Lyman Hardy | Brief Memories

Matthew Heick Leave a comment

In 2018 I added Lyman Hardy to my Hotel of Life. This mainly contained his brief obituary. I felt his impact to my life deserved it’s own write up, and 17 years after his death I feel I can get some data down.

My freshman year (1995-1996) I attended Sweet Home High School. This year had many, many memories, including the O.J. Simpson Verdict (October 3, 1995), scoring a 10/10 on my Earth Science Final Project by actually communicating with scientists from the USGS via email (eadn001@prodigy.com), a Band Trip to Walt Disney World (March 1996), and a Field Trip to Old Fort Niagara, the latter being led by Mr. Hardy.

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Who is Julie?

Matthew Heick Leave a comment

It’s 1996, and I used to record music videos off the television during the night while I sleep on a VHS tape set to EP. This gave me 6 hours of music and memories. I’d wake up early on Saturday mornings, plug in my VHS tape, and see what awesome music I captured.

First song: Soul to Squeeze by the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Ringmaster, Clowns, Freak Shows, Awesome.

Second song: Shame by Stabbing Westward. Intro: Apartment, Night. Leggy brunette walks into scene, cut to band charging up, song starts while brunette turns up radio and begins jamming in her red undies. The next 5 hours 45 minute of this VHS didn’t matter anymore.

The hell did this come from? This is awesome. Nick stalking Julie, A cop in a bad position, the band intertwined in this entire scenario, cheering at the end, complete entertainment. I’m hooked. I buy Wither Blister Burn + Peel along with Ungod with my 1 cent from the Columbia House (along with Fear Factory, Soundgarden, etc), and successfully navigate my teenage years with both albums.

30 years later I’m looking through archives, wondering about these actors in this music video, and I’m not the only one.

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Synacor Desk Swag

Matthew Heick Leave a comment

While cleaning things I happen to cross a pile of papers and sticky notes containing random phrases and interesting comments from coworkers at a previous job I used to work. I felt the need to get these digitized and memorialized as soon as the wave of nostalgia hit.

As an initial prerequisite to reading/seeing this data: I was called “Sparky”, a name provided to me by David Molik shortly after I was employed. The reasoning was simple: There’s just too many “Matts” in an office building of 300 professionals to verbally discern me from the rest, so a moniker was appropriate. It stuck for a decade, and was much better than my previous moniker “Crash.”

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Hard Mode

Matthew Heick Leave a comment

The online MMORPG “World of Warcraft” is currently in it’s 12th expansion “Midnight”, and it’s 2nd “Race for World First” for their raid “The Venomous Abyss”. As of this writing the top 3 Guilds are all 6/8 of the Mythic Difficulty at the second week, with the penultimate boss causing them the intended difficulty with their paid-for gear and 317 item levels.

“Back in the days”, meaning between 2013 and 2014 I participated in WoW’s 5th expansions “Mists of Pandaria”s final raid “Siege of Orgrimmar”. As a guild we had cleared many raids, and a majority of raiders decided to continue to the hardest content that was available at the time: Heroic. Unlike current hardcore guilds that take them weeks our journey took almost a year of pain, money, and more pain.

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Synacor Together 2020 Yearbook

Matthew Heick Leave a comment

During COVID I worked remotely as a Software Engineer for Synacor. Their work-from-home mandate started March 13, 2020 and lasted for ~715 days. After 6 months upper management decided to create a gem of comradery to remind us that, in times of turmoil and confusion, we have always been a team.

I finally got around to physically deleting the hard binding and getting the 8″x11″ yearbook completely digitized and OCR’d.

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