Brent’s Thoughts

A couple of weeks ago Pauline and I headed down to Nashville for Laura and Ethan’s wedding.  Ethan had ask me to be a groomsman so we got there for the rehersal and dinner afterwards.

It was great to be there and see people from college that I hadn’t seen in a while.  It was also great to meet other people that were involved in Ethan and Laura’s life that I had never met before.  Everyone got along great and had a wonderful time at the dinner, and I think I can say that we even had a pretty good time at the rehersal too.
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It seems lately that I haven’t been doing a whole lot with the computers that I have at home. Lamar and I were talking about this some and I realized, that unlike when I was in college or right after, that I didn’t really have a lot of projects running that I could be thinking about.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/04/science/04climate.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

I am not saying that it hasn’t happened before under some other administration, but this administration, just doesn’t care about anything except their talking points. They are going to hold intelligence back just to make their points.

UPDATE:

The Guy that is doing the censoring didn’t even graduate from College, but his resume says he did.

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

Original post on old forums

Did you know that last night an alarming number of people’s votes didn’t count for anything? No don’t worry they wouldn’t have changed the outcome of the election. No not even because it was 50,202,473 votes that didn’t count. It doesn’t even matter that it was a full 43.96% of all votes cast last night, it still wouldn’t have changed the election outcome…. this year.

With the electorial college system that we use any vote that is cast for a person that doesn’t have the majority in that state is a wasted vote. The two major parties are always quick to talk about how voting for a third party canidate is a wasted vote, but they never bother to talk about it for them. If you voted Democrate in Kentucky, did you really think your vote would matter? If you voted Republican in California did you really think your vote would matter? Most of the 50 states are so locked in with what they end up that the canidates don’t even bother to run ads in them, let alone actually show up in them. Your vote matters…. well as long as you live in one of the “swing states” or maybe you vote with the dominate party in your state.

I pulled down the stats for voter turn out that they had this morning and did a little totaling. The results are here.

If you want to know the states names just put them in alphabetical order down the side. We are out building democracies for other countries and they aren’t bothering to do this dumb electorial college thing. Why are we?

The electorial college system was originally designed because the founding fathers didn’t think the average people were smart enough to pick a president. So instead they voted for a party and then the electors for that party got together and picked a president. In a way, I guess, they are still right. We don’t really have enough information to pick the people that are running, but we don’t really pick them anyway. The members of their party do and then just give us system where it looks like we get to pick them.

Until recently I would have trouble remembering the last time that I had a dream that I can remember. It seems that since about my freshman year in college I haven’t had much to remember from when I slept. Recently though this has all changed around. I think it has something has awoken recently. Honestly, I think it is a resurgence of the creativity of my mind. It is a interesting feeling to have some inspiration in my thoughts and ideas again. It is nice to spend some time thinking of new and cool things that I can do to make things work better and provide new things to work with. I also find I have little thoughts and stories that flit across my mind. So far they have come unbidden and skittered away before I could grasp them and bring them to the front for analysis and catelogue. I also find my desire for stories and to read has increased.

Unfortunately, there are some down sides as well. Along with having dreams is having BAD dreams. Three times in the last two weeks I have woke from a dream of varying themes, but all of them being pulse racers. Ghosts and demons, evil versions of people I know, protecting an unknown group of people from the likes of Jason Voorhees, they are all the things I have been dealing with in my mind at night. Luckily, though things are not all bad, otherwise I think I would have little use for the now prominent adventures. I have also had several interesting but not bad dreams over the span of the last two weeks. I have spent time with a cousin, two best friends, several people from my high school at some kinda whacked out reunion and several other quite interesting events.

What am I telling you for you might be asking? Well first it this site is foremost my journal so I would like to document this occurrence, but second I find it a most interesting thing that when in an environment that is inductive to ideas and thoughts how you feel better and start to think more about things.

Well I have been working on the new format for this beast. It was getting to be too big of a page to expect people to load all the time. This method also allows me to limit the access to different sections and such a little better. Work continues on in the normal fashion. It has actually been kinda slow and I am without a project to mess with as well. I have also offerred to speak at the January Linux meeting. I am unsure if it will be a big turn out or not, but at this point I no longer care. I plan to talk about what I want and the people that show up will get an earful of information that I think will help them out later in life. Lately the club is stagnating (I think), but I now understand that that is just the way it is going to have to be. No one has applied for the Webmaster position that Aaron left open with his resignation, and I know of no one that is clamoring for the VP position. The archive section is only about 4+ monthes behind and the page is falling into a bigger state of decay. On a plus side zuhli will be taking over the lead role as server admin and he thinks that there are some interesting possibilities for the assistant position. Developement on the servers also seems to have stopped, it isn’t really anyones fault I guess it is just that Frank put effort into his position as Admin for the Astronomy Lab (which was a paying position) and the non-paying stuff sometimes took a backseat. I guess I just expected him to put the same energy into the servers that I did, but I now realize that I put more effort into it then most would have because I didn’t really give much of a damn about school so that left a large amount of time for the Biodepartment and WKU-Linux.

On another interesting note, I put in an application for a Linux/Unix admin to a Biology department for another college. I am hoping that maybe I will get a shot at it due to having to worked for another Biology department. I am not sure if it will work out, but it would be cool if it did. It isn’t that I mind my job at AFNI, as a matter of fact if it was just our call center and there was no headquarters with people talking down to us and blocking us I think I would actually enjoy it, but the constant effects of having other people tear up stuff and refuse to fix it or even care make the job a little annoying.

I have been playing the expansion pack for Mechwarrior 4 lately and I am wondering if I could develop BattleTech system based upon it. There are a few issues with the multiplayer system that they have for it, but I wonder if it would be possible to modify it to work the way I want it to. I have even dug up some of the old Battletech books out of the bookshelf and started rereading them. I have such streaks in my life were I am really interested in something.

Well Afni called me today. They would like to hire me. Only problem is that they are offering a bit less than I wanted. It is helped by the fact that I can continue to live here rent free (+12000$), but still I would like to be making more money. Everything else about it is good. The main head-quarters is in Bloomington Indiana, which means when they move me up to it I will be moving to a spot that is pretty much equidistant from both of the places I would like to spend my time. I get to stay here. I get to work on machines for people. I get to work on some servers. I stay near my family and friends. I stay near WKU-Linux. All great things, but there always must be a downside I guess and the one thing in this is the money they are offering. Now here comes the life altering revelation for the day… wait for it… Money has never been that much of a thing for me. Why is it now? I guess I just thought that I went to college for something, and that something was to get a job I liked (which this is) making fat cash (which this isn’t). I mean there is a job here at the CS department as a Course Instructor that pays near 40K why not just take it? I am sure that given the skill set of some of the other Course Instructors that they have hired I could get it, but would I then just be becoming like them? I mean Bill Spees, while he would have been a good computer history teacher, was a lousy OS instructor, but they kept him on for another year. What afni is offering me would be more money than I have made in my life, and probably more than a lot of other people making at the high point of their lives, but I guess I was just expecting more.

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.

I was born in Anderson, Indiana in the summer of 1979. I grew up there and went to school at College Corner grade School. I had four people that were my age that lived with me in my edition. Marcus Boffing, Todd Schaefer, Matt Clark, and Scott Stafford. When I was young Marcus and I were the closest of the two, and me and Todd were always at odds. Slowly Scott and I grew to be better friends. Sadly he moved away when we were in 5th grade. We grew up and went to East Side Middle School and Marcus became harder and harder to get a hold of, partially because he was one grade behind us and partially because he was somewhat part of the cool crowd. As middle school finished up Todd and I became best of friends and spent two summers together, all the time. During this time we moved on to Anderson Highland High School. Twice I brought Todd down to Dale Hollow Lake with me and several times he spent the whole day with my family. My family took to calling him my adopted brother. He ate with us a lot and he was there when we got our first of our current dogs, ChiChi. We had a saying that we shared a brain. Often times people would walk up on us having a conversation that had meaning to us, but meant nothing to anyone else. During the summer of my Sophomore year Todd got a job working for Meijer in Anderson and slowly he faded from my life… for a bit.

Ever since I can remember clearly (which is about 3rd grade) I had been in swimming. I was part of a swim team in Anderson called Anderson Community Aquatics Club (ACAC). I loved the practices and tried to go to all of them, but I hated the meets that they had and tried to stay away from them as much as possible. This made some of my coaches think that I was a scrub swimmer and they put little stock into me. Once I was in middle school I started swimming for the school team instead of ACAC, which further pissed off the coaches. I continued to bring about their dislike by beating a large number of their “favorite” swimmers in the middle school meets. I traveled on to high school and continued to swim for the school, and further distanced myself from the ACAC group of kids and people. I didn’t like the way they were and the way they acted. This was perhaps my first demonstration of elitism and the way some of the more spoiled rich kids and parents can be. I also saw the effects of parents who wanted something for their kids push their kids to that goal despite what their kids wanted. In swimming for Highland I found a group of people that were swimmers that treated you like a friend no matter what. In this group I found several friends that are important to me, but one that I have come to count on and call a best friend, Jim Lindzy. By the end of my junior year Jim had taken Todd’s place as the right hand man in my life. We trained in the same lane in the pool and spent several nights playing pool at my house until late. By the beginning of my Senior year some would argue (us being some of them) that we thought a like. While this might be a shade shallower than the way me and Todd where, it also allowed for us to be somewhat separate in the lives that we led but still be good friends. For Highland I started out as a second tier member of the team, one of the guys that you could count on to get third or fourth, but to always be improving and doing whatever was needed. I did letter my first year there which was a big deal as only Jim and I were able to do that as freshmen. During my sophomore year and at the beginning of my Junior year I took over the lead spot in my events and came to be the one that the team counted on to win those events. Several times that year I went in to the races knowing that the person I was swimming had been faster than me and coming out of them winning. I still got beat some, but I was winning my fair share as well, and I was constantly getting better times. As my Senior year started for swimming, I found myself stronger and in more control of the way that I was swimming. I finished out my senior year as a swimmer winning all of the single races I swam in during dual meets. I swam for and narrowly missed the Highland record for my event, the 500 freestyle. I also placed 25 in the state in that event at the state meet.

I also found that my friend Jim had started to fade from me a little. He was now spending some of his school day at the trade school learning HVAC and spending his weekends working for a company called Best Heating and Cooling. So as yoda said in Episode I of the star wars series “Two there are always”, I found myself seeking a second again. It was at this time that Todd and I hooked up again. Todd was in danger of getting expelled from school on a new rule that the board had created called the 10 absence rule. This was almost strictly because he couldn’t wake up in the morning. I didn’t want to see Todd get kicked out of school, so I started going over there in the morning and waking him up, then we would go to school. Their were only a few problems with this though. First was that this was right in the middle of swimming season, and therefore I was only able to get over there two days out of the week. Most of the other days he was making it, but slowly the number of days that he was absent crept toward ten. Another of the problems was that (purely my opinion) Todd really didn’t think he needed school. He was still working at Meijer and making decent money. The last reason, due to Todd’s brother getting kicked out of Highland and Todd’s ability to miss class and still get A’s on the tests, he was not extremely liked by the faculty and staff at Highland. This was proven by the fact that once he reached ten absences he was immediately kicked out of school for the rest of the year, but at the end of the year twenty people graduated with over ten absences (some with on the order of 20-30). So Todd was expelled from school for the last semester of my time there. We continued to talk and hang out a little, but after that he started working a lot at Meijer and that shortened our time as friends.