Dave Easterly’s Bravo Sierra Blog

Long time no blog

October 27, 2005 on 11:58 am | In General, Personal |
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Well, it’s been a few weeks since my last post and what a few weeks it has been! Probably the worst and saddest thing imaginable happened last week. A young boy whose family I’ve been very close to for a long time was killed in a tragic auto accident. He and a friend were both killed. The boy I knew was a kind, caring, and wonderful person. He was a friend to my son Robert, and I keep a picture of the two of them playing together on my desk at work. David Cherry was only 17 when he was taken away from us. He was cremated on Friday, Oct. 21, 2005 and his memorial service was on Saturday, Oct. 22, 2005 at the Boys and Girls Club in Bozeman, MT. There were literally hundreds of people in attendance at his memorial. I’ve put up a gallery of photos for his family at http://www.mvlinux.net/gallery/

In other news, I am still on the road to being smoke-free. I haven’t smoked a whole cigarette in over two weeks. I took a few puffs from half a cigarette the day of David’s memorial service, and it tasted like stale ass. I think I’m about to get this thing whipped.

For those who don’t know, we’re having a Halloween party on Oct. 29. We’ll be having LAN gaming, Linux installs and MythTV setups, and Karaoke using PyKaraoke. I’m supposed to be KJ’ing for the party. Unfortunately, I’ve completely lost my damned voice! I’ve got Laryngitis and Bronchitis at the same damned time. This happened once before when I was DJ’ing Blues Nights at a bar called “The Corner.” It totally sucks not being able to talk. I’m going to completely stop talking and carry around a notebook to communicate with people until I’m better. Info about the Linux Install / LAN / Karaoke party can be found online at http://www.magiclug.org/

PyKaraoke – A working MP3+G Karaoke Player for Linux!!

October 4, 2005 on 1:29 am | In All Things Geeky, General |
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PyKaraoke is the answer to about a a dozen prayers!! I’ve been looking for something to handle this for ages! It was a major PITA to get all the prerequisites installed and set up (some from RPM packages and some from source), but once I got it all compiled and/or RPMed into place it ran! I transferred a few mp3+g zip files over to the old MythBox, fired PyKaraoke up, pointed it towards the files, and then…. NOTHING.

I got an error that the .cdg file used some sort of “unknown compression” or something to that effect. It turns out, it had shite to do with the .cdg files inside the zip. It was that SDL_Mixer was compiled without MP3 support. Thanks, RedHat.

So the final steps to make it all work were to download the rpm for smpeg-devel and the source for SDL_Mixer and compile with MP3 support. And whaddayaknow? It freakin’ WORKED! Now all I gotta do is find the time to make a nice, neat package and roll it up as a MythTV plugin. As if that’ll ever happen. I haven’t got time to take care of important stuff, let alone dream geek-projects. But goddamnit, now if we wanna have a Microsoft-free karaoke party, it is ON! No Windoze, and no X-Boxes allowed, baby!

Welcome to the Divided States of America

October 3, 2005 on 1:01 pm | In General, Political Musings |
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I am actually embarassed to think that we live in such an intellectually backwards and ignorant country. Check this story from the UK. Some of the statistics they point out:

The American world view

64 per cent of people questioned for a recent poll said they were open to the idea of teaching creationism in addition to evolution in schools, while 38 per cent favoured replacing evolution with creationism.

40 per cent of Americans believe God will eventually intervene in human affairs and bring about an end to life on Earth, according to a survey carried out in 2002. Of those believers, almost half thought this would occur in their lifetime with a return of Jesus from heaven.

1 adult American in five believes that the Sun revolves around Earth, according to one study carried out last summer.

80 per cent of Americans surveyed by the CNN TV news network believe that their government is hiding evidence of the existence of space aliens.

70 per cent believe it likely that Saddam Hussein was involved personally in the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Hello?!? This is the twenty-freakin’-first century, and we have people who still believe in a geocentric universe?!? An incredible 38% of Americans polled thought we should just scrap evolution all together and teach just creationism?!?

I can’t imagine what it’s like to be that ignorant. It boggles the mind. Being that stupid and backwards should be painful. It should really, really hurt. Of course, people who would believe these sorts of things probably wouldn’t notice it since their brains have obviously atrophied ages ago.

Damn, it’s no wonder the rest of the world hates us. Here we are waging a war to “prevent the expansion of radical theocracy and spread freedom and democracy” and yet here at home we’re just backwards and intellectually primitive as the radical fundamentalists we’re battling. Not only are we stupid, we’re freakin’ hypocrites!

Noone should take me the wrong way… I LOVE America. I love living in a country where it’s possible to speak your mind (for now) and openly debate controversial issues. I love living in a country where I can choose to be an Atheist just like you can choose to be Agnostic or Catholic or Pentecostal or Wiccan or Muslim or whatever you want. But sometimes, once the debate is over and someone has clearly lost then we shouldn’t let them start the debate all over again a few years later. The creationists were wrong in the Dark Ages of the 6th and 7th centuries, and they’re _STILL_ wrong today. So why rehash a debate that has really been settled for the greater part of 100 years?

The only thing about Evolution that’s a theory is how some of the changes from one generation of species to others occured. The fundamental concepts of Evolution are cold, hard FACTS that have withstood over a century of serious scientific scrutiny and examination. Just like our planet is round (an oblate spheroid to be more specific) and revolves around the Sun. Just like diseases and caused by microorganisms like bacteria and virii, and not by demons and angry spirits. If they were asking schools to teach a geocentric, flat earth universe we wouldn’t be having all this controversy. We’d laugh the wackos out of town… The only problem is the wackos are the outspoken majority now.

You can laugh at me if you want, but I wouldn’t be surprised about the alien coverups, though. heheh