Brent’s Thoughts

Taken from bash.org:

<Nukleon> the greek “hell” was cold
<Nukleon> like the norse
<@amz> the christian hell is also pretty cold, compared to its heaven
<Nukleon> uh
<Nukleon> wut?
<Nukleon> heaven is bliss
<@amz> it has liquid sulfur in it, so it can’t be over 400 celsius… on the other hand, the bible describes the sun in heaven shining like 7 suns, each 7 times as bright
<@amz> which gives an estimate of 2000-3000 celsius

That was just too interesting. I had to post it.

http://www.wired.com/news/wiredmag/1,71985-2.html

I don’t really agree with his conclusion at the end, but he does a great job of showing several sides of the situation. Personally I think that it is important to call people on things that they are not rational about. I don’t know if I take it to the level that Dawkins does, but there is something to be said with having the strength to stand out and say that you think the majority of people are being dumb.

You can have your beliefs if you want, but when you come to me talking about them, you better damn well have something to back them up besides passages from the Bible and the need for ME to prove YOU wrong. Luckly, for the most part, my ideas fit with the world around me. If you want to try to believe in something that doesn’t match the world, I think it is important for you to have some logical reason that your belief is right.

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

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

(thoughts continuing on events from yesterday) I find that a nights sleep hasn’t brought me any closer to internalizing this. As more and more is learned I get no closer to being able to walk away from it. The amount of firefighters lost alone is staggering. Tonight I drove home in the dark and felt as if the night was darker than normal. I kept finding myself wondering if the power was out or if the county had turned off the lights on the road. Instead I realized that things where exactly the same only my perception of them being darker. It is amazing how things that are not close to you and effect no one that you know can come so close to you. Amazing still but in a brighter way is that during times of peace and tranquility America can be divided and seperated, but in a time like this when the fight is brought to our doorstep and into our house we are a united front. If there is anything that is comforting in this I would say that is it. I feel like I am waiting for the other shoe to drop in this. I am not sure if that will come as a second terrorist attack or if it will come as an attack from us, but there is more to this story that what has already come out, and I don’t mean the “public interest” stories that the media are going to drag out of it, I mean a large scale set of events that will effect more than the United States alone. For now I must go eat.

Well with High School over I was looking at four years of going to Ball State for college. Todd and I started hanging out a bit more and everything was pretty cool. I was making time with a couple girls and working at the YMCA as a lifeguard and swim instructor. I went to Ball State and registered for classes. Then my dad got the option to transfer to the Corvette plant in Bowling Green… Talk about your world changers. : )

There where several weeks where my parents were gone while they were looking for a place to live around Bowling Green. During those weeks I continued to work and had the idea that I was still going to Ball State. My parents then came back and pretty much shattered those ideas. They were not ready for me to leave their house even if their house changed places. They dragged me down to Bowling Green (under the story of just letting me see the college). At the end of the trip I found that I really didn’t have a choice in the matter and that I was moving with them. Dad had to be there to work the week after July 4, but we couldn’t get our new place until the week after that, so we spent a week in a motel in Smiths Grove (which was were our new place was). Let me tell you if you haven’t been to Smiths Grove, you ain’t missing much. The week that we got the new place we went back to Indiana and got a trailer full of our stuff to bring down here. Todd came with us. Me and him spent the week helping my mom set stuff up at the new house and at night going in to Bowling Green. At the end of the week it was extremely sad to drive him back up to Indiana and pick up another trailer full of stuff. I signed up for classes at Western Kentucky University (WKU), as a computer science student, the day before classes started. My classes were horrible. The one bright point was I met Coach William Powell (a.k.a Coach Powell, Coach) and Coach Stephen Crocker (a.k.a Coach Crocker). They were the swimming coaches at WKU and they were awesome. I spent the year swimming for them and I never once regretted swimming for them. There were times I wished I wasn’t on the team, but I never wished they weren’t my coaches. I never really meshed with most of the people on this team like I did the ones in High School, most likely because I didn’t live on campus and one other strange twist of fate. The registrar got my phone number incorrect by one digit. This caused no one to be able to get a hold of me, and I was never in on the random events that the team had. I was always and outsider to most of the people on the team. Over the summer Coach Powell hired me to work in the office with him probably because he knew my sophomore year he would have cuts for the first time in WKU history. I was cut from the team. It was alright with me though as I was having shoulder troubles and I didn’t feel that I was a part of the team. I instead found a better role working for Coach Powell and Coach Crocker. I ran the meets and did just about everything they needed anyone for. It was great… I got to know Coach Powell great and I think I have made a friend for the rest of my life. I worked for Coach my sophomore and junior years. During the first semester of my sophomore year I met a girl named Pauline Hack. We quickly started talking and became “an item” as my mom would say : ). We have been dating ever since then with only one breakup which lasted one day.

During the second semester of my junior year I was in a networking class that also had a lab with it. The lab had and interesting teacher by the name of Maxx Lobo. Me and Maxx quickly hit it off as friends and started hanging out a lot together. Maxx held a position with the BioDiversity Center as their server administrator and he passed that Job along to me. He also got me involved with a club called WKU-Linux. I became their server administrator as well. I now found myself dividing my time between teaching some swim lessons, Pauline, hanging out with Maxx, Working for Coach Powell, Working for the BioDiversity Center, working on WKU-Linux’s Servers, trying to swim again, and my family. Something had to give. The first to go was the trying to start-up swimming again. While I was enjoying the feeling of being back in better shape, I was not enjoying the lack of time I felt because I was dropping 3 hours out of my day, everyday. I found another great coach name Derek Thomas and enjoyed swimming under him as well. The next thing to go sadly was the job with Coach Powell. I was working for the BioDiversity Center making $8.00/hr and only making $5.15/hr with coach. The Center was letting me get 20 hours a week and 20 hours a week was the most that you are allowed to get from Western if you are a full time student. So I decided to drop the job for coach and move onto a job more in line with what I wanted to do in my life after college. Shortly after this decision my time sharing queue was again shortened as Maxx applied for, got, and accepted a job for Privada in California. So sadly after only about 5 months of close friendship Maxx moved off to a bigger pond. We were still able to talk and stuff via the phone, but there is always something missing with that. I spent the first semester of my Senior year struggling as the server administrator of WKU-Linux, because I had little real server experience with linux and I had lost my backstop for help and advice in Maxx. While he was still available at times, I felt that I had to work on my own to solve things and to let him get used to his new position with Privada. I had also lost some of his help to ram through things I thought were needed for the group on the officers list of the club. I was struggling with a group of officers that I saw as not caring as much about the club as I did. I found out that they often thought that I cared too much, but I had received something from Maxx in the time that we hung out. It was a desire to see the group expand and flourish. By January of that year the officers had become a stagnant group, with one member becoming completely indifferent to the group. That is when I took notice of Frank Miles (a.k.a Frank J. Miles, milesfj) I watched him at a few of our group meetings and get togethers and decided I thought he would be a good candidate for the position that was currently being taken up with the indifferent officer. I therefore pushed (with a little of maxx’s help) through the removal of said officer and the election of Frank to that position. Things became a little more lively on the officers list and we acquired Linux-Wolf from an anonymous donation for the group. I then put forth some effort to get the group meetings so that we could stream them across the internet to the alumni and remote members. I also worked to get a huge amount of traffic for our FTP server by submitting it as official mirrors for several Linux distributions. As the semester and my term as server admin (for WKU-Linux and the BioDiversity Center) started to wind down, I started looking for replacements. I found one in Ethan Zuhl (a.k.a zuhli). The only problem was that I didn’t feel he had all the skillz at the time to keep my machines safe. I pushed through several things to solve this problem. With the help of the new WKU-Linux President, Rob VanFleet (a.k.a rvf) we got two server admins for the group, Frank and Ethan (sounds kinda like a comic strip doesn’t it?). Frank was to be the senior admin with Ethan learning from me and him how things went down and taking over for the spring semester. I also started teaching Ethan what I knew for the BioDiversity Center and found him as a good admin once he knew the steps to get the stuff right. I graduated with a Computer Science degree with a Math minor, became Executive Adviser for the group and left the BioDiversity Center at the end of the fiscal year at Western. I have since spent my time searching for “gainful” employment.