Sponsorship

Posted on July 18, 2005 by Brent

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.

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My own little TV Station

Posted on July 15, 2005 by Brent

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

Posted in Geek | Tagged , , , , , , | 2 Comments

… Someday never comes …

Posted on July 6, 2005 by Brent

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. 🙂

Posted in Journal, Thoughts | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

More Pics

Posted on June 29, 2005 by Brent

I got some more old pictures scanned in. Most of them are in the family section, though a few are in the friends as well. You can always take a look at the RSS feed or the updated list at the bottom right of the page for the most recent pictures.

Pauline was also in a wedding over the weekend, so I will get those pictures posted soon too.

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Optic Love

Posted on June 22, 2005 by Brent

I dropped some new pictures into the gallery. Mostly of the hot rod festival that we had last weekend at the farm. Dad is the photographer this time and not I. There are pictures of mom’s new (to her) mustang and some excellent ones of my uncle’s Corvette. Oh and of course there are the ’56 pictures that I am slowly working my way through the process of captioning.

Check out the location of the corvette pictures that are located in water. Somewhat cool, is the fact that I think they are taken in the same location, just with 25+ years difference. Kinda nifty in my opinion.

Gallery is located at http://news.brentnorris.net/gallery or you can use the ever updating list on the right side of the journal main page.

I also got my scanner and picture albums over at the new house, so I am going to try and get some more of those scanned in and posted.

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The changing Mtv

Posted on June 21, 2005 by Brent

While I was up in Indiana, I had like 1 minutes to kill at one point, so I flipped on Mtv and sat there watching it for a second. I don’t really know why I decided to stop there, perhaps it was the video at the time, though I don’t remember what it was.

What I do remember was that when the next set of commercials came on I was amazed at what I saw. The first was a commercial for huggies and the second was for one of those “once a day genital herpes” drugs. Wow.

Now if you look at these two commercials and guess Mtv’s target market, you get 15-25 year olds with kids and genital herpes. What a proud group that is. I can honestly say, that I don’t think Mtv was showing these kind of commercials when I was a kid, so the question is are they changing their commercials to keep up with the people that are my age now who still watch Mtv, or are they tailoring their commercials to the slutty 15-17 year old?

Posted in Thoughts | 1 Comment

Been working on a new project

Posted on June 17, 2005 by Brent

Notice that this isn’t in the geek section. That is because this project had nothing to do with computers at all. I actually spent the most part of this week up in Indiana working on Dad’s old 56 Chevy with my uncle.
Continue reading →

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Who says those Biology classes were a waste?

Posted on June 10, 2005 by Brent

I ran into a snake today in the yard.

Once I saw it I used my knowledge of snakes to classify it as a poisionous snake. I quickly went in a retreived a shovel from the garage. After deftly seperating the snakes head from the rest of the snake’s body with only 6-10 quick strokes. Unfortunately, after stopping the wild swings I noticed that I had previously incorrectly identified the snake. It was in fact a dead snake, which I then realized was not poisionous at all. Ah, well, such is life I guess.

Perhaps I should attempt to augment my classes of snakes from “poisionous and dead” to something more accurately depicting the different types of snakes… Nah.

Posted in Journal | Tagged | 5 Comments

I refuse to believe that my existance is just a test.

Posted on June 3, 2005 by Brent
Posted in Skeptic | 2 Comments

Random Music in this day and age?

Posted on June 1, 2005 by Brent

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.

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