Just in time for all our lives to be gobbled up by a burst of filming, Mark Steven Grove has whipped up a new demo reel with some of our recent exploits: (click the logo to launch the 13-meg Quicktime file, or right-click and "save target" to stow a copy somewhere on your local system)

You'll probably recognize Mark, Greg Anderson, Sam Del Rio, me, and a few other familiar faces (even if our faces aren't always visible).

Of course, after we've gotten some of the footage that'll be shot over the next few weeks back, we'll probably get a New, Improved Demo Reel up on the net...so, stay tuned....

Got in the first shipment of Mark Steven Grove's "Shinobigatana: Basic Sword Skills" training video, now available directly through Warrior Quest International and other fine retailers. Now, you too can learn the fundamental postures, grips and hand positions, and basic attacks and defenses used with the traditional sword of the ninja.

Stay tuned for later installments, which will include other traditional weapons, unarmed techniques, and a series of videos on the traditional kunoichi arts.

Apart from devoting far too much of the last few weeks to trying to get the phone bills under control--initially, ICG was raising the monthly bill for the local dialup lines by about $1,000.00. That might not sound like much to you, but for a little ISP like Nyx, that's a big jump. And thus ensued a campaign of trying to find somebody--anybody--who could provide information on their rates at any of the other Denver-area Competitive Local Exchange Carriers (CLECs).

You'd think this wouldn't be so hard; most of the time people complain about phone companies being too aggressive at promoting their services and trying to get people to switch over to their services. The situation changes completely, however, when you're talking about trunk lines. Given the dollar amounts involved, you'd think they'd be at least as eager to gain an ISP as a customer, but on the contrary, what I encountered was 1) hardly anybody even knew who handled that kind of thing in their company, they were just sure that it wasn't them; 2) those who did handle such things generally didn't return phone calls; 3) if they did handle ISP services and return phone calls, then they didn't actually know what services they offered, what PRIs and T1s were, or what they would cost.

It took a little under two weeks to get calls back from AT&T, and Qwest. Pretty much anyone who responded faster didn't provide that kind of service in this area, anyway, though Allegiance Telecom was far and away the most enthusiastic, so much so that the representative I spoke to wanted to drive right on over to discuss the matter. One drawback with Allegiance is that they didn't provide PRI or other trunk line services in this area, but he was sure they were going to be expanding out this way sometime soon. I figure we can talk about it then.

In the meantime, the folks down at ICG ran into someone who knew what an ISDN PRI line was; it only took about three weeks, and then we were able to make some progress towards unsnarling the billing situation. Part of the problem is that some of the services they were billing for were not services that Nyx was receiving or had any need for, part of the problem was that they were adding taxes onto the bill that were either inapplicable or inappropriate (e.g., city taxes for cities several miles away from here), and part of the problem is almost certainly some stuff we still haven't figured out yet.

But it's progress. And the phone lines are still working, which makes a difference.