News on All that Jive

This week was busy with ‘go skate day’ and school.

Barcamp was great. Check outNixternal’s blog for some coverage.

Today I went to a festival called ‘Taking It To The Streets’. It was a celebration of the IMAS fondation’s 10 year anniversary, it was a giant skate jam with 200+ people coming through a small two obstacle and it was a hip hop festival.

When I rolled up to the skate session, the first thing I noticed was Jackson Hennessy standing in the street, looking casual as can be. If you’re not familiar with the name, Jackson Hennesy is the best skateboarder in Chicago, and my personal favorite. For those who do know what I’m talking about, his part in the Uprise video ‘Chicago’s finest’ is simply amazing.

Later on that day there was a ‘best trick contest’. Basically you had a set amount of time to land the craziest maneuver possible. I came home with a tee shirt as prize for winning second place for a frontside ollie on the quarterpipe. Don’t listen to what Freddy says about there being only 3 people in the contest however. He’s just hateful because he didn’t land it.

Lastly we watched Lupe Fiasco drop his brand of hip-hop on the crowd. I mean this in the literal sense because he fell offstage and hit his head on the ground. He did get up and finish his set.

All around a great weekend.

-Eddie

Help

I’ve run into alot of problems with websurfing recently. Basically I can’t handle any amount of date being transferred into my computer. Anything with more content than Google’s homepage takes a super long time to load. This is an issue when I try to read my online philosophy homework and there are 30 threads with 5 posts apiece, on average a day. I’m trying to establish where the error is. My initial inclination is the ccc.blackboard.com server is slow in handling query or date input. I notice that it tends to hang on a simple page load. I’ve tried running with and without frames, with and without java, different OS types, different browsers and nothing has helped. Obviously TCP/IP is a protocol standard, so none of these should make such vast a difference.  My next attempt is to try it from a different land line, which would mean locking it down from the modem straight, no router or possibly trying to do my work at my cousin’s house. Here’s a question though.

cross-Os platform.

Free as in beer.

bash/shellscript/application that does the following:
I need to see where exactly the server is breaking down with my computer, the data packets being sent (ideally via ‘ping’), the latency of my requests and any other fun stuff that might be useful. Basically I need to know if the problem is clientside or ISP based. Or the server itself. Obviously because of security reasons, I am essentially locked out of the server, but I’m hoping someone out in Gnu/internet-land can help me out with these problems, so I can sleep at night for once.

-Eddie

ps. BarCampChicago was great. Thanks to the sponsors and everyone who came out.

pps. Good luck to Jim Cambell on his application for Ubuntu ’substantial contributions’ membership.

Strange Thoughts

Martin Luther King Jr. (yes, the ‘I have a dream’ MLK) was in my dream and talking to me about hip-hop, among other things.

Nixternal has a confusing image on his blog.

I don’t have shoes on but I will be at the Chiglug meeting today.

-Eddie

Wiki Project Idea

I have an idea for my skateboarding team where we would be able to go onto a wiki page, and edit our the page to reflect out plans to go skateboarding.

Where on the internet would I be able to go to accomplish this, in terms of editing the page and hosting?

The page should be a simple text box so someone can change the page to read “mike f. wants to skate thursday.’ or ‘tom p. is skating wilson skatepark at 8pm tonight (the 7th).’

-Eddie

Standard Ettiquette

If you step on someone’s shoes, or ‘kicks’, said victim has the right to engage you in a physical confrontation.

“Digits”

I saw this interesting tube on the Interblags of combining numbers and ideas.

-Eddie

Music/GPL

I saw this article about Q101, a local “radio rock” station somewhere. I say radio rock, because that is the only general styles of rock which they play, and exclude many other good styles, not because I got hit in the head and forgot how to use syntax. NOTE: This article is somewhat slanted and slanderous, which seems to distract from the overall message.

In short,

Itunes plus

Plus as in… freedom, or price? What is being added to make it a ‘plus?’ Don’t get me wrong, I think that consumers should support freedom from DRM by power of cash.  But why are we going out of or way to pay for freedom, to sidestep DRM. Why is that not the default?

-Eddie