Brent’s Thoughts

Why does everything have to be blamed on something anymore? Can’t someone just be wired wrong in the gourd? WHATEVER HAPPENED TO CRAZY????

Back before there were video games, before there were violent movies, before there were violent television shows, people used to climb clock towers and drop caps into people below them. Hilter didn’t have Quake to play so what made him want to kill so many people? Do you think Jack the Ripper got his ideas from a slasher flick? I haven’t ever heard that Manson got a high kill list while playing Counter-Strike. Oh wait, Manson was due to popular music wasn’t he? There is the first place I can think of where this was done up by the media. And they are doing it even now. The sniper out there now is a video game player according to them. Their one big key piece of evidence to that fact is that he left a tarrot card saying, “I AM god.” This obviously links him to God Mode on video games and has nothing to do with the fact that the police and media on national television said that the individual responsible “Thought he was god”. I mean everything they have said about him he has played off of and rebuked, but not this one, nooo this one is about computer games.

This is such trite bullshit that it makes me physcially angry at the people that write it. It is amazing to me that people cannot see such an obviously stupid thought, because they are so wrapped up in their own agendas. Look to all the reporters out there, listen to this: It isn’t your job to find something and villianize it to the public. It is your job to report the news, nothing else. America doesn’t need you to tell us your opinions or to try and bias us to one side or the other.

You watch the news and notice how they spend hour after hour talking about what this person thinks and how this person feels. You know what? All of it is worthless crap, because none of them know this person and none of them have talked to him, because if they have then they know who he is and that means they are obstructing a police investigation as well as costing peoples lives.

Video games, movies and television aren’t costing people their lives… PEOPLE are costing people their lives. Guns don’t kill people, people kill people, guns just make it easier. Video games, movies and television don’t even do that, studies have shown that they actually provide an outlet for aggression and anger, but does anyone in the news report that? Not that I have heard. Some people are just not right, call it stupid, crazy, or handicapped, but in the end it amounts to the same thing. They are wired wrong. If there weren’t video games they would still be doing things wrong, because that is the way they are

It is time to stop blaming things and activities and take responsibiltiy for what you do. McDonald’s doesn’t make you fat. You of your own free will eating McDoanld’s makes you fat. Last I checked Grimace wasn’t standing by my head with a gun and a box of McNuggets. If you are crazy I’d say your only real out would be something that altered your genetics, parents smoking crack, power lines, lead paint, something, but Movies isn’t an excuse.

So everyone that reads this if you get nothing else from it, to help with my own sanity do the following for me:

If you ever go crazy and plan to kill people or some such write this down and put it someplace where they will find it when they whack you: I, [insert your name], of unsound mind and body, do hereby proclaim that I am going out and [insert crime], not because I watched movies, played games, or watched television. It is instead because I am fucking nuts. Please don’t blame perfectly harmles activities for me being a fruitcake. Signed [insert your name].

That way I don’t have to listen to every talking head tell me how me and you capping each other in HALO caused you to go and whack someone.

I have a psychosis. I know what you are guys are saying, “You think you have JUST one?!?” No probably not, but I’ll have to ask the others that are in my head with me.

Anyway, generally I am a pretty self confident person. I don’t have trouble with large groups of people, I have no trouble making jokes, no matter how tasteless, with people, I think I make friends easily and I hold deep friendships quite dear. So I cannot figure out why I have the troubles that I am about to relate, perhaps because I am always attempting to be the best at what I do, or perhaps it is just a fault in me. Like the old commercial used to say, “You make the call.”

I have a pretty large set of knowledge about computers, networks, hardware, operating systems, and a lot of other stuff. There are a lot of people that defer to me when talking about stuff and I am around. All this is great and does wonders for my confidence, but whenever I am around fellow geeks I have the horrible time that I think they know more than me and it drives me nuts. Even if it is just a little bit of info, or something I have no reason to know or chance to know. It still drives me crazy.

You may be one of my friends and sitting there thinking that I am not talking about our connection, well you are wrong. There is no friend that I have that I know in a computer situation where I have not had this problem with them. It has nothing to do with you, just me. I think that is why I seem so eager to learn what you know, because I am always in the back of my head thinking that this person gets away from me and starts laughing their ass off that I don’t know whatever it is that we were talking about.

I love my job. I love everything about my job and all the stuff I do there, and therefore it seems so odd that I would become worried when I have to tell people what all I work with, because I don’t get to work with all the stuff that other people do. I worry that they look at me as a loser because I don’t work in a fully fiber building with servers that have 8 disk arrays in them. Are you less of a “winner” if you have never had a job that lets you play with twenty thousand dollar servers? Am I more of a beta geek, because I don’t operate advanced multi bladed cisco routers? I have never taken a class that really taught me much about anything I do. It is all self learned and gained via work, interests, desire, and friends. I know more about stuff than people that have had several classes and certifications, yet still when I am in a conversation with these people I feel I am being put down in their mind. In my logic mind I know that such is not the case. These are great friends of mine which I hold in high regard and I believe the feeling is mutual, but in the sub mind the thoughts still run rampant on my psyche.

If there is such a thing as an alpha geek (and I truly believe there is) then I think this is what my problem is. Scientific theory states that in most environments there exists an alpha male and several others that strive to unseat him in that role. In nature the alpha male receives first pick of the females. In the Geek world I would say that it is most definitely not the situation, but what does the alpha male receive? Why is it such a boon to be one? This is a question that I cannot seem to answer. Perhaps my “pocket psychiatry” is not advanced enough to sort this out. Maybe there isn’t anything at all, but nature still demands that this activity is enforced. Honestly I don’t know, but I think that is what my problem is.

Again I am not talking about anything that is wrong with my friends only with my head.

Ok everyone bitches about linux not being userfriendly and not being a good desktop setup. Well shut your pie hole and get these iso files and burn them on CD. Or if you can find it, buy it.

Redhat took everyones complaints and smoked them in my opinion. If you have no complants about XPs look and feel then you are going to like this. It has that bubbly “rounded” look. If you don’t like that look then you should be cool too since it still has the full user interface, no “click here to see the shit that we have hidden and that you are looking for” effects.

The graphics are pretty, the installer is the best Redhat has ever put together, I am a little disappointed with the choice of mozilla over galeon and the fact that galeon is on the third cd, but I can see their logic there.

A lot of people are complaining about the KDE, GNOME combination/bastardization and you know what I have to say there… STFU. If you know enough to know the difference then you know how to change it to look the way you want. If you don’t know what I am talking about then cool cool, you won’t need to and it makes little difference to you. Redhat is attempting to take away the last area that MS is really dominate at and I for one don’t care if you are a KDE or a Gnome users, I am a “Get-People-To-Stop_Supporting-and-Using-a-Crappy-OS” person and I think this is a step in the right direction.

The apps that are included are pretty much the standard RedHat fare, but they have done a good job of making everything accessible and easy to find. Defintely the prettiest distro I have seen. If you need a desktop OS then this is the one for you. I haven’t gotten a chance to try out the server install yet, but if it is the same as previous Redhat Server installs it will be fine.

All in all this is a distro and is the way that linux should be going to take over the desktop market.

Here is the collection of thoughts and tales that have been piling up here in my head, pick the ones you want and comment about them.

Got a new cell phone from Edmonson County Schools, emails will be going out soon.

PDA is nothing less that phucking awesome. There are some things that are annoying about it, but I just chock those up to hating MS and go one with my life.

I picked up the Linksys Wireless Access Point/Router/Switch/Coffee Maker/Best Friend/Roomate the other day and it is pretty nifty. Works well with the PDA once you open your eyes and install it correctly.

Mark Hicks, a friend of mine and owner of JMH Webbing got married over the weekend. It was a nice ceremony and I caught the garter at it.

While at the wedding I learned the AFNI-BG has been having severe network issues for the last few days and has lost a bunch of money in an attempt to upgrade the network that I talked about previously using equiptment that was from another call center which they couldn’t get to work.

I also found out the management is being restructured inside AFNI and Shane will no longer be a manager of the BG Call Center. I would say that is good news for Cheyenne and others that will no longer be under his thumb, but hey is that really my place anymore?

Work continues at Edmonson County and we are starting to dig ourselves out of the hole that having only one person on the job can create. Currently the schools are on Fall Break so that gives us two weeks to gets some work done.

I have been working on “archiving” DVDs and have found some really sweet software for linux that will do it for me rather nicely. I hope to be posting more about this soon.

Since maybe I don’t do it enough, I would like to thank maxx for hooking me up with the forums and everything. I would also like to thank Zweix Internet Solutions for that as well.

I miss all the posters for this page. C’mon guys get your talk on.

People I haven’t heard from lately: Frank Miles, Jeremiah Byrd, Todd Schaefer, Seth Johnson, Mike Lamont. Where you guys at?

New Xbox Game : Outlaw Golf. Quick Review: It Rocks out, if you play games on the xbox get it.

Also since I still get mail about AFNI due to this page, I would like to also post that I got some mail from one of the before mentioned Tucson Techs that got fired and he said that he was fired for the joke email that came out and that the also told him he was fired for what he said in the reply to Jeremiah’s email. So despite what I was told they did get rid of people due to that.