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Everyone Does This

You’re on the shitter– there’s nothing to read. What do you do?

Pick up the shampoo or toothpaste, procede to read the back.

Prove me wrong.

Posted in Humor.

3 comments

By Brandon – November 28, 2009

This Damn Website

My website has gone through quite a few iterations since its original conception back in the Fall of 2005. It was originally a C++ app I wrote from the ground up, listening on an open socket on my computer for people trying to connect via their browsers. It was a mess, but a really badass project and I learned a ton about network programming. If you have no idea what that means, this method for making a website is like cooking in which you have to build your own house, kitchen, and oven before you can even start making dinner.

I then eventually made a PHP and MySQL site, but again from scratch. I taught myself PHP and learned a lot about databases, but the site was basic, inflexible, and arduous to work on and update. The cooking metaphor? Making a cake from complete scratch, and doing a half-assed icing job. The most rewarding part was knowing you baked it yourself with your own recipe. It looks bad, but tastes pretty good. In the end your kitchen is a mess though, and you spent a lot of time working on it.

Finally, I gave up and installed Wordpress, an extremely popular CMS. I transferred over the majority of my blogs, but have yet to update it since. Extended metaphor aficionados could see this as making a boxed cake, and hiring a professional to do the icing job.

So I haven’t posted a blog in over a year, and I’m hoping to get back into it. Since I’ve installed Wordpress and seen how extremely flexible and easy to use it is, I have helped a few different friends set up their own websites, all powered by Wordpress. I don’t regret rolling my own site for so long, but the time has come to abandon the persuit for web development knowledge and jump on the all-in-one CMS bandwagon.

Hopefully soon, my blog will again but graced by the elegant unintelligible babble of my own obfuscated reflections on life. Something I’m sure that you, dear reader, are shitting yourself over in anticipation.

Posted in Computers and Programming.

1 comment

By Brandon – November 25, 2009

Why Linux Sucks

A few weeks ago, I thought I’d give Linux a legitimate try. Having spent a huge amount of time working with Linux machines both on campus and remotely, I felt I was pretty comfortable with the environment and the operating system overall. I was attracted to the power of the command line, the extraordinary modular design, the flexibility, the amazing file system design, and of course, the overall nerd factor. I started out with Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron), but eventually switched over to OpenSUSE 11.0.

So I setup a new partition on my system drive… and away I went.

The Fonts Look Like Ass

The very first thing I noticed when my computer booted to the Linux Gnome desktop is that the fonts look like booboo. At first I wasn’t very concerned, because it wasn’t until Vista that TrueType (a subpixel font rendering engine from Microsoft) was enabled by default. But even after messing with the settings and trying Linux’s version of subpixel font rendering, the results were still less that pleasing. Horrible gamma correction, shitty hinting options… etc.

The most common advice when trying to find a solution was to download Microsoft’s fonts (especially the new Vista fonts). Kind of ironic, huh? Even then, the fonts still looked like vomit to me. And what was worse, the overall font sizes had to be larger to remain clear, when on Windows I could lower the size and still maintain legibility. Everything in Gnome had to be bigger… effectively reducing my screen real estate.

Free Software Blows

There are exceptions, of course. Firefox, for example… is a great browser. But there are NO true alternatives to the Microsoft Office Suite, the Adobe Creative Suite, or Microsoft Visual Studio.

The Gimp (the shitty GNU image editor/Photoshop replacement) is under featured, buggy, and slower than Photoshop. I tried to give this app a chance, but it’s pretty horrible. OpenOffice looks and feels like Office 95 or worse, and is less stable than Office 2007 SP1. It’s also slower to open, with a lot of rendering bugs from my existing documents.

And there is NOTHING comparable to the ease of use of Outlook 2007. I use it to seamlessly check my email from my UT account and my Gmail, as well as synchronize my calendar and contacts via Bluetooth with my phone, and keep up-to-date on my friends via their shared Outlook calendars. Nothing on Linux can do that… without a horribly complex and counter-intuitive process that half-assedly works half the time (25% efficiency?).

None of the billions of music apps that are out there even remotely compare to the stability, speed, and aesthetic appeal of Winamp or iTunes either… so hopefully you don’t like listening to music much.

Of course, there was nothing even remotely as powerful as the SONAR 8 + FL Studio 8 combo I have running under Vista. With Vista, my latencey for my outboard sound hardware was about 5.9ms, with Linux (and lmms), it was around 320ms.

And I don’t care what everyone else says, VIm is not a replacement for Visual Studio.

You can’t really blame them… of course a nerd-run project that is in perpetual beta is not going to hold a candle to the products of multi-billion dollar companies like Microsft, Apple, and Adobe… but the Linux fans need to stop acting like this isn’t the case.

Anyway…

Technically, Linux is a great operating system. This website is actually run on a Linux server and is extremely reliable… but I think that’s as far as it goes. Sure it’s fun to geek around with compiling all your own shit and what not, but most people (even most geeks) will just want an OS that works out of the box.

Linux is NOT a consumer-level desktop OS for a power user, home audio enthusiast, productivity geek, digital artists, film producer, songwriter/music producer, or most average people.

Maybe for old granny, who doesn’t need to do anything but check her email and look up cross-stitching patterns on the internet, Linux is good because you don’t have to buy the Microsoft products. But… what if she needs to print something? Good luck getting the drivers to work.

Or maybe old granny knows how to download custom drivers and compile them herself?

Posted in Computers and Programming.

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By Brandon – October 16, 2008

MP3 Players Are Antisocial

So I’m sitting here at work (tutoring) and since no students are coming in… I’m getting some work done. Well, was getting some work done until I decided to update my shit blog for the first time in over a month.

Anyway, so I’m reading up on the MAX5154 12-bit DAC chip that I’m planning on using for one of my labs and I decided to bust out my 80 GB Zune. The Zune, by the way, is a seriously underrated MP3 player; I like the interface better than the latest iPod. Also, the display uses a highly reflective screen background with white text, so even in the horrible glare fest that is a Texas afternoon, the display is perfectly legible.

Back to tutoring– the tutors sit at a huge 30-person conference table and wait for students to walk in and sign up. Even with only 20 people or so, the room quickly gets VERY loud.

So I queue up T.I.’s latest album (Paper Trails) and unroll my headphones. As I bring the buds up to my ears, the buzz of activity… tutors talking to students, some guy drawing on the whiteboard, and a few frustrated freshmen all instantly disappear… replaced by the phat production of ‘Paper Trails’ slamming into my eardrums at 761 MPH. I ceased to be part of the room.

I no longer have any ability to effectively interact with anyone else… all I can do is look around the room and imagine what is going on. Like watching a TV show… everything is so one-way and inaccessible.

After a few hours of listening to music… it’s time to leave. Popping the buds out of my ear, I return to being part of the world. Turns out the token stoner EE guy has been bitching about not getting a sandwich he ordered an hour ago from Jimmy Johns… and of course those frustrated freshman are 10% closer to switching their major to liberal arts.

And so for two and a half hours, I wasn’t part of their world. Nobody talked to me… I couldn’t hear them anyway. Their stories and interactions served as nothing more than a slightly-out-of-focus backdrop to my life while I starred at this screen.

I wonder if I really missed anything?

Posted in Observations.

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By Brandon – October 7, 2008

A Lonely, Lonely Universe

Depressingly impossible thought of the week:

We assume that every human we see around us– our friends, family, kids, adults– experience the same sort of self awareness and sense of existence as we do. In other words, for all 6 billion people on the planet, there’s a soul in the driver’s seat for each and every one of them.

And most of us also assume belief in some supreme being or beings, so even when all else fails… you at least know there’s something out there bigger than you imposing some sort of reason on your existence.

But what if, in actuality, your awareness is the one and only in the entire universe? Meaning everyone else you see isn’t a complex and rich personality, but rather is an empty shell that just coincidentally happens to exhibit behaviors that would seem to suggest a soul.

This is not unlike saying the entire universe as you perceive it is nothing more than a lengthy dream, only more life-like than anything else you’ve experienced simply because you haven’t “woken up” yet. This isn’t entirely unimaginable because everyone has had a dream of waking up thinking a dream was over, only to wake up again– realizing you were having a dream within a dream.

Another way to state this idea is to say that your interaction with external events is isolated– everyone else exists not in the same sense that you do, but rather just in the sense that your perception of the universe imposes their existence.

Could this really be the way things are? Is the universe completely populated by soulless caricatures of intelligence, and you’re the only one single awareness that exists and will ever exist?

I really hope not, or it would be one lonely universe.

Posted in Philosophy.

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By Brandon – August 17, 2008

16-Bit Nostalgia

It was sometime during the youthful and care-free years of elementary school that my parents bought my sister and me a Sega Genesis. The system also came with Sonic 2… which might be one the best video games ever made… as I’m pretty sure that the hours of jumping and spinning a little blue hedgehog changed my life forever.

Even as much as hearing the shitty FM synth music on YouTube brings back memories… I also have played and beaten almost every Sonic game on the Genesis. When the time of the old 16-bit system came and went, I even downloaded an emulator on my PC and replayed most of the games (or at least my favorite parts). More recently, I played them on my phone with a Smartphone-based Genesis emulator. Interesting how it took dedicated hardware back in elementary school to do now what can be done in software real-time on my phone…

Anyway… I regressed into my childish pastimes of playing console video games and recently purchased a Nintendo DS. First of all… I was amazed at how advanced 7th generation handheld systems are; the DS can pump out 3D graphics comparable to the Nintendo 64 and comes with onboard Wi-Fi… both for ad-hoc gaming with a friend close by or over the Internet to play with people all over the world. Badass.

One of the games I bought was Sonic Adventure Rush… one of the most recent additions to the Sonic franchise. I had high hopes and high expectations; the format was similar to the Genesis games… run as fast-as-hell to the right of the screen, pickup rings, and don’t die.

I was happy to see that the new additions Sonic had seen since my first exposure to the series 10 years ago didn’t take away from the game and render it an unfamiliar generic platform game– it was the exact opposite actually. The new game on DS is faster and crazier than its little brother on Genesis… but it retains the same spirit.

There’s enough in common with the old game to make me feel like I’m back in the prepubescent and innocent years of elementary school… and that’s probably why I love playing it. It provides a small amount of escapism from the quickly-approaching “real life” that is less than a year away. I’m just glad that at 21 years old, jumping off of springs and collecting golden rings still has the ability to entertain me for a while.

Now if you will excuse me… I’m going to go play some Sonic on my DS.

Posted in Nerdy Stuff.

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By Brandon – August 3, 2008

Perspective

It seems, at times, that I might have an extraordinarily limited perspective of the universe. Considering for a moment the magnitude of shit that exists out there that we will never experience (and could never even imagine experiencing), it seems to dwarf the infinitesimal sliver of existence for which I am an observer.

For example, imagine a perspective where a lifetime is measured not in tens of years, but in billions of years, and traversing across galaxies is as easy as going from city to city for us. You could see the life cycles of stars, the formation of new planets, life, evolution… and truly appreciate the vastness of the universe. We, on the other hand, exist for such a vanishingly small amount of time on such a small little chunk of the universe.

It’s also limiting that we are experiencing time in a one-dimensional, collapsed manner. The past is continually fleeing from us and the future is nebulous… but that could easily just be our perception.

It’s like we’re stuck on a train, with only a rear window, traveling at a constant speed forever. We can always look back and see from where we came, but we have no idea how the track turns up ahead, or even if it will be running for much longer. How ignorant must we look to an observer who can see the track in its entirety? To something not bound by our limited perception of time, its idea of the universe would be quite different than ours.

But maybe it’s good that we suffer this “limited perspective” of ours. When you’re only around for less than a century, the only appreciable wonder we can experience in the universe is each other. The Earth, the stars, space, and time are not going to give a damn about what you or I do with the rest of our lives, but the people around us will.

Friends will come and go, love, hate, death… all complex and powerful forces that we, in our limited perspective, can nearly get a hold of and experience them as they change and evolve throughout our lives. Could somebody who can skip around galaxies on a whim really appreciate something as delicate and fragile as love?

So maybe we don’t have that limited of a perspective after all? Maybe the most impressive things to witness in the universe are the relationships and emotions we experience with others happening right here on this frail little blue marble spinning around one lonely little star…

Posted in Philosophy, Space, Time.

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By Brandon – July 23, 2008

Be Good At What You Do

I’m of the opinion that regardless of your job, you should at least put forth some modicum of effort in fulfilling your duties. Every job is important… from being a janitor to a CEO of a Fortune 500 company; obviously certain jobs are more glamorous and desirable… but that’s beside the point.

The thing is, there’s no excuse for doing your job poorly… but especially if you have an easy-ass job. For instance:

The movie ticket-taker person: An exhaustively simple job, free from any real stress save standing around for hours at a time. Take the tickets, tear the stub, and say “left” or “right” to direct the movie-going patrons to their respective theaters. Can’t really mess that up right? Wrong. The other day, I went to go see Wanted with Anita… and our ticket taker SUCKED. Not only did he not greet us (kindly or otherwise), he struggled to tear the tickets (slowly)… and then left it to our own deductive abilities to determine which side of the theater to go to. It was rough.

Another popular variant is the fast-food cashier that not only rings your order up incorrectly, but then seems upset when they have to get the manager’s authorization to rectify their mistake. The best is when you ask for extra ranch sauce and they act like it’s the most arduous task ever… sauntering over two feet to the “sauce rack” (or whatever) and laboriously selecting the requested flavor packets before disdainfully slamming them down on your tray.

“Will that be all?” they ask. Yes. That is all. THANKS.

Posted in Humor, Observations.

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By Brandon – July 4, 2008

Reflections on a Dying Jeep

Recently I was gifted a new car (1997 Nissan Pathfinder) by my step-mom’s family to replace my ever-faithful 1996 Jeep Cherokee Sport. The Jeep was my first car and a perfect first car at that; it was nice enough to stay running (most of the time) and shitty enough not to have to constantly worry about every little bump and scrape (and quicksand trap…).

It also had 4-wheel-drive (courtesy of the rock-solid NP231 transfer case) and a beefy straight-6 motor… which lent itself not only to really bad gas mileage and frequent fill-ups, but also to a respectable amount of torque and offroading abilities. I also could burn anybody off the starting line… until about the 35-40 MPH mark. And when shifting into the all-balls, crawl-licious 2.72:1 low range, the entire Jeep would lurch from the drive shafts slamming into gear and rob the planet of just a little bit of angular momentum… reminding me of what a powerful force I wielded. And who could forget nerdgasmic addition of a manual shifting circuit I built by hacking the shift-control computer.

Needless to say… I had a badass time with that piece. From offroading in remote forests in Rockwall and Rowlett, to throwing mud around and doing pointless donuts in random fields… to just driving all over the damn place in it… I loved it.

A Mess

Unfortunately, I think the end of it’s glory days is in site. There’s really no reason to have two cars in college, especially when the Pathfinder is in MUCH better condition than the Jeep: The Jeep’s brakes are all but dead, there’s a loud leak from a crack in the exhaust manifold, the rear differential leaks sometimes, the AC compressor seizes when the car isn’t moving, the tint is molting off the windows, and there are tons of bumps, scratches, and broken shit on both the inside and out. There’s even a gaping wound with wires and connectors grotesquely visible where a stereo ought to be.

I never realized what a piece of junk it was until I drove it for the first time in about a month the other day. The first thing I noticed was that it felt so much more powerful than the Pathfinder… a small price to pay for better gas mileage I suppose. It also felt like it was about to fall apart… it was so loud, creaking, rattling, and old feeling. I loved it though… and felt a sense of betrayal when I reached for the shifter and missed… having become accustomed to where everything was in the Pathfinder.

It felt like the last time I would ever drive it…

I took the long route around town to where I was going, and peeled out whenever I had a chance. Using the manual shifter, I would floor it at green lights and let the familiar sensation of acceleration and a couple hundred horses wash over me. Do I really have to sell it?

I’ve always had a strong attachment to this jeep… maybe just because it was my first car and all. There’s just a lot of good memories with that beast, and it will hard to let go. Of course, the cool $K-spot or so will be nice though.

I feel like I’ll act like the concerned dog breeder selling puppies: ensuring that the new owner will love and cherish it just as I did. I don’t want this to be some old granny’s shuttle to happy-hour bingo and senior-citizen movie nights; I want it to go to somebody that will let the true spirit of the Jeep out where it belongs… in the dirt, in the mud… and in the wild.

So I guess this is goodbye for you and me, Jeep… we had a good run together. I hope that where you’re going, you can spend your last years doing what you love to do best; I only hope your new owner can give you things you could only dream of when you were with me. Maybe that lift kit we would always talk about… the after-market exhaust… a new windshield even?

Don’t think the Pathfinder is replacing you– no car could do that… especially a Nissan. There will always be a bright-blue Cherokee-sized hole in my heart that no other vehicle could fill. It’s been great.

So drive on Jeep… and don’t look back.

Posted in Humor.

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By Brandon – June 16, 2008

Corporate Culture

Today marked the beginning of my return to the closest thing I have to a real adult life: a corporate job (internship) at Dell. Among the constant tom-foolery and jack-assery of college life, there’s really not much during they day that resembles what life will really be like after I graduate and become a big ‘ol grown-up… besides paying bills I guess.

But this summer and last, I had a chance to see what life might be like working a typical 40-hour-a-week corporate job for a big company. It’s all there: the daily commute in shit traffic, the infamous cube farms, the meetings, and all the bureaucracy and processes you would expect to see in a Fortune 20 company with over 90,000 employees worldwide.

Corporate culture is funny to me, though. Everyone seems to have this personality they put on when interacting at the office– almost like this faux-casual way of talking, but in such a way as to not offend anyone or say something too non-PC.

There’s also the semi-awkward closeness you can develop with people you work with on a daily basis. You interact with these people every day… maybe even go out to eat lunch with them and joke around some… but in reality… you aren’t even remotely close to them. Though you might spend more time with them during the week than some friends, you don’t have even the slightest idea as to what type of music they like, what their hobbies are… their dreams, hopes, fears.

From this sort of distance that you can put yourself from your co-workers coupled with the need to work well together to be an effective team, a very weird relationship is formed. Your team is basically a bastardized family unit; everyone has his own role, status, and importance while their “real” lives back home are immaterial.

At the office, everyone is expected to do their job without outside factors effect them. Regardless of background, emotional situations, family, race, gender… anything… the second you swipe your badge and step into the building you become An Employee, with all the accrued emotional and personal baggage you carry veiled behind the business-casual attire and 5′ 10″ cubical walls.

This isn’t to say you can’t have real relationship with people at work, or that you can’t ever get to know people and develop good friends at the office… it’s more of just a reflection of the general type of interactions I’ve noticed. If you never got to know anybody on a personal level… I’m sure work would seem like an emotionless hell-hole.

And who would want to work at a place like that?

Posted in Observations, Work.

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By Brandon – May 27, 2008