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It is truly Elite

May 24, 2007 Posted by Liz in : Reviews, Uncategorized , 2 comments

During the torrent recently in Texas, water actually fell from the sky, as if it were the blood of tech angels, doing battle with the forces of corrosion.  It fell and like acid, damaged the roof of the store I work at.  Damaged it to the point that the roof offered no shelter from the tidal forces in the sky. As we ran around like madmen trying to protect customer units, display models and the stock(failing; forgetting the plasma televisions in the warehouse, 2 million dollars in damage- we have insurance) we had forgotten our precious tech stations.  The keyboards were mostly protected by an overhang, but, the ones up front were left to bear the burden.  The monitor survived, and the hole leading to the power strip was protected, but the mouse and keyboard were sacrificed for their benefit.

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Virginia Tech’s Extended Community

April 17, 2007 Posted by Bryan in : Uncategorized , comments closed

Having grown up and lived the majority of my life about 30 minutes from Virginia Tech, I spent many weekends walking the streets and sidewalks of the campus. While my wife and I now live 1,000 miles away, and any friends or family I once had at VT have long since graduated, I felt a significant sense of surreality seeing SWAT members run up and down those same streets and sidewalks yesterday.

While it has nothing to do with the normal focus of the site, I would like to take a moment in the most public venue I have - this website - to add my condolences and sympathies (and those of all of us here at the site) to the lengthy list that already exists. Additionally, I would like to ask our regular readers and any media who may view this post to consider the following as they watch the coverage or report on the events.

While the media is portraying Blacksburg and VA Tech as a rural locale (and in comparison to these reporters’ homes, it may seem so to them), in reality it is one of the more urbanized spots in that area of Virginia. With the city of Roanoke as an exception, VA Tech, and Blacksburg as a whole, is surrounded by 100 miles or more of smaller, truly rural communities. Each of these communities feel a tight connection to Blacksburg and VA Tech. These are the types of communities where you have to plan a 2-hour time slot to go to the grocery store, even though you may only have one hour’s worth of shopping to do, because of the time you’ll spend talking to friends you’ll inevitably run into.

Recent years have seen VT grow from a primarily locally-known university to a nationally-known one, but that connection to the extended community remains. What happens in Blacksburg and at VA Tech affects many times more people in a direct way than you can imagine unless you have experienced it firsthand. As I see repetitive pictures of the same two buildings on campus and the same small section of the drill field, I hope that, now that the immediate danger is over, responses to this tragedy consider the needs of that extended community as well.