Brent’s Thoughts

People often look back on their life and think things about how great it was when they were a kid. About how bright the days were and how they spent so much time having fun and doing things. I can’t say that I have never done that and recently I have become more inclined to do it. I remember times when we have family over on holiday’s and we were out in the back yard all day. The sun was shining and everything seemed great. Since then we have moved away from family and friends to come here to Kentucky. So for a while the holidays and weekends seemed to not be as much fun, but recently we have started to develop a new set of family. Not a replacement to the old family, but a new extention to that group. Part of this group are the Lawrences. Brenda Lawrence works with my mom at her school and they have become good friends. Her two daughters have also become good friends with my mom and my sister, because they are there a lot as well. Brenda’s husband and her daughter’s husbands/boyfriends also help a lot at school functions as does everyone in our family. This has given all of us a chance to become pretty good friends. They are really nice people who like to have a good time. This memorial day they came over to the farm with two four-wheelers and we had a blast. The day was one that fits the memory well. It was sunny, and not too hot. There was a nice breeze as well. We set up a horse shoe pit and played, rode four-wheelers, ate, and just all kinds of stuff. It was a day to remember and a day worth living, though now I am tired, sunburnt and back at work. Bummer

Recently there has been a lot news regarding Microsoft in many different aspects. Each piece of news has several important things in it that by themselves are interesting, but when they are put together they lead to some very interesting conclusions.

Recently Jim Allchin,a top MS Executive, stated that there were pieces of MS code so bad that if people were to see them they would be able to completely shut down anything using windows including the Department of Defense. Only a few days later Microsoft starts a campaign to get the Department of Defense to leave Open Source projects because they are insecure and proprietary closed source code is more secure. This is somewhat contradictory. The only way I can figure this out is that they must mean it like this, “Open source is less secure because people can see it, even though there aren’t any gapping holes in it. While our software is more secure, even though there are gaping holes and bad code, because no one but us can see them.” That is about the best summary of the two topics that I can come up with. If I was the Department of Defense I think I would see it in another light, “Is it better to face the enemy that is known or the one that is unknown?” Meaning, you can pay people to look at Open Source programs and see if there are any backdoors that people can take advantage of, but if you use MS software you have to take their word for it. This means there are several possible problems. First you have the fact that there are new breaches in MS software all the time, these problems are often not corrected for weeks or even months. Second, there is the possibility that MS is made to open its source and then you have these huge holes in your software. Holes that you already knew existed, but couldn’t correct. Third, and one of the more scary ones, what if MS, for whatever reason, decides to exploit those holes itself? There is that possibility. Right now we assume they don’t on good faith, but what if the court case doesn’t go their way? Perhaps they need to get into a couple of computers to see where the next court attack is coming from. Do you honestly think that there is an moral issue for a company that has done all the things that MS has done when it comes to entering a machine in the Defense Department?

Another interesting situation is MS attempting to audit school systems in Oregon. The school systems started raising hell and the news made it to sites like slashdot.org where thousands more people picked up on it. This led to several offers from people to help the districts move to Open Source software and Operating Systems. It also led to a stong look at Linux as a possiblity and led to MS changing its attitude and providing a free bar at one of their conferences. MS is now backing off a little with the audit threats, but is still continuing with the scheme of making schools pay for every computer that could run Windows, no matter if it does or not. This is pushing school systems to use Linux as well. All in all while I think that this attempt has brought some more money to MS, I also think that it has sown the seeds for less money in the future. Now there are company’s like Redhat are starting their school plans to help schools migrate to their version of the OS at a very low cost. Effects like this will continue to snowball as more and more schools have success stories for using Linux. Hopefully in the near future it won’t be a very big deal to hear of Linux in schools. All because MS tried to more greedy that it already was.

Increasingly, it seems things are not going MS’s way. There are more and more countries that are working on laws to not allow the government to run MS or closed source software. Sometimes it seems like the Judge in the anti-monopoly case is really working toward having them nailed down so this time they cannot get away. Server share is decreasing as more and more viruses and worms come out that take advantage of Microsoft operating systems and more admins are switching things to Unix. More and more people are realizing that there are other things out there besides MS bloatware and licensing. It is possible to go about your day without using MS software for things. At home I have had my primary machine running Linux for several months now, and I know of many people that haven’t used it in a long time. They are perfectly able to interface with the rest of the world and use programs that are productive. I still have a windows machine in my room. I use it for a television and to run programs for other people. I also use it to watch some movies that there is no way to watch under Linux. Linux commonly follows standards which are cross platform and will work on any machine, while the only place that they lag behind is in working with Windows formats. If Window were to loose some of the market share and have to start following standards that would go a long way toward allowing people to work with whatever they want and still have everyone be able to work with them. The only time I really miss Windows is when I want to play a game. Sadly most all games are still being written for Windows. Hopefully someday that to will be corrected.

:) :)

You like Redhat? You like running linux, but wish you could find a way to run linux on a bunch of crappy machines? Wish there was a quick way to set this up without having to take a lot of time to set everything up? Have a bunch of crappy machines that are without hard drives? Wish I would stop asking so many questions? If so pick up this cool distro mod. These people have done a nice job of taking Redhat’s version of linux and adding a setup that will build you a nice Terminal Server straight out of the cds.

I set this up the other day on some extra hardware and it is Tres Cool. Install is all kinds of straight forward and when it is done it works. That is all there is. I only ran into one little glitch. Most of the time I do not start in Runlevel 5. When I did the install I told it to go to runlevel 3 and that was it. Then my clients could not pull up X. It took me a sec to remember that they had to connect to the server to run their stuff and therefore the server needed to be running GDM. So I pulled up rc.5. eth0 is used for the local network with the thin clients and eth1 is used for the regular LAN. There are several advantages to this that I have found and I cannot find any real disadvantages to it. Because everything runs off the server you don’t have to any NATing or anything and you only use one IP in the LAN for your stuff. The distro does install a DHCP server for eth0 though so make sure that you don’t plug that one into the normal LAN. The only thing that I can think of as a bad thing is that all the traffic going onto the normall LAN is going through the one pipe, but I think that is a trival thing unless you have a lot of people downloading lots of files. This setup also keeps all your client traffic off the normal net and as long as you use somewhat decent networking gear (might want to stay away from 10meg hubs for more than 10 clients… shoot for switches) I think everything should work really well. One thing I think would be nice for SOMEONE to do would be to make the Xserver compress some of the data before it sends it out the card.

Anyway I think it is a decent download and since it has Redhat underneath it and the install is the same you can use it to install regular Redhat 7.2 if you want. Perhaps a patch to the Redhat ISO would be cool as well.

:) :(

I went into this movie expecting it to be a big pile of dog crap like the first movie was, instead I found a smaller pile that wasn’t quite as bad to pay 7 bucks to see. First I would like to say sorry to the creators of Spider-Man. Sorry that I was one of the people that wanted this new version to be good and hoped it was enough to go see it, thus causing the numbers for its first weekend to be close to Spider-Man’s which was a far better movie.

Some of the things that made this movie seem so long and so bad are next. If you want to be suprised by the movie then don’t read this (actually if you want to be suprised by the movie then don’t go see it either, because it still isn’t going to do it for you.)

Lucas made a movie that has a character list in the thousands (including extras and all) yet the casting list for this movie probably weighs in at about 30. That drives me nuts. The first three movies have characters that were done with make up and cool things that made them look real on real people. Now they just throw CG characters in which look plastic and fake. Don’t get me wrong some of the CG looks great, because there is no way that it could be done with real world stuff, but it seems that anymore Lucas just writes stuff in and doesn’t try any options except, “Make it in a computer.” It makes everything seem fake and cheesy.

The plot was sub par and left most of the people I talked to scratching their heads. Who did what and who ordered what are two major questions. The acting in several of the scense left much to be desired and the chemistry between Anakin and The X-Queen is laughable. It almost looks like they want to rinse and spit after the kissing scenes. Anakin is fucking annoying and I hoped Obi-Wan would shove his lightsaber through his gut after about three minutes of listening to him. It is funny for all the greatness he is supposed to be and have, he pretty much screws up through the whole movie. Of course him screwing up leads to one of the parts that actually made me smile, and that was him getting his arm cut off. It is hard to believe that the badass that Darth Vader is came from this bitchy punk.

The use of Yoda in the movie is great. It added a whole smiley face to the review. Lucas finally uses him the way he should be used and finally shows why his is considered “The-Force-Bad-Ass-that-No-One-Should-Screw-With”. It also shows that despite his grammer he is a very intelligent individual, who leads a whole battle into enemy territory. The origin of the storm troopers is a interesting one and adds a new element to the story as we find our “good” heroes fighting with them. They also seem to have more personality in this movie.

Another thing that really steams me about this movie is the apparent need to make little tie ins to stuff from the first three movies. Everytime any thing is going on there are little references to things that were done or said in the originals. The keep putting Amadala’s hair up in the buns on the side of her head, which I think is supposed to show where Leia gets that aspect of her hair care, but that doesn’t make sense since she states that she doesn’t remember much about her mother.

Sadly this movie has aspects of it that again show Lucas to be racist. That is assuming that Lucas designs the character for the movie. Of course the ever annoying Jar Jar is in the movie (though he has been cut down quite a bit). The trade federation people are there still talking with a chinese accent, but now he has added a couple new barbs. The new one that really caught my eye was the representative from the Banking Guild. This creature had a big head, big ears and a big nose. I cannot find a picture of him to put up here, but to me he looked that I characture of the the standard Jewish stereotype.

After doing the whole wish list things from ThinkGeek, I think I might have developed a cool idea. Thinkgeeks’s wish list is a good idea, but it is limited to Thinkgeek’s site. What if instead it were possible to go to any site and build a list. It could be a really nice thing for several reasons. It would make it easier for distant relatives to get birthday presents and Xmas presents. No more searching to try and find the place you were looking at something the other day.

Someone would have to provide the central server and database. If anyone wanted to see the other people’s lists they just hit the frontend and request it. You could have some ads on the front of this for revenue and also have some products that you are reselling for a web site. Maybe behind the scenes you can search out better prices on the items and give the people a better price whilest skimming some of the difference.

Since the site is just the proxy it really wouldn’t have to worry about credit cards, shipping, or anything. Perhaps it would be a time saver if it kept track of the shipping address for the people that have their lists, so that the purchasers wouldn’t have to know that, but that and the other info that it would have to have would most likely be non-secure and therefore not too much of a privacy concern.

The way it COULD work would be that as people browse there is a link in their shortcut bar or something along those lines. When they get to an item that they would like to add then they just click the shortcut and it posts the URL to it along with their login information to the “wish list” servers and it gets added to their list. Maybe ask them for a description or something, maybe it could be extracted from the page. Heck it could be possible to form partnerships with web sites such that there sites are listed on our page and their pages contain the information in a format that we can sure fire remove from the page. Therefore anything that gets posted from their pages has all the information you could ever want by default. It might be possible to do this with the link (kind of like googles search bar and quick links) or there might have to be some kind of software on the machines.

I think this idea requires further investigation and checking……

Well I had a lot of extra time today at work so I went through and setup a wish list at ThinkGeek.com. I don’t expect for all of them to be filled by people, but I do think all of the items look cool and I think that I will go back and pick some of them off as rewards to myself or something. I can’t think of the last time I had a list of things that I wanted laid out in front of me like that.

The potential for things to look up in my life has become a little greater. I know that I haven’t been writing news items as much, but I have been writing reveiws and such. This is because I don’t want to give anything away that may change the way people feel about me. I know most of the people that are reading this (all two of you) know what I am talking about and what is going on, but for those that don’t, don’t worry if anything cool happens you and this page will be the first to know. I just wanted to tell you that some of the problems that I have been having with my life earlier might be getting rectified and things hopefully will be moving in a new BETTER direction.

Peace Out \:)

I have some new toys that I think I am going to spend some time messing with. Hopefully I will do some nice site updates here in a little bit. You might notice the bar cleanup/massive redirection to the left. This is due to the thoughts that I would eventually like to seperate the two sites, but as I am typing this I am also thinking that this site probably gets a good amount of hits due to my tech stuff. Hmmm a conundrum hath been reached.

:) :)

This movie was FREAKING AWESOME!!!!

Da Boyz over at Marvel - Movie Style have outdone any previous attempts that I have seen for a comic book movie. The Batmans don’t hold a candle. X-Men nadda. Stan Lee and the rest of the crew did a damn good job keeping it real (or as real as you an get for a comic world movie). The storyline held true to the meaning of Spider-Man. They took creative liberties with only a few aspects and the biggest one a lot of Spider-Man fans (especially from more recent series) probably won’t know. For those that care: The make Spider-Man actually create the web from his body, not from the webshooters. In truth though that isn’t emphasized much in the comics anymore.

Casting is great. All the actors do a good job playing their roles and making them come to life. The only somewhat comic book looking character is J. Jameson and that is only because of that funky haircut. Parker/Spider-Man is played well both by the actor and the CGI. Mary Jane is slamming and Osbourne/the Goblin is played quite well though his face is somewhat blocked with the mask.

The movie is action packed, but still has its comedic moments as well as the love aspects. The Bugle scenes are especially funny. Props to J. Jameson for not giving away his reporters and photographers. Spidey’s quipts are good as well, though there are a couple places were it is kinda hard to hear them. The essence of the Spider-Man character is kept alive and shown off, which I think is lost in other comic book movies like the Batmans. None of the actors and screenplays for them really brought the character to life and showed all the sides to Batman that there were in the comics, but that is not the case in this movie.

Go see this movie! I hope they have already started on the sequel. I also hope that this grinds Lucas’s crap into the ground. This movie makes the Phantom Menace look like a High School graduation movie done by the Drama club. Other than the fact that the name will bring in more people this movie should kill Episode II and I hope that it does.

In a world that is increasingly more and more determined to be politically correct, I find myself more and more determined to not care to be politically correct. So often now you cannot say things like short, black, white, fat, gay, chick, and stupid. Instead you have to say things like vertically challenged, african american, caucasian, obese, homosexual, female, intellectually challenged. Well I think this is intellectually challenged. The world is not a sterile place and I don’t think people should be forced to use a sterile langauge. Words have meanings because they invoke certain feelings in people. By removing these words it only nullifies the effect of langauge. There are some words that have a such a strong feeling behind them that perhaps they should be avoided because of the feeling that they produce, words like “nigger” would fall in this category, but I also think that there should be a unilateral removing of this or not at all. Black people talk about racism and the effects of the word “nigger” when used on them by a white person, but then they go and use the word on each other and it is not a bad thing. This is racism. It is from black to whites, but it is racism none the less. It is difficult to defuse a word once it has a conotation, but for one group to use it and force others to not will never remove the feelings it will only set one side against the other over those feelings.

Anyway that is not what I started this about. What I did start it about was to show a couple sites that I have found that take political correctness, kick it in the ass and then boot it out the door.

The first one I have mentioned here before. It is called X-Entertainment. The main writer here is named Matt and he does a good job of keeping his site light and funny while still writing in a style that follows speech and thoughts more than Political Correctness and planning. This is a style that I enjoy.

The other site is Jiggin.net. This guy also uses a SLASH based system to post his stuff and does a great job of throwing up stricly “man” sytle content. It would be difficult to find anything PC on this site I think. WARNING : This guys doesn’t mess around with down sampling the pics he puts up on his page. Use a fast connection or go get a cup of coffee when you load this page up (he must be hosted by some really nice people).

Worth an honorable mention is Wil Wheaton dot net. You might recognize this guy from his pictures as Wesley Crusher from Star Trek TNG. Don’t worry I am not pointing you to a prude site. Wil is a pretty cool guy not very much like the character that he played on the show.

And of course you can always view mine or maxx’s site if you need some un’PC-ness. maxx can be pretty un’PC when he is not being Maxx.