Brent's Thoughts

I have been far too silent for far too long. (of course some would say that there is no such thing as “too” silent, since silence is defined as the absence of sound. Thus it would be difficult to have different levels of NO sound, but anyway…..)

Several things have happened since the last posts on here. War has broke out, we have fiber up and running at our schools, I have seen GigE in action, starting to feel like a server administrator again, job opening at WKU, good news on the EdCo job front, Cisco Class moving along, new PC coming, WebVCR machine running at work, article submission, fan mouse, poison ivy, and the return of Brock Umland to KY today.

Lets see if I can tidy things up a bit around here…….

Fiber: Yeah baby!!!! Fiber between over half our schools. Works great. There has been several network outages as we rebuild and completely restructure the network. So far things have been what I like to call “BAD ASS”.

GigE: Gigabit Ethernet for those not into networking. I have it to my desktop and all of my servers right now. Coupled with the Gigabit Fiber links and the district has gigabit all the way out to every wiring closet. After that it is mostly 100 meg to the desktop. Pulling data off of a IDE drive I can actually max out the drive and not the network. I am beginning tests against SCSI arrays to see how that goes. Right now I can transfer a CD to my boss’s machine faster than I can eject the cd from my machine and carry it over to his, which is the way networking should be.

Starting to feel like a server administrator again: With the fiber links and bringing sites up on that, we have started to move servers over to our office. We have been downing them and replacing pieces and stuff constantly. Doing it all with complete disregard for users and their needs. Ah great to be back in the saddle. Actually though other than random Windows-networking-not-refreshing kinda issues stuff has went pretty smoothly. Hardest part was getting the Compaq server in the trunk of my car to move it.

Job opening at WKU: WKU has a new job opening that really reads like it is for me. Add onto that the 5000 dollars more that it pays and I am thinking I might be a little interested in what they have to say. Might be kinda cool to be back on the hill again.

Cisco Class: Moving right along….(insert rest of Muppets Song…) Class is going well. We had our first field trip the other day. Of course it was just over to our office to see our new stuff, but hey oh well.

new PC coming: Thats right. What I have decided to call Mirage is on its way. Like Gears it will also be a laptop, but as per its namesake if you rotate it in the middle it becomes a tablet PC. How cool is that? It is actually a Toshiba Protege 3500. If you notice there the list prices you will see that mine is $2,299.00. Well every now and then you can get a good deal on ebay and mine is new-in-box for $1,500.00 +SH. A considerable discount I would say, especially since I haven’t found them anywhere for less than $2,099.00.

WebVCR Runnning at Work: Not much to say here. Got a Linux machine running WebVCR that is recording lots of stuff for me. I have already forgot how I lived with out it. Mnnnmmmmm…Daily Show……

Article Submission: Submitted a write up about MusicStorm to http://www.newpenguintimes.com/ Hopefully it will become something of a regular event.

Fan Mouse: Made a fan mouse for one of the guys that helped with our fiber. It is pretty sweet. I didn’t just stop at the mouse-that-has-a-fan idea, but added a three-way switch and a button that activates the fan at one of the switch settings. Unfortunately, while building it I broke the mouse functionallity. Gonna have to figure out what is up with that. Pictures to follow soon.

I have poison ivy: And man does it suck. I haven’t been able to shave for about 4 days since it is on the side of my face and I am afraid I might make it spread. Looking kinda scruffy.

Brock Umland (of Shogun Fame) returns to KY today: Mark Hicks (of JMHwebbing fame) has found some stuff about a building for a business and Brock is headed over here to check some stuff out. I’ll let you guys know what all goes down.

Pauline has been in New Orleans for the last few days and will be until Friday. It is interesting to have someone that you are so used to talking to everyday and seeing everyday not be there. Now I realize that she will be back and I realize that she didn’t move away or anything, I also realize that there are people that have more distant relationships that this ALL the time, but it is still hard. Don’t doubt my pain!!! j/k but it is odd to go home after work and not go see her, or to send her email and not get a reply for a day or two. When I sit and think about it though I should be used to it since so often in my life people that I have spent this much time with have left and have not come back at the end of the week. I guess it just never gets any easier to not be around the people that you love and enjoy spending time with.

Apex is a great game. Probably the best racer for the Xbox. The control is nice, the graphics are great. The game physics are done quite well and quite accurately. The only thing I don’t really like is the lack of ability to trick out my car with upgrades and such. I took some notes will I was playing lets take a look:

1. Damn this game is sweet.

2. Wow, that was an awesome powerslide!

3. Bastard!!!!

4. HAHA teach you to cut me off.

5. Damn wall!

6. Grrrrr!!!!

7. SWEET!!!!!!

8. Hey look at those sparks!!!

9. Man it I wish the sun would get out of my eyes!!!

10. WOW!!!

11. WOOOHOOO!!!

12. Holy $HIT!!! THAT WAS FSCKING AWESOME!!!!!!

That is pretty much how a typical race goes. Some of the stuff needs explaining I guess. 1 and 2 are fairly obvious. 3 and 4 are because the other racers in this game have no problem driving in front of you, or pushing you into a wall. 5 is due to the wall, which I hit all the freaking time. 6 is from where I lead a whole lap and then screw up and get put back in last place. 7 is when I get back up there. 8 is because the graphics are so great in this game, sparks flying off a car that is two cars in front of you can hit the car in front of you, skip off of it and spray off of your car, which I think is just an awesome effect. It shows the attention to detail that was put into this game. The only thing that isn’t real about this game is that when you fly over a hill and wrap your car around a light pole, it will still run and you can still win the race (which I have done). 9 is also a cool effect, where when you are driving into the sun it actually glares across the windshield and makes it hard to see. 10, 11, 12 are just the results of awesome racing.

Atari has made a great game with Atari flare for the different. They business aspects of it aren’t exactly what I had hoped for, but it is a cool system. The receptionist for the company must have been designed to compare with the DOA girls, because she is stacked. The voice for your production assistant and her lines sound like they were taken from a phone sex line. My favorite one is, “You are a racing GOD!!!!”

There is one other thing that I am not mentioning is DIRT. Man you can be tooling along the track at an easy 150mph hit a patch of dirt along the side of the road and BAM 45 mph. That sucks. Now I can’t say that I have ever hit 150 mph and then ran through a pile of dirt, but I don’t think it would effect you quite like that, or at least not that fast. Of course I could be wrong.

Well actually yesterday was a good day, but its wholesome goodness ran long into the night so I gave up trying to post anything about it. The chewy center was especially good, when mixed with the creamy chocolate covering.

Work was work, though there were no major explosions or weapons testing. The fiber was installed and done, though the electronics for it have not arrived. I headed out to one of the schools, got everything done by three and lo and behold Lamar told me to head to the house for the day. Well actually I headed to Western where I setup Meta and updated everything on it for the meeting. Met up with Rob (aka RVF) and Ray for dinner and dancing at Puerto Viarta (SP?). After scarfing there and chatting for a bit we headed back to Western. On the way I got a call from Todd, but since the meeting was looming close I ask him to call me back that night. Arriving at Western we found that Shindhelm had not unlocked the door for us. You would think given the fact that we have a meeting in there every Tuesday every month that it might form a pattern, but Hey I am sure he is a busy guy. So I picked the door with a stick of 30 pin memory and we headed in for the meeting.

The meeting went swimmingly and MythTV only crashed once on me (pretty good for cvs IMO). Everyone seem to at least pay a small amount of attention through the whole thing. I was suprised toward the end of the meeting as Pauline strolled in through the door. I promptly made a big deal out of this to the entire assembled group and throughly embarrassed her. Teach her to show up late

There were several questions about things and nice discussion about other Linux things as well. Dr. Gary was there as well and we spent some time chatting with him about various things including WKUs recent increase in network bandwidth and their attempts to track down all the static IPs that had been assigned out there, since they are currently “running out of IPs”. After a bit I headed home and found two extremely cool deliveries waiting for me. The first was a copy of Apex for XBOX, which I will be reviewing quite soon and the other was a copy of the Second and Third Edition of the BOFH books. Son of the Bastard and Bride of the Bastard. Great Stuff!!! Review of those will be forthcoming as well. The day ended with me calling Todd (long distance to Hawaii, ewwww) and chatting with him for over an hour and a half. Good time and all. Found out that he will most likely be hitting the contenietal (wow damn that is soooo spelled wrong) US sometime in November. I hope that I can be added to the agenda of that trip. O’Happy day!!

Thought I would post this interesting little tidbit. I am now teaching a Cisco Class at the High School in Edmonson County. The really interesting part is that I am not certified in Cisco!!

Really though it is just the introduction class that talks about the different levels of networking in the OSI model and how to wire cat5 ends and such. Stuff that you don’t really have to be cisco certified to accomplish. I might be able to work a cisco certification out of the whole deal though since the is a chance that I might be the one teaching it for a while in the future. I am not really upset over that or anything. Actually I think it is pretty fun, and I have never really had a problem teaching people things, be it swim lessons, linux or whatever. The two girls to post in the previous article are students from this class. We were comparing livejournal.com to my journal.