-10 years now. A list of my main influences would include SRV, Eric Johnson, Mike Einziger, and Andy Timmons. Joe Satriani is the reason I wanted to start playing in the first place, so he's probably my biggest influence.

[FretFire]

Re: The Well XLIX: Halp, I need a finger extinguisher!

Having said that,how have your tastes changed,and (if applicable) why?

I used to listen to a lot of metal and heavier rock, and still do on occasion, but lately I find myself gravitating to tamer stuff. I am big on blues, and is probably what I'm most comfortable playing myself, but I've been getting more and more into country, jazz, and fusion stuff over the past year or two. I do go in and out of phases where I listen to a lot of instrumental guitar records though.

[Jake]

Re: The Well XLIX: Halp, I need a finger extinguisher!

You ever get on Xbox live anymore?


My xbox just died AGAIN but this time I have no warranty so it may be awhile before I can fix it ($75 bucks, yikes) or replace it

[BTMN]

Re: The Well XLIX: Halp, I need a finger extinguisher!

What's coolest thing about where you live? Have you lived there long?

[FretFire]

Re: The Well XLIX: Halp, I need a finger extinguisher!

You ever get on Xbox live anymore?


My xbox just died AGAIN but this time I have no warranty so it may be awhile before I can fix it ($75 bucks, yikes) or replace it

I've been getting on more in the past week or two than I had in the past year or more. I graduated college in March, which freed up my nights, but until recently had been spending 99% of my gaming time on the PC. I've stopped playing MMOs altogether, so my gaming PC isn't getting much attention anymore. I've been playing some Left 4 Dead, and actually jumped into some Halo 3 action for the first time in a while last week.

[FretFire]

Re: The Well XLIX: Halp, I need a finger extinguisher!

What's coolest thing about where you live? Have you lived there long?

It's a tossup between the culture and the sky. The original part of town, or "Old Town", has a very cool ambiance and the mexican food here is just killer. But, there's nothing like a New Mexico sunset, absolutely amazing.

Albuquerque is interesting. It's around 4,000 feet average elevation, with mountains reaching over 10k feet butting up against the East side of the city, so we get a mix of desert and mountain weather. Summer highs can get into the triple digits, but then we'll probably start getting snow here in a few days. There's a lot of government job opportunities here with Sandia National Laboratories and Kirtland Air Force Base in town, and there's a lot of technology-based companies around. For example I believe the Intel plant here is the largest in the U.S., if I remember correctly. Because of that, it's a pretty "young" city for the most part.

I moved here about three years ago to finish up school, I was born and bred in a small town of about 12,000 people down in the Southeastern part of the state. Artesia, NM to be specific.

[lpmarshall]

Re: The Well XLIX: Halp, I need a finger extinguisher!

Next time you are in town we'll have to catch a drink out in Westport since I work not far from there.

IIRC, you do Cisco stuff or something similar? How did you get started in IT?

And if you had only 1 amp, 1 pedal, and 1 guitar for the rest of your life what would they be?

[Petrovsk Mizinski]

Re: The Well XLIX: Halp, I need a finger extinguisher!

If you could write a song with with only 4 strings on your guitar, which 4 strings would they be?

[FretFire]

Re: The Well XLIX: Halp, I need a finger extinguisher!

Next time you are in town we'll have to catch a drink out in Westport since I work not far from there.

Definitely, I'm always out in Earth City when I'm up there and usually get put up at the Crowne Plaza on Lindbergh, not far from the airport.

IIRC, you do Cisco stuff or something similar? How did you get started in IT?

Yep, my official title is WAN Engineer. Basically, I'm under the tutelage of our senior engineer and help him take care of aggregate connections into our datacenter and their interaction with our ~2500 customer locations. The customer sites are a mix of private DSL and VPN over public connections (could be DSL, cable, aircard). We provide a secure, managed broadband connection for merchants that have to process credit cards. We don't actually handle the card data, we just transport it. Wow that sounded like a sales pitch .

I got started in IT right out of high school really, I started going to school at New Mexico Tech in Socorro for Computer Science, and found out I absolutely hated coding. So I took a year off, saved up some money, and went back to school. This time I went into Information Security, and loved every minute of it. My first job in Albuquerque was being a jack-of-all trades IT nerd for a local semiconductor company. I managed the website, maintained their computers, did backups, etc. Then I got a contract help desk job for the company I currently work for and they pushed me up the ranks, eventually buying my contract out after six months. They sent me to get my CCNA, and then three months after that I got my Bachelor's degree and they bumped me up into the "engineering group" to start working on PCI compliance. I will have been with this company for two years on December 11, actually.

And if you had only 1 amp, 1 pedal, and 1 guitar for the rest of your life what would they be?

Great question. Guitar would be the strat I assembled a couple of years ago, no question. It is *my* signature model and I'll never part with it. Amp would be a VHT Pitbull 45, I used to own one and sold it during a rough financial patch a few years back, miss it dearly. Pedal would probably be a Hermida Zendrive, it's a terribly cool light overdrive.

[FretFire]

Re: The Well XLIX: Halp, I need a finger extinguisher!

If you could write a song with with only 4 strings on your guitar, which 4 strings would they be?

I'd probably pull off the E strings and just use the A, D, G, and B strings. You can do plenty of chording to make pretty substantial rhythms, and would really just be missing a handful of notes in the high register for leads. I don't go up in the meedly-meedly range there in the last few frets too often anyways, so I doubt I'd feel handcuffed .

[Mr 9finger]

Re: The Well XLIX: Halp, I need a finger extinguisher!

Do you ever miss Gcom?

[FretFire]

Re: The Well XLIX: Halp, I need a finger extinguisher!

Do you ever miss Gcom?

Not really. I kept up with JDB for a while but eventually stopped going there, too. Not sure why really, everyone was nice enough and nothing ever happened that turned me off of it, I guess I just prefer it here.