The Flow of Consciousness

I didn’t blog as much as I would have liked to this year, mostly because of my crazy busyness.

My article on how to install Gears on 64-bit Linux continues to see quite a bit of traffic. I even host a copy of Gears, even though it’s likely out of date. Also in the Linux vein, my articles on how to buy DRM-free music online with Amazon MP3 on Linux and Android were moderately popular. I wrote an article on how to add CACert root certificates to Chromium on Linux and it sees more traffic than most of my other posts combined.

I wasn’t as active in the open source community as I would have liked, but I did make some contributions to Gwibber, Astrid, Celtx, and Lernid. I mentioned the first three in my Launchpad activity update. The latter is a newer development by Jono Bacon. I contributed the entire Esperanto translation less than two days after it was available on Launchpad. I have no way of verifying it, but I think that the Esperanto translation was the first complete non-English variant translation available.

I recently wrote two brief articles on how to automate some tasks on Facebook. One was how to rapidly expunge friend suggestions, and the other was how to select all friends in a friend select dialog.

I met Tom Dickson of Will It Blend? fame at CES last year. He was really cool and friendly.

I also wrote a few articles on politics, my favorite being A Comment on Socialism Defined, a comment left on a friend’s blog, Strike the Root!. I’ll not go into how much I think Obama and his friends have screwed up the country already (it’s not all been bad—he has done some good things). That’s something for another article.

A new hobby this year for me has been stock trading. I’d saved up some money and decided to use some skills I learned in middle school to make a buck or two on the stock market. Ironically, not 12 hours after I blogged about my flagship stock being up near 200%, that stock, SPNG, dropped 27.66% in one day, costing me $23,000 of value on a $10,000 investment in 65 minutes. It recovered, and I still made out with a profit, but I learned a very, very valuable set of lessons. I still kick myself occasionally because of this and probably will for a long time. My goal of getting into stocks was to generate enough money that I could pay off my student loans really quickly. I could have paid off more than 2/3 and I didn’t cash out when I should have.

I did meet many, many new people in the stock world, especially Stockguy22 and the Bulls on Wall Street crew. I said goodbye to StockTwits after I was temporarily banned for cheering on Vonage (VG) when it was less than 50 cents, riding it to 80 cents, and cashing out. They called it a worthless, crappy penny stock. A few weeks later, it spiked to ~2.20 and has been above a dollar since. HA!

I got some neat advice from friends while considering the purchase of a MacBook Pro (which I got and love) and the acquisition of a PS3 (which I did get).

The biggest changes in my life were in my location and work. I got a new job in March at Vivísimo, a search platform maker in Pittsburgh–I even wrote a post on the corporate blog! I moved in with some friends in May, but realizing we were a little cramped, I moved into a new apartment in July (I didn’t write about that!).

I wrote more than 28 articles for Bob Buskirk‘s ThinkComputers. My favorites were the Masscool MP-1371RS Media Player and QNAP TS-809 Pro network attached storage device. I use the former alongside my PS3 for video formats my PS3 can’t stream from the latter. The NAS has become the central storage hub for all of my computers, replacing the QNAP TS-109 Pro I reviewed two years ago.

BIOS LEVEL was fairly inactive this year, largely because of a major server outage from May to August. I did write an article on the Orbita Mouse, which I still use to this day at work. I did record and post several videos from Ohio Linuxfest 2009, including Linux Journal editor Shawn Powers’s keynote, Jorge Castro‘s talk on building a community around an open source project, and more on licensing, making money from open source, democratized design, and talking to policymakers and legislators about open source. All Ohio Linuxfest videos with a write-up are available on BIOS LEVEL, or on BIOS LEVEL’s Blip.tv channel.

Jon Daniel and I spend most of November cranking out a beta version of Profyle.at, a personal profile directory service. We’re not entirely finished yet, but sign up for our Profyle.at beta and you’ll likely get in! We want to help people find you on the Internet so your friends and family can follow you on whatever sites and networks you like the most. We pitched for funding and didn’t get it, but were cordially invited to present again during the next round in a month.

Brigette and I are still together, and going strong. We’ve spent most of her winter break together, driving throughout western PA to be with friends and family, too. She’s been working on her web site for her beagle and vizsla show dogs, Glade Mill Sporting & Hound. She’s come a long way, from using a completely WYSIWYG editor to redoing it with a mix of code and WYSIWYG with Adobe Dreamweaver. I’m eager to see what she’s planning for it.

I’m blogging from BlogHaus at the Bellagio. I met and spoke briefly with Robert Scoble, the (in)famous blogger who was recently kicked off of Facebook for scraping information with a script (Google it if you’re that interested). He and I have very, very opposing political views (he’s a Clinton fan apparently, given his reaction to the news that Clinton won New Hampshire’s primary election [I could be wrong, though], and I’m a Ron Paul fan). We did agree that Ron Paul does have a long shot now—Iowa and New Hampshire have spoken—but have differing views otherwise.

One person, Xavier of Notebooks.com, explained to me why the gold standard doesn’t work. I’m still trying to digest it, though.

In a nutshell, he explained that the reason the gold standard (or any other commodity) doesn’t work in our current economy is that its doesn’t take into account how we create wealth. The creation of wealth deals with assigning value to new creations. For example, if I create a web site and someone is willing to pay me $10M for it, then, essentially, I’ve created $10M worth of wealth—a lot. In a gold standard economy, or any other commodity, I’d need a lot of gold or that commodity. Even if there was, multiply this by a couple hundred web sites, or perhaps houses on beachfront property, and there’s not enough gold to match the value. If the value were instead matched to the available gold, then its value would be much, much less and everything would have a much, much lesser value. On the gold standard, the dollar would buy a lot more, but there would have to be a lot more smaller denominations in order to make up for the increased value of the dollar.

Essentially, the current monetary system is based on debt. If someone wants to mortagage a $1M house, the bank, the mortgage originator, and all other parties have to agree that that house is worth $1M, even if it was built for $1. If the bank gives the mortgage, it’s essentially created $999,999.

I’m finding it hard to digest, but I don’t have the base of knowledge to be able to dispute nor naivety to blindly accept. I need to investigate this more so I can better understand why Ron Paul is a proponent of it. I can understand if the reason for the gold standard is because the current way of doing things has some unconstitutional basis, but I need to understand why he wants it this way.

I’m posting using my XO from the hall out side of where Showstoppers and the PC Race for Charity are going to shortly occur.

CES has been a blast thus far. There’s so much cool technology here! My feet hurt like the devil (WPAYL people: worse than seminar!) and my back is a little maligned, but I’m in cheery spirits.

I haven’t had time to check my mail and such until now, as every spare moment I’ve had has been spent typing things for ThinkComputers.

Vegas is a beautiful city, too. The nearest similar experience of which I can think is Clifton Hills, ON just across the Canadian border from Buffalo (where Niagara Falls is).

Here are two pics I took with the XO’s camera.

Bioshock is the reason I’ve not written in a while. Orange Box isn’t helping, either.

Bioshock is one of the more rivoting (misspelling intentional, har har har) games I’ve played lately. I enjoy single player games with a good story line and atmosphere, and Bioshock hits both.

What else have I been up to?

I finished my first quarter as an adjunct instructor at ITT Tech. It doesn’t look like I’m going to have a class this quarter because of scheduling conflicts, but, AFAIK, I’m on the substitute list.

I have one night left of an Advanced Visual Basic class at RMU. Enough said.

Pittco announced Iron Storm 8, the LAN party group’s ninth event. Sean is heading up the planning for the event and doing a very, very good job. Cat herding is an art.

CES is a little more than a month away. I’ll be covering it for ThinkComputers. I’m in the process of reviewing a new cooler for ThinkComputers, too. It dropped my GPU temperatures by more than 12° C!

I’m going to a rapid application development party this weekend, at which we’re going to attempt to add a payment system to Autonomous LAN Party, a LAN party management system. Unfortunately, the newer versions of ALP at Q Licensed, a license which is incompatible with the GPL. Under the Q License, changes to the software can only be distributed as patches. Users are free to redistributed the source of the software, but their changes must be separate from the source. If this license shenanigans turns out to be that much of a problem, we’re just going to write our own LAN party management software and GPL it.