I would just like to announce to the world that I finally got wireless working on my laptop!


Anywho, today wasn’t very eventful, work as usual, lots of laptops to setup, the occasional desktop too.
Alex called me up at work and said we had an appointment to checkout the house near the elementary school. I left work about 30 minutes early and got there ahead of everyone else
The house is pretty nice, it’s 1280/mo I think, and the deposit is 1280 too :/
The house is pretty spacious, the rooms are a little tight to fit, but it’s not a problem, since the rest of my stuff will be spread around a little. We drove down the crossroad mall to leech their wireless and looked to see if anymore houses had come up. We found one that perked out interest, 6 bedroom house, 2500 sq feet.

the place was huge, we drove over to the place and checked it out, it’s got 7 bedrooms, 2 floors, 3 bathrooms, 2 master bedrooms, and 2 fireplaces. Oh, and it also has two decks!
The place is freakin’ sweet! It’s 2500/mo, which is pretty damn cheap in my opinion. As soon as we got done checking the place out (a contracter was there finishing up some remodeling and showed us the place) we called up the landlord telling her we wanted the place.
Well, unfortunately for us, we have to give them an application, and there are already 2 applications in and she has 3 more appointments this week. BUT she said she would get back to us by friday!

I didn’t do all that much today, I was tempted to go to PAX, but I’m short on cash until my paycheck clears at the bank.
Yesterday I bought some stuff for the car, this liquid that converts rust to primer, anti-rust spray paint, a sanding sponge, and a couple brushes.

So today I sanded down all the places with rust. I did some heavy duty rust removal on my car last year, but i went about it all wrong. I got most of the bad rust off of it, but i also shaved off a lot of metal. I used naval jelly to remove the rest and then coated it with anti-rust primer. Well, I didn’t put enough coats, and it was coming back. So I decided to do it over again but smarter.

I used the sponge to sand down all the spots that were coming back, and all the other spots that had appeared elsewhere on the car. After that I took the liquid stuff and used the brush to coat each spot. I let it dry for about ten minutes between coats (I did 3 coats, maybe 4). I’m going to have it dry overnight/through tomorrow (until i get off work) then sand it a little to smooth it out, then I’m going to paint it over with the anti-rust paint, I’ll probably do 3 coats again.

On a sidenote, my laptop is now running Mandriva Linux. Everything is working fine except for the wireless, but that’ just because broadcom sucks and it’s being retarded. I’m thinking i’ll just buy a pcmcia atheros card, since i’ve had much better luck with those chipsets.

I’ve been toying with this idea, but I’m going to have another project going in Tech 294.

Make my own ddr pad
And that’s not all. I’m going to be setting up a Gateway solo 2100 with linux, then loading stepmania onto it, turning it into a miniature DDR gamesystem. I’m going to house the laptop and it’s dock (it needs one for the pads) inside some sort of case that i will pimp out with a big fat DDR logo of some sort.

In other news, my lease ends in september, so i plan on moving out. I’ve been looking at houses with some guys I know, and we’ll be getting a house with a 1 year lease! A lot of the houses we have looked at so far are really sweet. We’ll make our decision later this week, and hopefully I’ll be moved in by the end of september!

I got up this morning, and managed to beat Shard into the bathroom. I got all my gear together, shard went into the bathroom and had a shower, and it was only 8:20! So me being all pumped about being to work early for the first time in awhile, Sped out the door, where my morning euphoria was quickly swept away.

Usually in the morning Shard moves his car from behind me and parks it on the right side. This ensures that I can leave work on time, which is usually when he’s in the shower, or just about to get out.
Unfortunately, this time around he didn’t move his car and he had gotten into the shower after me, which meant that he had gotten in about ten minutes after he usually does. He finally got out of the shower at 8:40, and i asked him to move his car. He freaked out because he realized that I was going to be late for work!

Well, as soon as I got into my car, i zipped out of the driveway and sped towards work. When I’m on the highway I’m usually going 65-70.
Well, this time I was going 70-80. And guess what happens when you speed? Yup! You get pulled over!
However, it wasn’t with your standard cop car, I can spot those miles away. It was an undercover cop car! I think it was an Acura, I’m not sure of the model or year (late 90’s or 00’s?) but it was red. I was confused for a second because it flashed it’s lights at me and stopped. But I played it safe and pulled over anyways.

Highway patrolman walked up to my passenger door, and spoke to me for a bit.

Officer:  “Why are you speeding? Late for work?”
Me: “Yeah…..”
Officer: “You need to watch your following distance, I was following you for quite some time!”
(I had actually noticed a red car following, but didn’t really think about it)
Officer: “Give me your drivers license”

He took it and went back to his car. I was going about 79 he said, but he only wrote me up for going 65.

Even though I’ve been speeding since i got a drivers license, this is my first speeding ticket! Which really blows, but it’s kinda cool at the same time (in a “First Time!” sorta sense, not a “Oooh! Lets get more!” sense).
Hopefully i’ll be able to maintain a good track record from here (and figure out a way to identify the undercover cop cars, those will be tricky!)

I got to work at 9:15am, I spoke to chris and told him I got my first ticket! We had a little discussion about it, and then he got mad at me for trying not to be late.

WTF? That’s a little odd, I get yelled at for not being late? and then he said I wasn’t late because it was only 9:15! So, he told me to take my time coming to work, and if I’m going to be late, just call.
Well, I guess that’s kinda cool?

powered by performancing firefox

Posting this so i don’t lose the link again and spend 2 days trying to find it:

Linux car mp3 player

Chris left early to go to a doctor appointment, and Jayvee had the day off. So I ended up pretty much doing my own thing most of the day, wasn’t too bad.

A few things i have going on right now:

1) Grabbing all the parts for the car mp3 project.

2) Looking for a new place to live

a) Going to get a house with 3 other guys, things are looking good so far.

3)Getting ready for classes.

a)Start on sept 18 b)Still need to buy the books, shouldn’t cost very much.

4)Looking to get more friends.

a)failing miserabely.

edit: how the hell did i go 3 days without updating? something sounds a little fishy…

I had this idea last week, and it’s been rolling around in my head, so I thought I would voice it here.

After recent events, it seems as though we’re slowly entering a hitler-esque regime. Bush is only halfway through his term, and things are already pretty bad. We can have hope that this falls elections will end the Republican control in congress and bring sanity back to our nation, but I’m tired of waiting.

Too many people have stood by, hoping that things would get better, that someone else would stand up and say something, that another person would react, that someone would stand up and say “No, I don’t want this”

Well, it’s not going to happen, why? Because you’re waiting for that to happen. If we keep waiting, our freedom (the oh so overused word that’s been sadly mis-represented, marred, and taken out of context and constitution (in spirit)) will fade, if not dissapear.

Franklin D. Roosevelt once said “Only Thing We Have to Fear Is Fear Itself” Powerful words from a great man. Unfortunately it appears as though the “fearing only fear” era is over. And nobody has really taken notice.
Why? Because everyone is too scared to react to the atrocities (yet another word used in excess when speaking of the Bush Administration) done by George W. Bush and his toads.

Well, I think it’s time to do something.
What do I want to do? Well, as I mentioned at the beginning, I thought of something last week. It’s becoming clearer everyday that everyone wants to isolate the Muslims, or anyone who looks muslim, and put them in a cage. Why? Because nobody knows what a terrorist looks like.
The world around, people who are or appear to be middle eastern, are being in many ways.
A recent Gallup Poll showed that 2 out of 5 americans believe that muslims should be required to wear a special I.D.

Gee, this reminds of something…..what was it…..

Oh Yeah! the holocaust!

Yes, yes, I know I’m probably being a tad on the extreme side, but messed up times call for messed up measures.

My plan, is to stage a silent protest by wearing badges. and what badge would that be?

You guessed it! The yellow badge.
I want to stage this protest in the most provocative manner I can think of, let me get arrested, I’m exercising my free speech (what’s left of it) damnit! Although it won’t be the yellow badge, as everyone has already seen it so much, the symbol has been desensitized enough, so something of a more clever design shall be made.

Anyone who is interested in doing this or has any thoughts about this, please feel free to comment about it. I want to get as many people as possible to participate in this as possible, I want everyone to hear about this, let them know that there is at least one person who won’t sit by and let this happen. I’m not going to write a letter and hope someone reads it, I want them to hear about it.

If you would like to participate, send an email to badge(at)chipnick.com to show your interest.

Bah, I really need to start updating more often.
I now pledge to update at least once a day, starting…..now, which just happens to be 12:05am, so I’m set.

Today (well, yesterday) I came in to work and found that Chris wasn’t there, so I logged on and proceeded to work on my xp loaded project (In a nutshell, my job is doing build-outs of computers for employees, there is a standard install I do and then i add on additional software, so I’ve been working on bundling the standard install into the XP disc) while i waited for him to arrive.
After a bit I got bored and decided to remote to my computer, discovered that it wasn’t online, so i ssh’d into my mini-server and attempted to send a WOL to it (but I had reset the cmos earlier, so it wasn’t enabled ), and then I got a phone call! And this doesn’t occur very often, since nobody knows my extension (not even the receptionist :/)
Turned out it was Chris, he was sick (He went camping over the weekend, and the guy he went with was sick, so he got infected) so he would be working from home. He asked me to setup an employees desk for him, and configure the employees laptop to be ready for him.
I ran off and did that, at this point i figured i should do some actual work, so i decided to work on the clone boxes (a fancy name for the 7 identical computers in S&R). I grabbed one, set it up (took several hours) and then proceeded to ghost another one.
I ended up getting all seven done by the end of the day, and this was supposed to take me about a week to do.
Without Chris there to give me random tasks to do, I guess I sped through everything. On a sidenote, Micheal (my boss), apparently goofed up an idrs server I setup a couple weeks ago, so i have to reinstall the os to it tomorrow, so i guess that’s something for me to do!

This marks week number 2 on the job (I started on a friday, so that week doesn’t count) and so far so good, I haven’t gotten to do any *nix boxes yet, which makes me sad, windows isn’t any fun (although the xp loaded project gives me endless hours of fun! </sarcasm>).

My brother was up here this last weekend, haven’t seen him in like a year and a half, so it was good to see him. But as usual, we pretty much sat around and surfed the web, but it was still cool (I let him drive my car, and give me some tips on shifting). He’s a fun brother, it seems like he’s matured a lot in college, and I’ve become less of an annoyance to him (at least I hope so). He’s also thinking of moving to the west side from St. Louis, so there’s a good chance I’ll be able to see him more often!

Today The guys I work with invited me to go to lunch with them. And where did we go?

Hooters!

Yup, we went to hooters for lunch, it was pretty cool, had fun and everything, and Jayvee being the evil joker he is, told the girls that it was “my birthday”. So, me being totally oblivious to what was about to occur to me, played along with it, got a hug from one of the hooters girls and then got a bunch of “I <3 Hooters” stickers stuck to my face and chest. We got our food and I proceeded to eat. And then that’s where it all went wrong….

What happened? Well, I’ll let you see:

Read the rest of this entry »

So I’ve got a job now and it’s great work and everything. But with all jobs there are going to be times when you’ll have nothing to do. So what do you do? Get on the internet!
Browse the internet, chat with friends, and all that fun stuff. But there is that risk of getting caught. How? Because you’ll be noticed on the network by the system admin!

Well, I decided that wasn’t going to happen to me (even though I work the with all the IT admins and the sys admin works 10 feet away from me) and looked into methods of avoiding this.

My solution was FreeNX. Install the server to your Linux computer, and you can download a client for windows or linux and connect to it!

So how do you do this? Well, you can follow the guide in the ubuntu wiki here to get it all setup.

for those of you too lazy to read the guide, here are 4 quick (and brief) steps to get it done:

1) edit sshd.conf and change the line “Port 22” to “Port 8888”
use the following commands to accomplish this task:

sudo nano /etc/ssh/sshd_config
sudo /etc/init.d/ssh restart

2) Add the freenx Repositories to your sources.list. This can be done a variety of ways, use these repositories:

deb http://seveas.imbrandon.com dapper-seveas freenx
deb-src http://seveas.imbrandon.com dapper-seveas freenx

note freenx is currently not available in the edgy-seveas repository. It is safe to use dapper-seveas.

3)Install freenx

wget http://seveas.imbrandon.com/1135D466.gpg O | sudo apt-key add – sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install freenx

4)Edit /etc/nxserver/node.conf and uncomment the line that says #SSHD_PORT=22 to SSHD_PORT=8888

And you’re set!

However, the client is version 2.0, and there are some compatibility issues, so i had to search around a bit to find 1.5, which works with the freenx server. I managed to find the 1.5 client here
And just to be safe, I uploaded to my server, which can be downloaded here.

So, now you can be all secretive and nobody will find you!

Happy web browsing!