Brent’s Thoughts

We have used Monoprice at work for a while and I knew that they had good prices on cables and such. The real kicker though was when I recently purchased a surround sound receiver from Best Buy. I am planning on mounting the the rear channel speakers in the corners of our living room up next to the ceiling.

I looked at the speaker mounts at Best Buy and was shocked that they were around $40 for a pair of mounts. It was shocking because I had already seen them on Monoprice for around 4 dollars .

I wonder if Best Buy would price match those.

this past sat Brent and I braved the extremely rainy weather to venture out to the large town known as Nashville to see a comedian by the name of Rodney Carrington. He is pretty popular, had his own tv show for a while. Brent had purchased the tickets several months ago. We started out by having a nice dinner at Smokey Bones and then got on our way to Nashville. We used the GPS to find our way to TPAC (tennessee performing arts center). Sadly, the GPS program was alittle off so we subsequently got alittle lost in downtown Nashville on a rainy sat night in the middle of what turned out to be a baptist convention (the streets were teaming with people and traffic). After both of us vowed to never live in such a big city, we found a place to park and were subsequently guided to TPAC by a nice man. the show was good, our seats were not too bad, but I still think that I prefer zanies . it is easier to get to, a smaller building so basically all the seats are good and they provide dinner with the show (and its cheaper). Anyways, the act was pretty good. we got outta there at around 9:30 or so and home at around 11:00 I think.

zOMG OMG OMG!!!!!!11!!111!! They are cloning aminals and put tehm in UR foodz!!! RUN!1!!!

..ahem… sorry.

The news agencies are all awash with reports that the FDA might approve cloned animals for sale as food. Whoopdee.

People need to stop being so reactionary to words like clone. When that word is said the knee jerk reaction is to freak out and think that there are some age accelerated mutant creatures out there that we might be eating. That isn’t what this is.

This is cloning along similar lines of what Dolly the cloned sheep was. I am not 100% sure they are using the exact same method, but lets work with it that way.

Dolly was an EXACT replica (in DNA terms) of her donor sheep. So exact in fact they think it was possible that she was born 6 years old, because that is when the DNA was extracted from the donor sheep. It took her the same amount of time to reach normal size and she died of a disease that the other sheep around her also died of. She didn’t suffer from some weird disease, and she wasn’t treated with any weird chemicals. She was just a sheep, who happened to have the exact same traits as the sheep she was cloned from.

That is the same thing that we will see in Bulls and Cows that have been cloned. There isn’t any reason to label the meat or any of that crap, because when you are eating the original there is no difference than when you are eating the clone. The DNA you are eating will be exactly the same as the original, because that is the very definition of the word CLONE.

As a matter of fact in the end it might end up being even better for you to eat cloned meat. What the farmers/companies that are doing the cloning are looking for is the perfect piece of meat, the perfect animal. What they will then do is clone it and continue to grow it over and over, providing lots of the best quality meat possible, so that more people will pay for that meat. How will that help you? Well if the cloners can find a great piece of meat that doesn’t have to be injected with hormones and chemicals then they will go for that as their donor because it is cheaper. In the end we should end up eating meat that has fewer steroids and crap injected into it, which should make the free range style people happy.

Really there are only a few downsides to the cloning of these meats. The first is that it could potentially lead to a famine. As the more desired meats are cloned it would stand to reason that the less desired ones will fall out at a quick rate. If the remaining types are all susceptible to a disease then it would be possible that large portions of the livestock population could be wiped out. This is not different than the selective breeding that we do now, but it might work faster and leave a much smaller gene pool in a shorter amount of time.

The other thing is that it will slow or stop evolution in these animals. Not that we haven’t already done that, but it could be the final stop point for it. In the future if all animals produced for food are clones mutations will be small or non-existant and thus evolution will be stopped. All generations will be the same as the previous.

The two above arguments are far better reasons to be cautious about a mass move to cloned food livestock than any of the imagined religous or bigoted “we don’t want clones” reasons and I really wish that the news media would have taken the time to think about that instead of just playing on peoples fears of a word.

Nationalcity just emailed me to remind me that I can stop getting my paper copy of my statement and check everything online. Discover card says it to me all the time. Alltel (opps Windstream) includes it in everyone of their bills they send me and GM reminds me every month that I can get my payment automatically deducted and they won’t have to send me a slip.

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I have been listening to a couple different, non mainstream, bands lately. The first is called Cheap Fireworks and is made up of some friends of Pauline’s. Actually looking at their site and from what Russell (the lead singer told us) it looks like they aren’t playing together anymore. I downloaded their tracks off of their site and have been listening to them quite a bit.

I like their stuff. Too bad they aren’t making more, I would love to hear a studio version of their version of Folsom Prision Blues. It is great. Also (and this line is just for P), it looks like Russell is going to try and make a new album and if you look at the front page and read the comments, looks like Doughty is going to help.

The other thing that I have been listening to is MC Frontalot. A self confessed Nerdcore.Hiphop Rapper. His stuff is pretty good. Some of it is really funny and a lot of it has really good lyrics too. His site also sports free downloads of his songs, so you might want to hit that up too. His site also sports some fairly funny commentary too.

Original thread from my old forums

Well my parents new house is pretty much completed. All that is left is for some appliances to be put into place and for some touch up paint work to be done. As a result it was time for me to start finishing up the Television system and Computer network. The phone system piggy backs onto the data wires so it gets done as well. The television system is actually a fairly complex system. There are really two completely separate systems in the house. Dad and I ran over 500 feet of coax in the attic, which was kinda cool since I was running it when there was no ceiling underneath me. Since it is too far out of town to get cable television they have DirectTV dish and have two of the receivers. In order to hopefully allow more people to watch what they want one receiver is setup in the master bedroom and the other is (currently) setup for the great room. All rooms will be connected to both of these though. This allows all the rooms to watch either of the receivers. It is pretty cool and I did a decent job of designing it out and everything I think. When we plugged a VCR into the uplinks and then tested it out at the jacks that I got done, it seemed to have a really clear picture. Means I did a good job of making sure all my connections were grounded and all that. I think I will go back up into the attic and ground all the splitters so that the whole system will be directly grounded, instead of being grounded through the receivers. I think that if there is anyway to make the pictures look better then this is it.
The final end result of what I think would be the coolest thing ever is to take both receivers and place in the in a central location connected to 1 or 2 Linux machines running MythTV. Then out at all the televisions place a modified Xbox running MythTV frontend. With these everyone can schedule programs that they want to watch and the Linux computers will record it. Then anyone can watch it anywhere, anytime, and pause it as well. This would allow people to watch as many programs as they had recorded. Having only two receivers wouldn’t really be an issue anymore, since the chances that three people would want to watch something at the same time that was on live tv would be slimmer. Instead you just schedule your shows and then come back later and watch them wherever you want with the commercials automatically edited out not causing anyone else any grief. It would also allow Movies and Mp3s to be delivered to whatever room that was needed, independently of what was going on in the rest of the house. It is pretty much the end-all-be-all of content delivery systems in my book. Two good computers at about $900 total and then say four or 5 Xboxes at $149 might seem high, but I think it would be worth it and if you did it a little bit at a time might not be too hard. You might be able to find the Xboxes somewhere cheaper than that too I guess.

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

Sorry to those that are looking for immedate updates. It has taken a few minutes to get time to sit down and put this together.

The job is sweet. Lots of cool stuff to mess with and an office that is filled to the brim with computers, computer parts, and everything to go with them.

Honestly after my first day I didn’t have enough to talk about since I didn’t spend very much time at the place. Lamar (who as yet doesn’t have a profile in here, probably soon) was and is sick and needed to go to the doctor so I headed out a little early (read 10:00AM) with the rest of the day to myself. After today though there was more time to talk with him and to work on some stuff. It is great to be memorizing admin passwords again and to be working toward goals and agendas. All things that working at AFNI seemed to lack.

A conseqence of going back to work is that my work on Ann’s diary has slowed, though I do have some updates on gears that I will hopefully get posted soon. That reminds me and I don’t think I have posted these links. I have created pages for my machines since I so often talk about them I thought you should be able to see what they are.

Diablo
Samuel
Gears

Honestly it has been a week or three since I knocked those out so I can’t remember if I got them done or not. I’ll try to check someday. And no I didn’t pick those colors to be impossible to read I’m just lucky like that I guess.

What else….. Oh yeah big props to Pyroman for his meeting the other night about WebVCR+. The boy has done a bang up job on that shit and he deserves any traffic you can send his way. If you are too cheap to buy a TiVo then this is the shit for you. Top Notch!! Top Notch!!! (Two cool points for the movie which contains those last four words like that.)

Possible new look for the forums coming down the pipe. I am letting maxx get all his ducks in a row on his new house before I really start busting him or scott (sorry scott don’t have a URL for you off the top of my head) up with requests. It may not replace these but I might move it in on diablonetwork.net or as just an addition to these.

And finally props to Seth for his graduation from WKU!!! I hope he will continue to post to the page and keep us up to date on what is going on with him.