Brent's Thoughts

Today I received an email from my previous boss, Shane. He stated that he would like me to remove his full name from my news posts. An interesting request, but after doing a google search I understood why. A search for his name in google returns my site as the first hit, specifically this post. Interestingly, not in that post, but in ones that are relatively close to it I talk about how he is a pretty cool guy. So any potential employers or anything that were doing a search for his name wouldn’t see any problems that I was having with either him or afni until several posts later.

Here is the crux of the matter though. Not even really pertaining to this. If your name is posted on the web are you allowed to request that it be removed? A search for my name returns all kinds of hits some of them my site some of them not. Some of them me some of them not. I have never had the idea to ask anyone to remove my name, I guess because it has never been in any kind of bad connotation (other than the random flame war, which google seems to no longer cache). What does the crew think?

Well today I have some good news and I have some bad news. Which do you want to hear first? The good news? Ok then here you go.

The first step in bringing Edmonson County Schools up on a all fiber backbone for it entire district network, should be done by the end of the week. I ate lunch with the crew that is hanging the fiber for us. Really nice guys that I don’t think I would have any problem with hanging out on a regular basis with. The electronics are on order and hopefully they will get here soon. This will put two buildings on the backbone and allow us to start relocating servers to our office soon. Hopefully, this will allow more centralized control over the servers and the network. Lord knows they are going to need it, but I will get to that in a second. It will also increase the contectivity of these schools to the internet by about 48 times and allow for a district wide file server, proxy and authentication. It really is a pretty cool thing and I am glad that I was part of getting it designed and built.

Now onto the bad news. Due to preceived budget cuts, that might happen, as of right now I will no longer be employed by Edmonson County Schools as of the last day of June. If the state gets their act together and approves a budget that doesn’t cut my salary out of it, then I should still work there, but I don’t know if that is going to happen. It sucks to have found a job that I really enjoy and that I am doing great at (IMO) and to have it taken away from you, because there are stupid people running the government. Of course, it matters little that there is no practical way for Lamar to run the district without an assistant, and there is no practical way for him to use the servers that I have built on Linux, since he has no experience with it. That doesn’t matter. If I do lose my job it will be interesting to see what shape the district is in after a couple months of school. I don’t say these things as a slam on Lamar, I think he is a damn good DTC and tech, but it just isn’t feasible for him to be able to do it on his own. So it is a month of uncertainty and looking for positions somewhere else, before I know for sure if I am gone or not.

On a somewhat interesting note, Pauline is somewhat happy over the fact. Now she feels free to look at positions that are other places besides here. I am not sure that I am all that eager to leave here though. I like it here. Also, my parents (to the best of my knowledge) have decided on a house plan, and builder for the house on the farm. It looks like it should be started as late as September of this year. Plans envolve me wiring it for data, voice and cable as well as finishing an extra bonus room on the second floor. Looks like I might have plenty of time to help.

Got to thinking about it today and since there is little chance that anyone from Marvel would ever browse to my site, I went ahead and did a somewhat childish thing and sent them the following letter:

Perhaps this is going to the wrong address. If so I am sorry, but I hope you can see time to send it to someone who might be more along the right lines. If it is the correct one then I am glad.

Brent Norris
Assistant DTC, Edmonson County Schools and Marvel Fan
Cell: 270.246.0152

Pauline and I went and saw this tonight. It is a pretty good flick. Marvel is really doing a good job of converting their stuff to film from wood pulp.

Now everyone pretty much knows how big spider-man went over when it came out, but I have heard a little less about Daredevil. Perhaps because his comic was a little less mainstream, perhaps because it was is a little darker comic. I have to admit that part of what made Spider-man go over so big was 9/11. The world needed a hero and Spider-man was what stepped up to do it. Too bad Marvel didn’t have a Captain America movie geared up. They could have probably charged fingers to get in to that and people would have paid, but I digress.

Daredevil is a much darker movie than Spider-man was, but that is ok since all the DD comics I ever remember reading were of a dark nature as well. By dark I don’t mean as in black (though the movie did seem a little hard to see) I mean of an unhappy style. Things don’t always turn out good in this movie and Daredevil isn’t always a great guy. In some instances it reminds me more of the first Batman movie. Not the later ones that were more designed for kids and to be like comics, but the first ones where Keaton was Batman and it was about showing the bad side of the character some too.

The DD proximity sense is done well, but it can be a little hard to follow sometimes. Of course that could partially be due to the crappy-ness of the theater that I saw it at. I am starting to realize more and more that a theater is not a good place to see a movie, at least not the ones here, where all the movies are dark and the movements of the characters are hard to follow because of it. It isn’t until you see it on DVD on a regular television that you can see all the aspects of the movie and all the little things that you missed in the theater. Hell, sometimes the copies you can find on the internet are easier to follow than the ones that you see in the theater.

Anyway this a decent movie to see and I would say worth the money. It might not be as big a hit as Spider-man was to everyone, but I think that they did a good job of transfering the characters and story.

Now on to something a little on topic. I picked up a copy of Freedom Force at Best Buy the other day. You might remember it from this summer when it came out, though it didn’t get that much fanfair then. Now it is $20 at BB and I had a 10% of deal. It is a good game. I would recommend it for some hours of fun. The interface could use some tweaks, but most could in any game. It follows true to comics book style and makes you look forward to the next panel. What I really wish out of it, was that it was made by Marvel. The problem with Freedom Force is that it is made up characters that as a comic book fan I have no connection to. Marvel needs to buy up the company that made this and get them to port the engine and style to their universe. Then hirer a team to make some missions for the game and add in some stuff to help you make you own. That would be tight as hell. Then you have charaters that you know with powers you know and you can build you own stories for them. Hell they could sell expansion packs forever and just rake in the cash. All they gotta do it build it and they have mine. God I hope they read this.

The other thing I hope Marvel will do for me (Stan you writing this all down?): Put your damn comic books online!!!! I would pick up several subscriptions to some of my favorite comics if there was some way that I could either A) read them online or B) (And my real favorite) Download them and read them on my computer or handheld device. That would just be the epitome of “bad-ass”. If anyone reading this in anyway has pull with Marvel, please write me or write in here and lets get this knocked out. I don’t have time to wait all day.

Spent some time talking with maxx on Saturday. Topics of conversation ranged through several things:

Jokes about threads on the wku-linux list, to talk about the group itself, to talk about the history of the group.

X-Box mod-ing was also of much conversation as well as the cracking on of me for the purchase of a new IDE drive for said Xbox mod-ing. Talk of my mod chip purchase from EasyBuy2000 and their raid by cable companies shortly afterward. So I am still without my mod chip.

Also of some discussion were the various things that people search for that bring them to our sites.

Talk of work and events at both places of employment. Talk of houses both purchased and planned, of fiber and connections to these domiciles.

Relationships and theories about them.

Jokes abounded. From ones about ski racks and the resulting renaming of hills, to cracks about tools and the purchase of replacement blades after over 3 years of owning. Credit cards and lunch, and driving and gas all was discussed and all was good.

With all these link URLs in this it is hard to see what it will look like, so forgive me for improper formating. Also threads and work are double links hit the first part of the word for one link the second for another.

I couldn’t decide how to write this so I will attempt both ways…..

Once still drives, click and whir. Electrons trudge through old paths once again. Lights flicker and glow. Fans stall and then begin to spin. The power supply struggles under the draw of the drives spinning up to their operating rpms. Memory registers clear and reset. Checks are ran and processed. The LCD display glows a green glow and reads “System Ready”

or

[Bob Vilia voice] Today on this old Server we will be shoring up this old machine with a new hard drive here and cleaning up the inside cables. Generally what this machine needs is just a little TLC. Now once we get these repairs done we are going to start with a base coat of Redhat Linux, server install. After that we will be adding some after market custom settings and we should come out with a really nice backup server for our clients. We’ll be back right after this with the re-installation of the Proc and Memory cards. Next we will document the search for any extra parts to be had for it.[/voice]

Yep been working on the resurrection of one of my favorite machines for the last couple days and this morning I got it up and running. The one true biglinux lives again. After a fatal hard drive failure, WKU-Linux moved on to other machines, but after a bit of asking I got to get the real beast home. With some parts from Edmonson County I have put it back together in working order. It will work as a online backup server for the systems that we are using right now. Since it does have IDE in it, chances are that we will hook up an IDE drive for some of the backup while using the SCSI for some others. The other thing I am going to use it for is testing of the setup of TUX. TUX will be the main server for our county once the fiber is put in. There will be a lot of setup for it and I need something to work with until the chasis for TUX is freed up.

(This is dug up from something I wrote a while ago)

Perhaps one of the stupidest things to rant on, but hey it is my page if you don’t like my crazy rants start you own page, gain a small, but loyal (BTW thanks to all that read this) following, and then you can rant about what YOU want.

Anyway, back to what I was talking about, before I was so rudely interrupted, I go to get a hair cut today and it rings up to $10.95. I hand the lady a twenty dollar bill and she hands me back a five and four dollar bills, thats it. Change totaling nine dollars. Now granted I was going to tell her to keep the nickel, so I would have gotten the same change, BUT shouldn’t I have the option to give the extra nickel? Yeah Yeah I know it is only a nickel, but would it be cool if you went out to lunch ran up a $22 tab hand the waitress $25 and she doesn’t bring you back any change. Sure you were probably going to say, “Keep the change.” or something similar, but shouldn’t you get the chance to give her the money, instead of them just assuming that you were going to?

Though it seems like it to look at the way I am now, I haven’t been messing with Linux that long. Just now three years I guess. I remember asking Lamont something about it as we walked out of our last class before Christmas break. Somehow I got a copy of it on CD shortly after that and headed home.

I remember why I got a copy too. The Dell Optiplex that I had bought (the first computer I had purchased) wouldn’t run Windows 95 or 98 worth a damn, amazingly given its INTEL chipset. The onboard ATi graphics chipset wouldn’t work right and it kept crashing and rebooting. I had a beta copy of Windows2000 that worked sorta, but it still had the problems. I got tired of being in the middle of something only to have the thing crash and reboot. After several reinstalls, each one where I thought I had fixed it, I was ready for a change.

So heading home with my new Redhat 6.1 CD I fired up the install and blew away everything on the drive. I worked my way through the install guessing on a lot of it and hoping that stuff would work. It was a terrible install. Nothing like the first installs for Linux I am sure, but it was still bad. Nothing like todays installs either (unless you are talking about Debian and then it was a lot better). I rebooted and found a machine that worked. I left it up and tooled around in the menus looking for something to do. Not knowing shit about it I found little to do except play the games that came with it. I did find that it didn’t ever crash on me no matter how long I left it on. Well that was a good thing I guess. Still I didn’t know what to do with it since I had no programs to install, no idea what was on it, and no idea how to get to it. I had noticed that during the install Redhat was kind enough to show everything that it was installing and give a brief little summary of what that package was. So I went through a reinstall and made sure to watch the whole install trying to catch all the packages and what they were supposed to do. This time I learned enough to promptly break everything beyond repair by me. So, I reinstalled it and broke it again. This process repeated for several weeks, with various excursions back into W2k Beta when I was tired of messing with it. Slowly you learn to use it and to find that there is some really cool stuff out there.

Now I use Linux exclusively as a desktop, no Windows here. There was an interesting road from one to the other, but I think that I am happy with the walk.