Ok so I havn’t posted anything for a month.

But I still have thoughts and ideas. One of my thoughts is of “why are geeks and beer even associated.” I mean really it doesn’t make sense to me. I have never seen anyone code while they are drunk. I have not seen anyone say anything intelligent while under the grasp of alcohol. so why why is linux or opensource described as “free as in beer”.

Caffiene makes so much more sense. Whatever flavor you enjoy your caffiene in it helps you to stay awake, concentrate and give you superpowers. All those things help with coding or doing the all nighter gaming session.

But it is funny to watch drunk people. Then it becomes hilarious to tease them the next day when they don’t remember. What kind of fun is that. “I don’t remember” Yah that sounds fun to me.

Nope I don’t drink.

Bittorrant the Problems it has are sometimes pretty gapping. Downloading a Linux distro at launch is great but a few months down the road there may not be enough or any seeds on that torrent.

So it’s great for flash mobs but once the mob has been maced and gone home. The party is over, or not over but died down to the point of being in a zombie state.

My idea is a plugin for a torrent client that would setup a seed network. Everyone in this seed network would have bits of all the files being shared. They wouldn’t know what bits of what files they have but the network would know the checksum of those bits. Then the network would take those bits and share it with the client which would then upload it into the torrent network.

It’s like a seedleach. I only know a little Java. Otherwise I would have coded up a prototype to find the bugs and weaknesses with this approach as of now it still needs a little more thought.

I though I would share, maybe something like this already exists. Oh and I am keeping the SeedLeach name.

Sometimes the need will arise when you want to copy and paste something but without the formating of the text following along.

This is where the simple notepad comes along. The first part is to copy the text with the formating that you want. Then open up notepad, paste into notepad then select all. Recopy then paste the text where you originally wanted it.

Congrats now you have text without the formating. Now you can start from scratch on the formating.

Yes, thats right I have been having doubts of whether having your children believe in Santa, if it’s such a good thing. Sure it may seem harmless to believe in Santa, and sure the kids love to get presents from this jolly old fat man from the north pole.

Then comes the preteen years. Some take it hard when they find out their favorite fat man is not real. Some come to the truth that it never made sense for a fat guy to give them presents.

I think Santa isn’t so much the bad thing but the exploitation of him to sell toy’s. Which only contributes to the materialism of this time of the year. When really it shouldn’t be about some fat guy. For some it should be about Jesus. For others such as I, it’s a time for family. Presents be damned.

Then there is the breaking of a child’s spirit once they know Santa is a made up figure. Some ignore this, some are a little bitter about it. But I find it funny that the very faithful methods are then shown how to breakup that faith they once had in Santa. Just thinking that could be applied to other parts in a persons life.

In the end I still haven’t answered if Santa is good or not. On one hand it’s a nice story for children. On the other it’s the exploitation of that story I have such a hard time with. I say forget Santa and let your kids know you love them and thats the real reason you chose to give them gifts. Santa’s not taking my glory.

Disclaimer: You should only take this post half serious. Please don’t take it out of context. It’s more of a thought process here.

The Internet these days is almost synonymous with misinformation. An hd speaker from a penny. Wow that’s awesome. That’s if it were true, but it isn’t. A television that is powered by a triple A battery, nevermind that what comes out the wall is 110V and what comes out the AAA battery is 1.5volts at best and that one is AC and the other DC. (Alternating Current and Direct Current)

Technology for a lot of people is equal to well magic, not many people will take the time or to actually figure out how things really work. For most the explanation that equates to magic is enough.

Why are some people making up all this misinformation and why is it so popular. I suppose I should say something about snake oil. The promise of something for free or nor free is too great of a pull for most the population to resist.

A conclusion I can pull from that is snake oil isn’t limited to just the Internet. I blame those that have something to gain from their fellow humans even if it is to take advantage of them. Catering to their feelings of fear and greed.

On this blog while I can’t promise that everything will be correct I will do my best. Who knows maybe I will play myth buster.

What is it with pirates and rar? Why is rar so special? Really what’s so good about rar? Why not 7zip, tar.gz tar.bz or even zip.

Pirates for the most part have no respect for the intellectual properties of others. But then some of those intellectual property holders aren’t so respecting of the people either. The people here meaning the demographic that could make use of said intellectual property weather they pay for it or not.

But really what is it with rar? I want to know why is it so much better. Is it because it was used once and then has become engraved into those that do pirate?

Yes I have pirated software in the past but I don’t anymore. For most the time it isn’t worth the hassle of waiting a week, or having downloads without seed. I have since either bought or replaced those programs with free counter parts. The free counterparts fulfill my needs anyways. Besides who hasn’t pirated at some point. Remember Napster?

To a point pirating has helped those intellectual property files. Would Quake 3 be as popular if it wasn’t pirated, same with Photoshop. I could go on with many examples. But I won’t since all I want to know is why Rar?

It seems that while money is a needed thing, It’s not always the most convenient. You have to work for it. For what really, what am I putting all this labor in for?  How can I make more of it? While I am not always sure of those answers depending on the situation. I am not sure, but for fun lets take on a view that most would think is insane. *I am sure that when you take a different view of things that you are able to reaffirm other view points. *

The truth is Money is not worth anything. Only a perceived value. But really it’s the things you can buy with money that make money worth anything. You can’t eat money, I’ll pay you to try.

The value of money isn’t real it’s a perceived value. Why should one note be worth more when it is of the same material of another higher marked note. What is it with those markings that make it worth so much.

I figure that bartering had major problems. So a arbitrary system had to be put in place by a garenteer that said hey this note is worth this much and is backed up in this way. Many times being backed up by a stock of gold, But again you can’t eat gold. Now our money isn’t backed by gold but by a promise by the government and the people that the note of cotton is indeed worth what it says it is worth. This way the people are able to trade goods for money and the promise is that they will now be able to take this new found money then trade it for more goods. It’s a circle really… Oh what a lovely circle…

Many don’t even handle paper money anymore. Instead the worth is either transferred by check or by electronic means. Meaning that the money is stored and handled for you, and a convenient means of spending your money is presented to you.

The worth of money isn’t so much of what it is made of. It’s what it is representing. Which is only tangible when people are willing to work for the transfer of that wealth to them.

I want more, give it to me. NOW!!! Alright so begging doesn’t work. How can I get a piece of this pie. This money pie. I thought of a few things. ONE - Work for someone. Two - Self employee yourself Three - Invest it.

Boredom is a dangerous thing. I happened to have enough stuff in my truck to make a network patch cable, But since I had a few hours to kill. I decided to braid the patch cable. As to what this does to signal quility I don’t know. It’s mostly for novaltiy purposes. Far as I know this may cause cancer in the state of California.

Please excuse the bad quality pictures. All I had was my camera phone.

The first part of making a braided network patch cable is to strip the protective sheathing with a pair of wire stripers. Be carefull not to cut too far into the sheathing as to cut into the actaul wires themselves.

Once the sheathing is off, seperate out the pairs. On cat5 you’ll notice that each pair is twisted. This helps with the signal to not get crosstalk. Don’t seperate the individual wires out.(Category Five for those that never knew what the cat in cat5 stood for.)

Now that you have the pairs are seperated out you can start braiding the pairs like you would with anything else. Although with the pairs already being twisted it kinda got confusing at times.

You’re at the end and need to terminate to make the wire usefull. I cut off a small part of the sheathing and kept it. This does two things keeps the cable from undoing and when you crimp the connector on it provides a tight fit for the wires. Since this is a straight through cable the colors on each end at in the same pattern (Orange white, Orange, Green white, Blue, Blue White, Green, Brown white, and Brown)

To make a good Termination make sure that you have about a 1/4 inch of wire that is cut off. Then push the rj45 connector on ensuring that none of the wires move out of place or else you will have to redo it.

The completed cable on the seat of my truck. I took it home and was able to operate on my gigabit network. Using iperf to test if it was really gigabit speed, got around 680 megabits per second which to me is good enough.

What is it with my productivity going down as I stay on the computer for longer periods of time.

It’s as if I will procrastinate as I use the computer more often. OH I can put things off, after all I will be on the computer for a while longer. I just took a nice five minute break there. I almost brewed some tea. I don’t drink tea, but I should have used that five minutes for brewing.

I am being a bit silly there. But really what is it I do on the Internet? I waste time. Sure I am looking at sites that teach me or inform me of a lot of things. What I am accomplishing while I am surfing the web.

The most effective time for me on the computer is when I get less of it. The less time I have to sit there thinking of what I want to do on the computer is better.

I know that I am not the only one with this problem. This in combination with my ADD. Or I may have things backwards Maybe its my ADD that is not helping.

I wonder what can I do to remedy this situation. Maybe I just need to turn the computer off. Sure the convenience of having a always ready system is great. I tend to sit down at computers that are on. The boot time for is a deterrent, if I really do have a purpose in mind I can wait those few seconds.

I don’t want to sit there surfing the Internet waiting for the websites to update. How lame is that? I mean come on. What is it I am doing? Why am I wasting my time?

How can I find something else to do that isn’t wasting my time and still be able to get done what I want to get done. I have a few ideas. One how bout instead of studying at home with the amount of distractions that occur, I study with my laptop at school or the library. Two instead of just sitting at the computer without a purpose, I use the computer with a purpose in mind and once that purpose or activity is done then I move onto another or just leave and turn the computer off.

These ideas are all great and good, but implementing them is always harder then thinking of them. Well I need to get going, I am done with what I wanted to do. Now for some tea.

You know Instant messengers are in a pathetic state right now.. Let me explain You have lets say Aim, but you can’t talk to your friends on either msn or yahoo. That is pathetic.

Alright so we have Aim MSN Yahoo gtalk (jabber) guku, skype All not connected (well msn and now yahoo are or at least agreed to) Each trying to compete with each other, I don’t want to have an account with every single instant messenger provider out there. What could we do. One thing is to combine all the networks each having a @aim.com @hotmail.com @msn.com @yahoo.com so that you have username@network. Kinda like email. So that the messenger servers know where to send your message. Email used to require that you had an account on each network, We then slowly standardized on smtp.

This idea is novel and all but really is it plausible? Well, it would be other then Microsoft made it harder. With Microsoft passport you use your existing email address as your username. Which in itself isn’t such a bad idea. The problem comes when you try to login to your instant messenger account. Well the @example.com is no longer the network identifier for msn messenger users. There really isn’t a pretty way for people to get around this other then to do a user#example.com@msn.com So now the instant messenger knows that it needs to contact msn servers for this account. Since the instant messenger account is with msn.

Other then Microsoft’s dominance over things it should just leave alone. My point is that if I have an email spam@ideasurge.net That I should be able to setup or use my own instant messenger server.

I have more on this subject if anyone is interested I can expand more on the subject. Really all I want is one login to talk to all my friends. Is that so bad?