Often board

As the title states, I often board, but I am rarely bored. There is always something new to try with Linux, and I am always finding new hobbies that last a week or two, mostly from things on Instructables. My favorite pastime, however, is most definitely boarding. When I say "boarding" I mean many different sports involving boards, like snowboarding, wakeboarding, body boarding, and skim boarding. My favorite out of these is snowboarding.

About five years ago, my uncle took me snowboarding. I didn't do very well and it was tiring at first, but it was fun. After a few years I decided I wanted to get a snowboard and go back again. My other uncle has a vacation home right on a mountain, so we went there to snowboard. I have been doing it now for four years, and everytime I go, I get slightly better. Once I went for a whole week, and by the end I had learned how to do a 360. One of the coolest things about it, though, is that snowboarding helps improve all the other types of boarding that I do (except body boarding). After a good year of snowboarding, I was able to do much better on the wakeboard.

As I mentioned before, I rarely have nothing I want to do. At one point a few years ago I got big into Povray, which is basically a mix between 3D design and programming. The video I posted here is my greatest achievement with Povray. I mostly did single images, but this was my first attempt at making a video with it. Everything is created by me, which is pretty cool, I think.

The Quest for Free Music

When I discovered that Kazaa had become illegal, I went into a period of time when I couldn't get any music. This was mainly because I didn't know where I could find it free legally, and I was too cheap to buy CDs or the like. This went on until I found allofmp3.com, which is a Russian music website that was (and still is) in the gray area of the law. This site offered music at $0.02 per MB downloaded, so I could get whole CDs for $1 or so. I got a gift card for the site, and started to work.

This went on really well, until the RIAA discovered the site, and went to work pressuring the government to get the site shut down. During this time, the site was unavailable, and I once again needed to find free music. This time, however, I was fortunate to make a number of discoveries.

I discovered a program called StreamRipper, which allows the "ripping" of a stream of audio from a web radio station. This process was (and still is, I think) legal and free, so I gave it a try. It is not targeted yet because of the quality of the audio. Most web radio streams at 64 kbs, so the audio is very low quality. The program that rips the audio is also imperfect in that it sometimes overlaps the songs, and sometimes records radio ads and promos along with the songs. So, it had limitations. But it was still very useful in getting a wide range of music, so I could go for quantity and not quality. This lead to my introduction to the genres of Lounge and various forms of Electronic.

The "feature" that I have utilized this time is putting an mp3 on the page. I am doing this by embedding a flash player that is linked to a file found on the Internet Archive. The file can be played by clicking the little play button.

Adblock

USB drive to the max

Since I am constantly going between computers, I thought it prudent to purchase a small USB drive. I had done so in the past, but I let some one at work "borrow" it. I never really had a use for one again, until now.

A few weeks ago, the professor of the Internet class I am in mentioned "Wiki on a Stick." Intrigued, I learned more about it after class. "Wiki on a Stick," or stickwiki, is a self-editing XHTML page that contains a complete standalone wiki that can be run in most popular web browsers. I instantly thought of hundreds of uses, so I bought a new USB drive and installed stickwiki on it. It worked out good, but I had to plug the drive in, open it, find the wiki file, and then open it. I figured that this would become tiresome after a while, so I put on my hacker hat and got busy.

I ended up figuring out how to access the USB drive through the device manager through the command line. With this ability, I wrote a small Perl script that runs when I plug my drive in at work or at home. When the script runs, it looks on the drive for a configuration file, that tells it everything it should do with this device (I did this so that it can be expanded to do things like sync music collections on my DAP, etc), including opening up the wiki in Firefox automatically. Thus, it has become less of a pain to use, and it is beginning to work wonderfully for me for tracking projects in school and work, and keeping todo lists.

I don't know what other "features" Blogger has, or what exactly works as a usable "feature" for this assignment, so, since last time I used an image from somewhere else on the Internet with copyright, this time I will upload an image from my computer with no copyright (since I drew it). It is the small "cobra" in the upper right hand corner. This image is usually my avatar on web forums.

First Post!

This is the first post. What exactly does "First post" mean anyway? A phenomena (as shown in this article on Wikipedia) that mainly occurs in places where a new post is made often (like a blog, or a news site like Digg or Slashdot) in which a user's only purpose is to get the "first post" in the comments. I have encountered this many times on Slashdot, but not recently, as most websites put filters in place that block these meaningless posts, or other uses bring them down by voting (like on Slashdot and Digg). I don't find it annoying, since I rarely see it, but it is funny when a user incorporates a "First Post!" type post that actually means something with regard to the story.

What is the image, you ask? It is the Perl camel. You can learn about Perl at the above link, or at the Wikipedia article. I highly recommend it to everyone, but if it seems like it is too much, then there is always BASIC. The image is a trademarked image, and I have to say this to use it. It should also be linked in, so if it isn't, here is the link that it is supposed to have: http://www.perl.com/.