Another year

HAPPY NEW YEAR

Now I can be the leader I am suppose to be

After 40 post I have finally gained a follower.

Now I can start to amass my loyal army of henchmen (or women, depending)

I think I deserve a little HighFive action

Now, I expect more of my myriad of readers to pony-up and begin following my posts more regularly-

P.S. I command you.

if you can read this you must be a nerd

For some reason I am enthralled with electrical engineering, even though I have not had any formal training.

My job places me in the sphere of electrical application and installation, but engineering has become my hobby.

I do benefit from my engineering hobby in that I really understand many intricate components and methods used by suppliers and their products- this allows me to see beyond the packaging.

I picked up the Mims books (Engineer's Mini Notebooks) from Radio Shack.

They will not by any means make you an electrical engineer, but they do have a decent amount of information (and can help lead you in the right direction).

Now I have to decide on a project to embark. The hardest thing for me is that I must see a practical purpose for the project, otherwise I will abandon it.

let's watch fat people cry

Fat people are the new entertainment. I see that even MTV will take a break from whatever the hell they waste their time doing these days and will be airing a new show where kids try to lose weight before entering college.

The promo for the show is what we have come to expect from such shows. Fat people crying about being fat.

Why the fu*k do we still watch any of this sh*t?

I use to watch shows like "The Biggest Loser" and alike, but I have grown tired of the endless parade of fat to fatter contestants. Every year they look to find the fattest people willing to humiliate themselves on national TV. So the producers can sell some gum and zip-lock sandwich bags. We get it. No really you guys have made your point. Fat people are only valuable humans when they lose weight and become "normal".

I'm tired of the fatties show me some other freak show for a change. I want some new entertainment. Since it is alright to exploit people who have brought their current state upon themselves here are a few suggestions for "reality show" subjects I want to pitch:

1.) Crack Whores with AIDS

or

2.) Homeless Bums

Reprint- A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace

here is a oldie but goody :

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace

by John Perry Barlow

Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.

We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks. I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear.

Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. You have neither solicited nor received ours. We did not invite you. You do not know us, nor do you know our world. Cyberspace does not lie within your borders. Do not think that you can build it, as though it were a public construction project. You cannot. It is an act of nature and it grows itself through our collective actions.

You have not engaged in our great and gathering conversation, nor did you create the wealth of our marketplaces. You do not know our culture, our ethics, or the unwritten codes that already provide our society more order than could be obtained by any of your impositions.

You claim there are problems among us that you need to solve. You use this claim as an excuse to invade our precincts. Many of these problems don't exist. Where there are real conflicts, where there are wrongs, we will identify them and address them by our means. We are forming our own Social Contract . This governance will arise according to the conditions of our world, not yours. Our world is different.

Cyberspace consists of transactions, relationships, and thought itself, arrayed like a standing wave in the web of our communications. Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live.

We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth.

We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.

Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are all based on matter, and there is no matter here.

Our identities have no bodies, so, unlike you, we cannot obtain order by physical coercion. We believe that from ethics, enlightened self-interest, and the commonweal, our governance will emerge . Our identities may be distributed across many of your jurisdictions. The only law that all our constituent cultures would generally recognize is the Golden Rule. We hope we will be able to build our particular solutions on that basis. But we cannot accept the solutions you are attempting to impose.

In the United States, you have today created a law, the Telecommunications Reform Act, which repudiates your own Constitution and insults the dreams of Jefferson, Washington, Mill, Madison, DeToqueville, and Brandeis. These dreams must now be born anew in us.

You are terrified of your own children, since they are natives in a world where you will always be immigrants. Because you fear them, you entrust your bureaucracies with the parental responsibilities you are too cowardly to confront yourselves. In our world, all the sentiments and expressions of humanity, from the debasing to the angelic, are parts of a seamless whole, the global conversation of bits. We cannot separate the air that chokes from the air upon which wings beat.

In China, Germany, France, Russia, Singapore, Italy and the United States, you are trying to ward off the virus of liberty by erecting guard posts at the frontiers of Cyberspace. These may keep out the contagion for a small time, but they will not work in a world that will soon be blanketed in bit-bearing media.

Your increasingly obsolete information industries would perpetuate themselves by proposing laws, in America and elsewhere, that claim to own speech itself throughout the world. These laws would declare ideas to be another industrial product, no more noble than pig iron. In our world, whatever the human mind may create can be reproduced and distributed infinitely at no cost. The global conveyance of thought no longer requires your factories to accomplish.

These increasingly hostile and colonial measures place us in the same position as those previous lovers of freedom and self-determination who had to reject the authorities of distant, uninformed powers. We must declare our virtual selves immune to your sovereignty, even as we continue to consent to your rule over our bodies. We will spread ourselves across the Planet so that no one can arrest our thoughts.

We will create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace. May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before.

Davos, Switzerland

February 8, 1996

blogging basics

There is, in my opinion, two major types of Bloggers.

1st. is the writer. This blogger composes long posts; very well structured, articulate and opinionated. The writer writes about important issues and knows it. They also know that they know their subject best and look to inform others.

2nd. is the novice. This blogger writes in the moment; short attention spans abound. The novice is free to write about anything, at anytime, from any position. Most of the posts of the novice are expressions of self, thoughts; much of it incoherent from the readers viewpoint (because some posts are comments about recent situations).

I guess there is a third, namely the combination of the two, but this seldom happens. The writer blogger normally won't write like a novice. The novice can from time to time write about something not-so-completely useless, but will resort back to being the novice.

signed, the novice.

I'm all tinglingly

For the past few years we have been hobbling along with a old laptop that had seen its better day.

One of the fans went out so amongst the random overheats the laptop sounding like it was experiencing a death-rattle for the last 2 years. We actually missed the entire Vista release (which I hear wasn't much) I also just found out that all my old IDE drives won't work with the SATA motherboard.

But I don't care. I am in computer overload.

Just recently I got working with Ub10

And we just got a newdesktop (dual proc) running windows 7

So, for the span of 10 days, I have been been on full computer overload.

I am happy because win7 actually has user level access control on network file shares (something I could never find in XP (don't know if Vista had it)). And, I actually have UB10 and Win7 playing nice on the network (where my Win7 account authentication is valid for the share).

So, I know why I have been staying up later than normal.

Computers are actually fun again (if even for a little bit)

No time, or something like that

Right now there are many things I want to do but do not have either enough desire or enough time.

the end.

Ub10 login keyring ?!?

I decided to change my login password to something with a higher strength.

Once I did this I started getting a message about my login keyring no longer matches my login password.

WTF! I looked all over the place for the "keyring"

Nope, nothing.

Found the following article that got me in the ballpark.

For Ub10.10 if you get this message, here is what seemed to work.

Go to: System> Preferences> Password and Encryption Keys

It won't say anything about keyring, but...

Under the Password tab (far right) there will be a entry called "Passwords:login" Right Click on the entry and at the bottom of the pop-up menu, select "Change Password"

Then hopefully you remember the old password.

But after you update this, you will no longer have the login keyring nag screens when you start to use the internet.

Just taking it easy

Who would have every thought that you would need to recoup from vacation time?

After taking a week and a half off; going back to work (if only for 3 days) was like I worked a full week.

Don't know if my body was adjusting to the sudden change in climate (guess Al Gore is right at least once a year); or if I just became a victim of the laws of Physics and was forced to violate them (the body at rest part).

Pretty much, I am just going to take it easy for the rest of today; tomorrow, I guess, I should actually get my butt in gear and get back to the land of the living.

Its been a good run.

Socially Awkward

I have tried and tried but find that I am socially awkward. The whole concept of social networking is lost on me. I have tried FB, MySpace, different Forums, etc; and I am just not too sure what the hell I am suppose to be doing (socially that is). I mean, what is the point? I'm here doing my thing, and other countless folks are out there doing their thing- how are we actually socializing?

Mostly it just seems like people use the Social aspect to argue with people they don't know about shit that really doesn't matter.

I think it has become too much really. And as far as the amount of Flash and Shockwave that these site use. I loaded Myspace and opened Chromium's task manager : Damn flash plug-in was chomping on 22% of the proc, just loading the page.

Farmville, mafia, and alike (boring and repetitive as they are) (honestly, why the hell do people play this shit for more than a week?)

Too MUCH FLASH PEOPLE

Linux -Restoring my faith in humanity

I got a version of Ubuntu a couple years ago, in hopes of getting my wife interested in Linux based operating systems. She is not much of a computer geek and just wants to be able to play Farmville and other FB games, while occasionally printing some things off the internet.

I recently downloaded Ubuntu 10.10 and absolutely love it. I remember installing Slackware and Redhat 4 just to find that I couldn't get the monitor to run X. SCO, Solaris, Debian, etc if it had a X (even OSX for Mac) I tired to run it. I even once bought an old SunSparc unit.

Ubuntu 10 is an outright out of the BOX OS which can rival MS and Mac.

Yes it is true that I just bought new DELL with Windows 7 (64bit) and look forward to using in it. But I love the fact that I can browse the net on my Toughbook and fear very-very-very few virus threats. I might actually use MySpace again :)