Brent’s Thoughts

Something that has been happening lately that I haven’t really messed with much has been the phenomenon of Podcasting. I just haven’t really invested that much time in it. So then today’s randomness happens.

/. Has a story about nerdcore hiphop. Now I have already be digging on the scene with MC Frontalot, but some of the other people that are mentioned in the article I hadn’t really listened to. So I travel to the wikipedia link for Nerdcore Hip Hop and link travel to all the artists mentioned there. is pretty sweet, and YTCracker is decent as well. I decided to get all of MC Plus+’s tracks that he had for download and accidentally got a podcast that he had been interviewed on. So while I was listening to it I traveled over to the orign of the podcast at Daily Sonic. I grabbed the newest one and listened to it last night while I was mowing the yard.

This stuff is great. Take NPR and mix it with my generation, add in some idiot humor and you have Daily Sonic. Monday’s cast, talking about the Chipmunk abuse of the late 50’s is worth the price of admission by itself. So now I have a copy of ipodder running and downloading the casts. I think I may try to markup the audio for Coach Powell’s site so that it is available as podcasts. Not that anyone would use it, but it seems like a worthwhile endeavor.

It also made me dig up an old script that I wrote back in the AFNI called AMEN. I don’t even remember how far I got in it, but I think I am going to dig it back up and monkey with it a little.

I think I have a new favorite person:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_F._Kennedy_Jr.

Some of the links at the bottom are truly great information. I really like this one:

http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0122-10.htm

He really needs to watch out though. Bush could have him whacked and no one would even think about it. As a matter of fact people are probably expecting it, given his family history.

I had a conversation with my mom last night regarding my sister and her wanting to find someone, some special guy to love. We discussed how it is unfortunate that many women spend way too much time putting their life on hold until they find a partner. I know of two friends that also have a hold on their plans until they become a duo. I started to wonder what I am waiting on, if anything… what do people in general wait on? what happens if this thing that they wait on never comes?

Just wanted to let everyone know that I am collapsing the news.brentnorris.net domain into brentnorris.net

That means that all the links to the blog and gallery and stuff will be changing from news.brentnorris.net/ to www.brentnorris.net/

Please update your links if you have them. The links on the main brentnorris.net page have already been updated.

Every morning I hit a few sites. Actually, there is a cool feature of Firefox that lets me make a folder and just drop links in it. Then when I middle click on that folder it just opens all the links in tabs. So in the morning I just open a browser and middle click my folder and all my sites open.

Anyway, several of the sites are online webcomic sites. Some of them are fairly mainstream ones:

Penny-Arcade
Player versus Player

while a couple of them are less so:

Order of the Stick
Real Life
Yirmumah!

Now the last one I have be reading for only about 4 months, but I really enjoy the guy that does the drawing. He is a firebrand to a huge degree and makes pretty much no bones about it. I love it. I wish more people were like that.

So they had a week long donation drive and I dropped him $20. He personally emailed me and ask me if there was any of the artwork from his comics that I would like to have. I mentioned that I like the Seasame Street Medicated stuff, so I think I will be getting some of that.

Also, he mentioned that people could sponsor the site for a month and he would post their banner up on his site. I checked that and saw that it was only $10 a month, so I went ahead and did that to. The banner is up now and he made it for me. I think it is interesting that he picked a picture of the farm to make the banner out of. I thought that was pretty cool myself.

So now that I have decided to sponsor him, he calls down a shit storm of people bashing him, because he went into a web forum and told a “secret” about the latest Harry Potter book.

Personally I don’t think that is really that big of a deal. I think the hype and secrecy that this book has been subject to are pretty dumb. The sheer amount of people that have went stupid over these books is enough to make me not want to have anything to do with them at all, AND to make the sheep-ites mad. So, now I am actually happy that he is causing trouble over this.

Oh great now I am linked on the main page in the same post as another reference to his giving away the “Potter Secret”. Wonder how much overspray I’ll get from that.

We have been working on a pretty neat little project, here in Edtown.

Using a pretty high powered desktop machine, we have been working on a custom setup to stream Educational “Free to everyone” TV stations over our network. Right now to stream 4 channels it looks like it is going to take a P4 3.4Ghz 2mb Cache. That is transcoding and streaming them all, all the time.

On the other end, to decode one channel at a time, it looks like it is going to take a PII 233mhz. Both machines will be running Linux and running VideoLan-Client to do this. VLC is pretty cool. You can do a whole lotta stuff with it. There are apparently colleges that are streaming DVDs across their network and stuff with it.

I also setup a yam server. No maxx not just because I wanted to be like you. Since we run a proxy server and all our machines have to route through it, it was making it a real PITA to get the packages for my machines. YUM really doesn’t seem to like going through authenticating proxies so I just decided to cut out that step and move all the packages in house.

I am having a really odd error on that though were some of my repositories keep looking in “RPMS.$repo/Fedora/RPMS/” instead of just looking in “RPMS.$repo” for the packages. maxx you having any of that?

I got some howtos up about setting the VideoLan Streaming machine and a howto on how to setup the frontend clients too

Somethings you never think to say until it is too late. Sometimes you never take the chance to say them until the chance is gone. I don’t want to wait until that has happened to me.

I want to say thanks for every time that we played catch, and every time that we shot baskets. For every game of one on one and every time we messed with Legos. Every time we worked on the Commodore, to every time that we raced slot cars. Every time that we went to the lake to every time that we cut down a tree. For every memory you left me in these photo albums to every thought you share with me on these comments. Every time you watched out for me (sometimes even when I didn’t think you made it there in time). Every game of chess. Every talk. Every story. Every vacation, and every time you just sat and watched me do something completely stupid and said, “Good job”. Every answer to every question and every “lesson”. Sometimes I didn’t know I was learning and sometimes I didn’t know I wasn’t done learning.
For every ride on a roller coaster to ever pull behind the boat.

All these things and more, I cherish and am glad that I have gotten. I know sometimes I get caught up in my life and sometimes I don’t spend as much time with everyone that I can. Someday I will probably look back and wish I had spent more, but I am glad for the memories that I already have and the memories that I continue to make every time I am around you.

Thanks Dad for being my dad and thanks for so much that I have in my life.

Happy Birthday.