BS

New 2009 Music

2009-09-22T16:49:42Z

A lot of new music came out in 2009. You probably missed some of it, I certainly did. I wanted to mention some of it. Specifically I wanted to mention the new music because I noticed a pattern in virtually all of it. Every new album is “inspired”. Not every song, but at least a couple songs on each album relate to the changes the world is going through right now. You feel it, you see it, you sense it. You can’t quite put your finger on what it is, but you have your speculation. So do the musicians. Even the poppy ones are themed. Take the intro for the Black Eyed Peas new album “The E.N.D. (Energy Never Dies):”

“Welcome to the end. Tonight, there is nothing to fear. Everything around you is changing, nothing stays the same. This version of myself is not permenant. Tomorrow I will be different. The energy never dies. Energy cannot be destroyed. What we create. It always is and it always will be. This is the end and the beginning. Forever, infinite. Welcome.”

Below are the artists with new 2009 albums I’m listening to:
Alice in Chains
Anti-Flag
Avril Lavigne
Beardfish
Black Eyed Peas
Brand New
Chris Cornell
Cosmic Gate
Courtney Love
Depeche Mode
Diana Krall
Dolores O’Riordan
Eels
Eminem
Europe
Faith No More
Fastball
Filter
Free Spirit
Green Day
Hurt
Infected Mushroom
IQ
Jeff Buckly
KISS
KMFDM
Lily Allen
Mika
Miles Davis
Moby
Morrisey
Mr. Big
Muse
Neil Young
Our Lady Peace
Paramore
Placebo
Porcupine Tree
Prodigal Earth
Revolution Renissance
St. Vincent
Sufjan Stevens
The Answer
The Decemberists
The Fray
The Mars Volta
The Prodigy
White Rabbits
Yeah Yeah Yeah’s

I haven’t listened to all of this stuff yet, but I have bolded the ones that I have and they are all pretty good. Their perspectives on what to do about it are mixed, but I think they will all serve as muses for the rest of us and I highly recommend you find yourself some 2009 albums.

Maximus Corruptus

2009-09-08T20:05:53Z

As most of you know I decided to go to Prague for the summer. To do so I had to sell my projector, ps3 and my car. To sell the car I took it to the car wash to get it detailed and then I sold it 2 days later.

Now the day I went to get the car wash my registration was expired. Seriously it shouldn’t have mattered as I was selling it and leaving the country and was never going to drive it again. So I went and made a sales contract and got it notarized and everything. Doing this proved the car was sold and the girl who bought it registered it the same day.

Well, I faxed in all this proof from overseas and asked for a dismissal. They refused and gave me a continuance so that I could come to court right upon my return to the states. Court was mandated so if I didn’t go they would of suspended my license. Mind you this seemed a little silly to me as I didn’t own the car, but I figured I just needed to show up to get them to dismiss the charges.

So, I still don’t own a car. Took a bike to the light rail in Phoenix to defend my “corporation” from fines.

I stated my case and the officer didn’t argue with anything I said. The judge then said, “blah blah blah, I understand you BUT, blah blah blah still expired”. Then he told me it would be a $653 fine, due immediately and there would be interest and other fees added if I needed time to pay.

I almost shit my pants. I could buy a car, get an emissions test, registration and minimum insurance coverage for that price if I tried hard enough!!!!! I could register a different car every day of the week for half a month for less than $700. It has never been more apparent to me how corrupt the system is than now.

After court I sat in line to get a number, so that I could then be told to stand in a different line. That line then put me in a different line where I was given a piece of paper so they could “assess what payments I could make” and then when I got done filling that out I had to stand in 2 other lines again, followed by one more where i picked a number and waited to pay my minimum of $20 required today.

In the many lines I heard many people trying to explain to people behind a counter that they had taken the time out of their day to come down to the court to try to get an extension on a payment. Then I would hear the people behind the counter telling them that they had a maximum of 4 days or else a warrant would be put out on them. Beyond this terrible show of power there were other people yelling about extortion (which I fully agreed with) and all sorts of other ridiculousness caused by the system.

We need to stop putting up with this crap. This is the world we are part of. We need to make a stand. I am not advocating fighting and war as that is part of the terrible system we are already integrated into. I am instead trying to get each person out there with a bit of compassion to stop supporting these systems.

We allow a government to rule us that we all know is corrupt. We allow them to make laws that criminalize everybody except them. You are raised to believe that everything is black and white or good and bad but nothing is that clear. The justice system we have in place only serves itself as do the corporations and the government (which has actually stopped hiding it and has just outright admitted that they own the banks and the banks own them).

I will very soon be launching a draft of a new idea to help change this rotten system into something beautiful, but I cannot be alone in my cause. You do not need to wait for me to finish my plans, you can actively work towards your own goals. The world is not unsavable, you simply need to know what you want and tell everybody else around you that they should go for what they want as well. Stop banking at government controlled institutions. Stop voting on leaders from the 2 party illusion. Stop watching the news. Stop discriminating against people, as you were taught to look for differences in others. Instead look for similarities and find common ground. We are all connected, and this world has to support us all. It’s a long broken system and we now have the technology to build a new one that take everybody into account.

Do not protest against corruption and evil, for there is virtually no end to it. We are surrounded by fear and nasty things like what I have written above that will depress you. This is not to say you should not see the corruption. It is vitally important that you understand how rotten it is, for we put up with a lot of shit. Wake up and break the cycle. We all need to stop being enslaved by systems that do not benefit us.

There is no democrat/republican/communist/christian/muslim/jewish/black/white/asian/terrorist plot out to get you. We are taught to be separate, to feel alone. To think just for ourselves. Sure we all have our own beliefs, perspective and our own life purpose but there is no reason why we can’t all get along. We all live on the same world and when we improve the world around us even if only a little bit, it improves drastically for all of us. Life improves when we help each other and not when we screw each other.

Wake up!

Tell your friends, tell your family, your co-workers, your online community. Tell them that together we can all fix this. We can make a world grow instead of die. We can love each other instead of stabbing them in the back. We can be the change that we want in the world.

Last week in Prague

2009-08-23T12:50:52Z

Well, it’s been an interesting ride. I came here expecting one thing and I got something totally different. I have gone through all sorts of crazy times in Prague, but in the end it worked out quite well. I have made some good friends, had a wonderful place to stay, gotten free internet, clarified some things and even gotten support with a web project.

To those who have never been here, and I have spoken to many people who don’t have any idea where Prague even is, it is one of the most beautiful places I in the world. The buildings are very old, the architecture is amazing, the streets are all cobblestone, the transportation is so good that you don’t have any reason to own a vehicle and the people who live are generally happy and friendly.

I am rather sad to leave, but the only way to stay is to do so illegally. Perhaps if I had a good stable job it would be one thing, but I have things to take care of back in America anyways. For example, my first week back I need to go to court to defend an expired registration ticket on a vehicle I don’t own. :)

Ah yes, good times await. I will get back to America in time to watch the dollar collapse and the Amero be introduced. This truly is a historical period in linear time and I have realized that there is nothing to fear. For when I get back I will be quickly publishing a draft of my ideas for a new distribution system and a new form of online democracy. There are many more things on the horizon and though I have greatly enjoyed my time in Prague I now understand that I need to get to work.

Whoa, I have a lot of personal email to read…

2009-08-19T11:11:26Z

Ok so this is crazy. I have an email address @lyngaas.net. I host that the same place I host my email for @thesmartass.info. They are hosted on my server. Now I have been getting email everyday, and like most people it’s all spam. Though it has seemed odd that nobody has been sending me personal emails. Didn’t think too much about it since when I click send/receive in Outlook it shows that it checked the server, there are no new emails and then it just goes to next pop3 email and checks that and finds new email.

So then I find out that somebody did send me something specific and I didn’t get it. My spam filtering is totally off on that domain so that was really odd. I figured it bounced. Well I poked around my server and in my webmail I now have 52 new personal emails that have been collecting for over a month. Some of which I REALLY needed to see when they came. Doh. So now I get to read through all of these and send lots of “my bad” responses to people. Still not sure what outlook’s problem is. However as soon as I figure it out I will post it on this post as a solution in case it happens to other people. I mean email that’s not downloading is easy to fix if Outlook is giving you an error message, but when it’s not it’s rather tricky and I’m not about to change email clients just to fix it.

UPDATE: I got outlook to work correctly by deleting the account and re-adding it. However before doing that I combed through all the settings and could not find any one of them wrong.

Man Food, Without Meat

2009-08-16T15:24:46Z

Hmm, I don’t have any meat. I don’t have any sauce. I don’t have any money left. What on earth can I cook?

Thought Process ~~~ Okay let me see I have some macaroni shells, 1 pita bread, 1 potato, 2 chilies, oatmeal, 2 eggs and half of a beer I am currently drinking. Hmm, no sauce but I do have some cinnamon, sugar, cayenne, black pepper, salt, weird olive oil (meant for BBQ) and wait, I do have nearly 1 teaspoon of spaghetti sauce if I scape the jar.

Screw it, I am cooking all of it together. ~~~

Sliced up the potato into thin strips, decided to make my own “chips”. Cooked it in the weird olive oil I have, but decided that was boring so I added a bunch of cinnamon and my chili’s to the frying pan.

Boiled the macaroni shells, not enough sauce for them so I just took my tiny bit of spaghetti sauce and threw it in another frying pan with my eggs. Also I decided that since potato’s had cinnamon that eggs needed sugar. Macaroni was done boiling so I dumped out the water and let them soak in the remainder of my beer for flavor (I was always told that all there is too cooking well is to add more flavors).

Heated up my pita bread and was going to fill up 2 halves of it with stuff, but I had more than could fit in it so I only filled one half of the pita and saved other half for later.

It was still kind of dry so I quickly made just a little bit of oatmeal, with more cinnamon and sugar and since this was going to be my sauce I decided that It needed a kick so I added some cayenne powder to it.

Now, I knew that I might have just wasted all of my remaining food on total shit, so I just smiled and nodded, mixed it all together and braved my first bite…

To my utter surprise, it was FANTASTIC. Who could have imagined that something this bizarre could taste so good!? Only thing it needed was some kind of meat, but ya make due ya know..

So I gave it a name: Beeraroni Egg Pita VS. The Spicy Sweet Oatmeal Chips

Sure, it sounds more like an exhibition grudge match staring your breakfast, but I assure you the meal was worth every penny I paid for it.

And on the 7th day, the server shall rest.

2009-07-27T11:21:12Z

Don’t you hate it when you make an error in a conf file and then the server works fine until you go to sleep, only to wake up and see that your server has been down for hours on end?

Yeah, I hate that too.

Anyways, it picked a reasonable time to be down. Most visitors to site are in America and that would of made it go down between 11pm and 7am depending on where in America they were. On a Sunday night that’s not so bad of a loss.

I am however glad that I have a cron job setup to “check the health” of my server though. It was designed by my friend to help me survive getting slammed by traffic by kicking people off and restarting the web service so that new people could get to the site. The bonus is that it determines server load by checking to see if it can load my site via the web. So this morning I had 60 emails telling me that apache had restarted ever time that job had checked the site.

I highly recommend a script like that to everybody who runs their own server. Just cURL your own server with cron job and if unreachable restart apache.

Anyways. I have been adding lots of new features lately. Most of them for my site moderators/admins, so it might not have been noticed by everybody else. However site will soon be automated and have constant new stuff on it, as well as noticeable improvements in user experience and interaction with the site.

So everybody be sure to make an account on the site. You login once and you will stay logged in for the next year so it shouldn’t be too much of a nuisance. I am working to make Facebook, Google and Twitter accounts authenticate on my site as well. Technically they already do, but I haven’t gotten them to “link together” with existing accounts, which I feel is important. Still even though you don’t see it you can already connect to site with your Facebook and Google accounts.

RIP Poor Terabyte

2009-07-21T16:48:42Z

Soooo. Today went well. I was busy kicking ass and taking names when I kicked too hard and my external hard drive enclosure fell on the floor. Well it seems that hard drives don’t appreciate a little freestyle jumping and it refused to boot.

I went downstairs to one of my friends place and tested the drive on his desktop computer. The drive when turned on made lots of lovely noises, but just wouldn’t turn on so I am SOL.

What this means: I have lost 900 GB of data that was available to me while in Prague. I lost app installs, all my movies and my music. Now I am not a stupid so my music is still on my desktop computer which my friend has been taking care of while I am out of the country. The 400gb worth of movies, well they don’t matter. They are mostly lost, but the internet keeps getting faster and I will just be able to stream whatever movies I want from my own site if I need a movie.

Yet, this is still rather tragic as it was very nice to have a massive amount of music on shuffle while I worked. I can go back to listening to last.fm, however in order to do that I need to launch a date cracking software, that launches an IP hiding program and makes me look like I am in America… before I use last.fm since they started charging per month to use their service overseas due to licensing issues.

Don’t worry about me replacing the expensive drive, as it is still under warranty, though I can’t send it back until I am back in America so I might as well not start the RMA now.

So if anybody would like to pay their respects to my formerly amazing media storage device, there will be a moment of silence immediately proceeding your reading of this post. I would set a time, but then we would all have to synchronize ~~watches~~ cell phones and I just don’t see that working.

Napster 2.0 – The Pirate Bay

2009-07-17T22:45:38Z

So a company called GGF (Global Gaming Factory) has announced it’s intention to purchase the Pirate Bay recently. Well they have gone further and have decided to make it a pay site.

This will still be a torrent tracker, but to use it you need to pay and that money will go to pay off the copyright holders. Well I laughed at this, and thought of suprnova and how it once died for being the first real piracy tracker out there that everybody used. The guy who created it got sued and harassed and threatened at his home. Yet today it’s back up and running again as a good ol’ fuck you to the people who wanted to take him down.

How I see it:

Avast ye maties, you come to this island you will pay me a fee and
then i will charge you for that which you are getting free on other
trackers. BUT, as a consolation you will get to feel less catholic
guilt and have to go to confession less for your vile sinning ways.

When will old people (media companies) learn, distributing content to as many people
as possible makes more profit for the people who made the content.
piracy increases distribution and interest in products. because people
pirate windows 7, they blog about it and other people find their blogs
and become more interested in it and then they pirate it at home and
decide to buy it for their business.

In 1999 the offspring was the most pirated band on the internet. They also had the highest selling album. Back then I made compilation cd’s and gave them freely to my friends, who then became fans of musicians they had never heard of and ended up going to their concerts at local festivals.

New media distribution won’t conform to old systems, learn to work the new systems in new ways to increase your profitability. If you really want to work with the new type of media instead of fight against it then start making content that isn’t restricted by a bunch of DRM (digital rights management simply means that you buy content for one specific platform) and you give it to me on super fast servers faster and more convenient than I can pirate it then I will buy it. I buy games on the playstation store because it’s convenient and I am lazy.

Anyways, you can pirate the new RTM version of Windows 7 (build 7600) at btjunkie.org or isohunt.org, and help improve their sales to businesses and OEM manufacturers by creating more of a demand for it. They really have worked out a lot of the bugs that plagued it for me on earlier versions and I think business and OEM’s should pay for it.

Forgive and Forget

2009-07-05T12:52:20Z

I have lost too many friends and family members throughout my life. So my personal philosophy is to not hold a grudge for too long. I held one against my friend Chris for well over a year, but it was simply because of how I perceived a situation between him and my mother and one always has to take a side.

Another person I was very good friends with, Mark, still to this day holds a grudge against me. Something about me stealing his car, using his washing machine and moving to New Zealand. IDK, we were very good friends for years. But still, when you are a stubborn bastard you will hold a grudge until the less stubborn of people earnestly try to fix the situation.

Here’s my thought process. One holds a grudge and then every time you have an association that reminds you of that person you get upset. I do not like being upset or in a bad mood, so if I make up with those people my thoughts will be primarily good. State of mind is everything, and all we have in life is our perception of reality.

So yesterday I made up with my friends from Prague. The ones I flew here to visit in the first place. They think I wronged them, I think they wronged me. Whatever, it’s all the same now. I mean because of how things went down I know more people than I would have and I have a beautiful place to live in the best area of Prague (I will be uploading photos of my loft as soon as I finish writing this).

We will probably never be as close as we used to be, but we have both agreed to put the situation that went down behind us. It just seems to me that it is better to have friends than enemies.

I went to this Mexican bar (yes one exists in Prague, there was even one Mexican there playing La Bamba and other bad music) with them and a couple of their other friends yesterday evening. Since it was an American holiday they were giving 50% off on all American alcohol and food. So we all got cheeseburgers and some Jim Beam. I thought my bill would be quite high, even with the half off discount but it seems the staff had not been writing down what all we were eating and drinking properly.

So Martin took the liberty of telling them what each one of us drank. Hmm, coulda sworn I drank two or three times that amount. But no matter, perhaps that was a different night :) We left for the night and I jumped on the tram that went back towards my place. Didn’t actually have a pass, and if you get caught without a pass it’s 1000 CZK fine, but that made it a more interesting ride home.

Anyways, I honestly don’t want to drink as much as I have been doing since I have been here. However every person I meet here drinks, and so that’s what you do when you hang out with them. I understand that though since the beer is cheaper than the water. People move here to drink cheap beer and wine.

Speaking of alcoholics, I was woken up this morning by Jason calling me. He was mumbling something in his thick Irish accent that I couldn’t make out. Eventually he asked what time it was and I told him and he said to go back to bed. I did, but got up in another hour or so and walked over to his restaurant which shouldn’t have been open but it was. I walked in and there was broken glass all over the floor.

He made me some coffee, and I went to buy him some cigarettes. He insisted that his staff would clean the place up, that is what they are there for. His poor employees ;). It seems that his wife is out of the country for a week or so, which just gives him more of an excuse to get drunk. He himself could not remember what happened. So I will keep Jason as an example of what not to strive to be. He has a successful restaurant, and is actually a pretty nice guy, when you get his sense of humor…. But drinking that much all the time would cause me way more problems than it’s worth. Besides, I am not Irish enough to keep up on a consistent basis.

“When is a mistake not a mistake? When you have learned something from it”
Ann Uplands

“Whatever is begun in anger, ends in shame”
Benjamin Franklin

“Change is the Process of Life Itself”
Neale Donald Walsch

Locked in Starbucks

2009-07-03T13:04:46Z

Had I not come home with maybe 1500 CZK more than I left with the other night I decided that I really needed a phone.

Nobody has been able to get my iPhone 3G to work with a local pre-paid sim. It just site there and won’t activate, and iTunes says it’s not able to. Still, it’s unlocked and at home I use it with T-Mobile so one would assume T-Mobile would work here as well.

Well one would be wrong. So today I spent 1499 CZK to purchase another phone and 400 CZK worth of pre-paid credit. Now I can actually give people my phone number, which is much easier than telling people to email me or call a US phone number. The number is +420 736 779 188, I give that out freely since incoming calls are free in virtually all countries except America so feel free to call. Though I still do not expect many calls since you would have to pay international fees to reach me, though I am awake during Arizona time of 1am-1pm (just add 2 hours for central time) so I figure it would probably be somebody drunk dialing me.

Also I made a direct, easy to remember link for virtually all my pictures since I had somebody who’s not on Facebook ask me to see the pictures of my trip.

http://tinyurl.com/jamesphotos

I got locked into Starbucks last night. I went in 20 minutes before they closed and they didn’t notice me going into the basement so when I left at 10pm I had to yell into the back to get somebody who was closing to notice me and then unlock the door just to let me out.

I suppose it would have been a fun survival story, had they shut off the lights and left me here over night. Though I would probably end up stealing food/coffee and then some camera would get me thrown into a nice foreign jail.

Opened registration on my site. I actually broke it when I first made it and everybody’s had the same password (that they didn’t know). Have since fixed it, so register an account on the main page of thesmartass.info. Right now it doesn’t do much, but it will become needed in the near future to use most of the site.

Anyways, have a kick ass day.