:Crazy Or Genius

Today, I had three questions for my boss:

1) I am moving into a new place around the first of September. Do you mind if I come in late a day or two as a result?

Answer: That’s not a problem. Just remind me when so I know where you are.

2) Google Code Jam is coming up. I would like the chance to participate, but the qualification round is on Monday the 22nd………..

Before I was able to finish, the response was: That’s cool, you can take the day off.

I wasn’t even able to ask the third question before my boss asked his own. “I was wondering if you wanted to continue working part time for Satlantic”. I told him that weekdays would be a problem, in between my full time classes, and society work. This is apparently not a concern of his. He is content having me put in whatever time I have and see fit. I think this is quite awesome, and told him that as soon as he clears the financial details with the budget, get back to me and we can work out details.

Question 3? It was supposed to be ‘What are the odds of me working part time for Satlantic in the Winter’.

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I have been a user of Audioscrobbler for almost a year now. For those not in the know, Audioscrobbler is a site which your audio player submits track info to, and keeps track of things such as weekly top artists, weekly top tracks, as well as all time totals. Not stopping there, it created a community, giving you listings of similar music correlated from other users with similar listening tastes, as well as top charts by country, etc, etc. It had a sister site, called last.fm, which allowed you to listen to your own private radio based on your regular listening patterns.

Today, when I went to look at my profile, I noticed that it has a sleek new look and is now integrated completely with last.fm. For all those who haven’t tried it, I seriously recommend that you try it out. There are plugins for a lot of popular media players.

Last.fm discover it again for the first time.

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Over the summer, I have been using 2 operating systems on a regular basis: Windows 2000, which has been running on my home machine for 3.5 years now, and Fedora, which is running on both my work machine and my campus machine. At the start of the summer they were both running Fedora Core 3. I had no problems with these set ups, as I didn’t need them to play media like movies or mp3s. These were development desktop systems and they worked well. The only big addition to my work machine was the inclusion of apt, because yum doesn’t want to work through the http proxy here for some reason (and yes, I did make sure to set it up so that it should).

Recently, I decided I wanted to upgrade from Core 3 to Core 4. I installed the main Fedora4.rpm (or whatever it is labeled as), pointed apt at Core 4 rpm repositories, and ran apt-get update followed by apt-get install. As the upgrade included a new version of gnome, and I wanted to test some modifications I made to my rc.local file, I decided to restart my machine as well. Logging in, I was faced with the X Windows manager, instead of Gnome. Seems apt-get dist-upgrade removed a bunch of the core gnome packages instead upgrading them. Performing apt-get remove gnome followed by apt-get install gnome however, didn’t make any difference. Finally, I discovered that gnome-session wasn’t installed. A quick apt-get install fixed that and everything was better.

On campus, I decided to upgrade using yum. This was worse than apt-get. It completely destroyed my system. And by completely, I mean COMPLETELY. I wasn’t even able to log in via the command line as it apparently decided to remove the default shells as well. Thankfully, There was very little information I actually needed saving, and a LiveCD allowed me to retrieve that. The system itself, however, got a complete reinstall. Hmmmmm… since nothing is basically being run on it now, maybe I should try another linux distro…

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So…….. you are down at the Busker’s festival and come across a Much Music area where they have XBoxs and laptops sitting out in the open. What’s a computer geek to do? Obviously check out the laptops to see how much access they left.

Which is, of course, full access. So you browse around the hard drive, and right in the root directory is a folder entitled Partition_Magic_8.0_with_Serial. If only they had had internet access and I could have taken a screenshot. Way to go with that warez Much Music. I was amused, very amused.

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Halifax International Buskerfest is once again in motion. Quite a few interesting shows were performed this year. On the first day I went down, I basically ended up watching a series of finales, so I really don’t know how good the entire acts were. As always, the waterfront areas were PACKED with people.

Chaulkmaster Dave

Everyone in Halifax knows of Chaulkmaster Dave. Chances are you have seen his work in front of the Library on Spring Garden. As always, he was down at thje Buskerfest, showing off his talent. His renditions of Spiderman and Batman are simply amazing, as usual.

Matty Blade

I’m sorry, but I don’t want to wait around 10 minutes while you are saying you are going to swallow a sword, before you actually swallow the sword. Also, I am getting tired of finales where you get 4 guys to hold a pole while you climb it and perform your 30 second performance.

Scot Free

One of two escape artists that I managed to see, Scot Free managed a constant stream of jokes, puns, and wit while being wrapped in a roll of saran wrap for his grand finale. That’s right, not the traditional straight jacket escape, but sarran wrap. His non-traditional approach, and constant humor made him one of the better shows I managed to see.

According to his website, he is also an extreme skateboarder, and a chainsaw juggler……. while the chainsaw is on.

Stephen Elway

Another escape artist act, this time with the traditional straight jacket. The performer came across as eccentric, and since he escaped while ‘I’m Too Sexy’ was playing, and turned it into a dance routine, it was quite entertaining. The setup to the event, where he had two members of the audience tie him up, was filled with the busker wit I enjoy so much.

USA Breakdancers

This was the best performance of the day, in my opinion. Despite the fact that I couldn’t see some of the breakdancing, due to the sheer number of people watching, the moves that I did see were spectacular. At one point, they pulled some people from the crowd and got them to dance for the crowd. To my (and I am sure the crowd’s amusement), one of these people actually did some breakdancing himself. The look on the face of the leader was amusing. I swear, he was thinking “Off all the people in the crowd and at this festival, I had to pick the one white dude in Halifax that can actually breakdance to a degree”. The famous busker wit was also present here, with such lines as “We will accept any donations, so if you can pull out your wallet, take out 5 or 10 dollars……….. and give us the rest….” and “We are trying to pay for our educations, so if you could give us 5 or 10 dollers, that would help a lot. On the other hand, if you give us 20 or 50, we won’t have to go at all!”

Jeff Collins

Take Matty Blade, have him eat fire instead of swords, and you have Jeff Collins. I liked (or disliked) there shows the same amount in the same way. After 10 minutes, I was thinking “Eat the damn fire already!!!”

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