Deep in the depths of a high school boarding campus, an idea was born. Cascading from a spark, thoughts built upon each other, and an innovation was imminent. Slowly, word leaked out and news spread like a wildfire. Within weeks, the entire campus knew about it, and everyone was scurrying to sign up for beta testing. Tension built as hundreds of people waited for the first, private release. Deep in the depths of a high school boarding campus, Renditi was born.

Yesterday at 10:00 PM US Central time, Renditi’s alpha testing was scheduled to begin. I couldn’t wait – this was the first time I would see Renditi at work. At 10:12 PM, Renditi was silent, and still password protected. I shot a quick instant message to Ravi Pilla, one of two owners of the site, who had lost track of time. My excitement hit a wall. We changed the release time to 11:00 PM, and Ravi made some last-minute updates.

Not long after 11, I got an instant message from Ravi with the username and password to access the site. I immediately switched to my Firefox window and typed in Renditi’s domain. I entered the username and password and I was in. I navigated through the splash page and registered my information. I was taken to the main interface… and was lost.

There were two subwindows open: the player and the playlist. Half the playlist was off the screen. There were icons on teh top-left of the screen, but their mouse-over alternate text appeared off the screen as well. The "whoa" effect I got from the incredible, high-quality graphics on the splash page started fading as I scrambled to get everything organized and fit on the screen. Suggestion: Make all windows fit on a 1024 by 768 screen resolution from the initial loading screen. Make the alternate text for the icons appear on the bottom right, not the top.

After I got accustomed and aligned everything to my liking, I started actually using the site. I went to the Search feature and searched for Sum 41. After several seconds of emptiness, I alt+tabbed to AIM and asked Ravi if the search feature was working. Soon enough, the results came up, and the search was, in fact, not broken. Suggestion: Add a "searching" animation to inform users that their request actually went through.

Within ten minutes of release, disaster struck. I accidentally closed my Firefox browser, and when I reopened it and went back to Renditi, I was met by a string of PHP errors. The reason? Max user connections reached. Renditi had gone down due to an overload. Around this time, one of my friends instant messaged me and said, "renditi is kinda sucking balls right now." I hate to admit it, but I partially agreed to it – what I saw so far wasn’t as revolutionary as I thought it would be. Of course, I kept in mind that this was the very first pre-release of the website, and deep inside, I knew I was expecting too much. Ravi had told me minutes before that they were going to update on a daily basis with problems they find each day. I hoped for the best for the future, and refreshed the page. Renditi was back up.

I started fiddling around with the search feature and added some more music. It was a tedious process, searching for each song, one at a time, and adding them to my playlist individually, one-by-one. Suggestion: Create a feature where entire original albums of artists can be added to your music library at once. Everything was going pretty well until I accidentally double-clicked a song. It added itself to my playlist twice, so I went to my playlist to delete the duplicate. I didn’t see a delete button, so I right-clicked on the song to see if there was a special menu. All I got was the standard Firefox right-click menu. Suggestion: Disable right-clicking, and create a delete feature.

As the time neared midnight, I started closing down my programs and got ready to go to sleep. Renditi left an impression in my mind that will last a lifetime – a peer and good friend, aspiring to become a multi-millionaire. With continuing updates, the concept that Renditi introduces really exposes a facet of music that could change the way we look at music itself.

All feedback to this review and Renditi in general is greatly appreciated. This allows the programmers of Renditi to pinpoint key consumer issues and fix them as soon as possible. Feel free to leave a comment at the bottom of this post.

Many people have instant messaged or emailed me lately about my blog. It’s getting relatively well-known, and it’s advertised pretty much everywhere I have a presence – in web forums, social networking sites, and so on. I said in early April when I first made this blog that I would try my best to update on a daily basis. In the beginning, I was doing great; I had several blog posts already written and ready to be posted. I scheduled future posting dates so my blog would automatically post my blog entries for me. Then, I started to fall behind.

In only two weeks or so, I started running out of topics. I started posting utterly useless blog entries, like the riddle about the dead man. Someone specifically commented and asked if I was running out of topics to write about. Unfortunately, I had to resort to riddles again two weeks later because I was once again behind on my blogging.

This made me think about why I was blogging in the first place. Way back on April 5, 2009, I said that I was blogging to keep up with developing trends. People are centralizing their lives on social networking and other forms of internet-based socialization, and being an owner of a website, I wanted to keep up with the "popular thing" to keep my website modern and interesting. To put it simply, I started blogging because people have told me that they like reading what I write (especially Chronicles of a Roommate), and they wanted to read more.

As I was being pushed to pump out blog entries faster than I could handle, my writing became sloppy and boring. The topics I was writing about became meaningless and argumentless. My naturally debating nature went dormant, and I presented the topics I wrote about in a way that made the readers just not care.

Starting yesterday night and finishing this late afternoon, I changed hosts for web blogs. I originally had used Blogger, a blogging website now owned by Google. I now use a free, downloadable version of WordPress. I installed it into one of my databases on my main website, and I’m now maintaining every aspect of my blog. The good thing is that I have nearly full control of the features of my blog and now feel more comfortable using the interface. The bad thing is that I have free hosting from x10Hosting, and whenever the servers experience down time (which is quite frequently, seeing as I’m using a free service), my entire blog goes down with it. I guess that’s just something we have to deal with.

Making this change more or less a milestone, I’ve decided to change my viewpoints and opinions on blogging as well. Now, instead of throwing out a new blog post everyday, they’re going to be more spaced out; there could be anywhere between zero to two days between separate blog posts. However, now they’re going to be slightly longer and more meaningful, and hopefully, more entertaining to read. Starting from now, you might actually need the full five minutes to finish reading what I have to say.

On that note, I would like to successfully declare that I am done changing web hosts and am pretty much settled here. I had some frustrating times when my website went down earlier today while I was transferring blog posts and comments. To make it even worse, my website was up for a minute, then down the next, then up the next minute, and (guess what?) down the minute after that. (Just to let you guys know, all the old blog posts and all of your old comments are now on this blog.) Now that I’m done, I’ll concentrate more on producing good material and less on glaring at my monitor.

So it begins tomorrow – the very first, meaningful, and hopefully comical blog post. I have a pretty good idea of what it’s going to be about, but I’m not telling yet. I guess you’ll have to wait and find out.

Edit (May 20, 2009, 11:51 PM): I have gone back to old blog posts and deleted unnecessary posts or combined two relevant, shorter posts into one. You will notice the differences immediately.

Before I begin, I would like to give some words of advice to anybody that may be taking the computer science exam in the future. When you get to the free response section, write your responses in pencil, not pen.

Overall, the computer science test went very well. When my class did practice exams in class, I was averaging an 85% raw score on the tests, when a 60-65% is sufficient for a 5. Multiple choice section went smoothly, even though I was working and checking my answers up until the time limit. There was one question, however, that I omitted. The problem is, this was more of an English issue than a computer science issue – I literally couldn’t understand what the question was asking me.

Then came the free response section. My proctor specifically told us that we would need a black- or blue-inked pen for this section. What I didn’t catch was that we were only supposed to use pen to initial and date the front of our free response packets, not to complete the entire free response section. Within 50 minutes, less than half of the time permitted, I had finished all the problems and checked my answers. I was going through my responses and commenting my work to make the scoring process a little easier for my grader, when my proctor announces: "I noticed that some of you are using pen for your free response, but the test requests pencil." I looked up and stared at him blankly, then let him know that I finished the entire packet with pen. He quickly replied: "It’s okay, just switch to pencil now." I didn’t really see the point of switching to pencil when I was already done.

I talked to my computer science teacher after the test, and he said that he was pretty sure the graders receive the original copy to grade, or a copy that doesn’t require HB graphite. Hopefully that’s right, or else the grader might be receiving a blank page…

I think I pretty much said everything I need to say in the title. I’m sleeping early today; I have to do well tomorrow!

Edit (Saturday, May 02, 2009, 02:41 PM): I finished taking the SAT, and I have some words of advice for you. The TI-89 Titanium IS allowed on the SAT. I wasted about ten minutes digging through my storage box to find my old TI-84 Plus calculator because I thought that the TI-89 Titanium was not permitted. Apparently, it is – someone else in my testing room had it, and the proctor didn’t say anything. I did a little research after I got back home, and according to Wikipedia, it’s always been permitted on all College Board tests.