One day I decided to define myself. At that moment I made a piece of artwork. On it I put some fractals and a string of text. The text simply said “I am that I am, for I am what I perceive myself to be. I am truth for I believe it. I am love, for I conceive it.

This was just a definition of what I was to myself at that exact moment. I can not define you. I can label you and put you into boxes, to help me better understand who you are. But ultimately that will never give me a truly clear picture of who you are.

Today a friend of mine was very upset, they stated that we didn’t see them for who they were. This is of course true, since I can not see from their perspective. I have chosen to define everything in life differently than they do. My words are linked to associations and pictures that have nothing to do with what their associations show them. So how could I possibly see them for who they want me to see?

From my current perspective most things I see around me are defined by the separation. If you were to look at a map, you could point to the Atlantic Ocean. When you talk about it you refer to it as one thing. However the only thing that separates the Atlantic Ocean from the Pacific Ocean is perceived distance. You could choose to see it as one ocean, two oceans, or zillions of waves and particles. All of them are valid in this reality.

If I were to see from the slice of perspective that my friend has then everything they ever said and believed is true. His knowledge of life, his understanding of science and philosophy, simply everything.

Thing is, I cannot see from that perspective. Nobody but my friend can. Perhaps if I were to move into a higher dimension, where I could reflect on their experiences then I could understand it better. However unless I truly became my friend I would never fully understand him.

How I see it, there is no reason to be upset by what other people think and understand because they are not you.

Life is a repeating pattern of the same thing over and over, seen from a different point of view. That is part of what makes it so beautiful. Ask somebody today what the most beautiful thing they have ever seen is. Each person who takes the time to come up with an answer will have a totally unique story. A description of something that you would have never seen. Sure, you can understand some of what makes it beautiful to them, but had you seen the exact same thing as them at the exact moment you would have seen it totally different.

Everybody gets butt hurt sometimes. We take something personally that we shouldn’t. Perhaps it’s from a relative, a friend, or even a television commercial. We start to expect certain things. We EXPECT that somebody will respect us, or will validate us in our ideas. We expect a little common courtesy and some empathy. Then our expectations get broken. Since even if the other person thinks they are being respectful and courteous their idea of what that is will still be different than yours. Nobody will always give you exactly want you want all the time, no matter how much they love you.

So why let somebody define you? Why even define yourself? Each thing you define by limits you. It is true that there are many things that are convenient to have structure and labels, but as a human being you are beyond labels. You are beyond all things I can ever imagine. You are who you are, and you will always be. Yet day to day who you are will change. Each day you will have a little different view on even the same things.

This too is just a limited perspective. A piece of writing can never encompass how people will interpret the words. It is simply a place to start. A place to begin to create your own truth, and to start letting go of the labels you put on yourself. When you really understand who you are, nobody will ever be able to hurt you.

Unless of course you want them to….

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.

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. 

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.

I seemed to have a lot of technical ranting in here so I decided to break the post up by themes.  If you aren’t into the technical ranting or start to lose interest just skip to a different colored text. 

<ultimatepc>
Even before I got back from New Zealand I had started to purchase the pieces to build my ultimate home computer.  Believe it or not I am not a gamer, but I still needed to build a giant PC with the newest shiznit because I run so many things at once on my system.
</ultimatepc>

<boasting>
Right after I got back I went and ordered all the missing pieces for my computer.  Spending more money than I had because to me a computer IS my lifeblood.  I purchased 2 monitors (one 24″ and one 22″ that was also a HDTV) an insanely large computer case with water cooling. 

The rest of the computer was a QX9650 (quad core, extreme processor 3.0ghz per core that can be overclocked and has 12 megs of cache), 4 gigs of DDR3 1600, an Audigy X-FI sound card, Some fancy 802.11n Wireless card, a nice Radeon video card and 6 terabytes worth of hard drives (though I owned most of them already.
</boasting>

<technical rant>
Here’s the funny thing.  I fix computers for a living, tis all I do.  I am VERY good at it.  However when I built this and turned it on the first time It was working, however it started randomly resetting.  I surmised at that time that it was either the really expensive power supply or that it was not grounded properly.  The grounding being the more likely. 

<thanks>
Still, a HUGE thank you to my friend Kevin who helped me with this.  Because even though I had “tried everything”, I didn’t try everything twice… He also dealt with me bitching about how he was doing things and didn’t back down.
</thanks>

<name>
I needed a name for this computer but I had already named a different computer Evil.  I briefly thought of naming it “Woman” because it is awesome but has been a huge pain in the ass all at the same time.  I decided instead that I would get over the computer being a bitch and just name it LSD. 

Why?  Because it started as a bad trip but is now awesome.  I figure it’s “all tripped out”.
</name>

<XP-vs-Server2008>
In a side note, I have installed both XP Pro 32bit and the 64 bit Server 2008 (supposedly 12% faster than vista) on here and I have done my own comparison tests. 

By far the fastest computer I have ever used, though it seems sad that vista/s2008 both run slower for me.  I mean what a cruel joke for Microsoft to play.
</XP-vs-Server2008>

I’m sure most of you that frequent my site know my sister died last October. What you don’t know is that Sept. 13th is her birthday.

Well, I plan to throw a very large party in her honor. However I was thinking the party wouldn’t start until 2pm. Seems it started a little early when everything died all at once… With a bang….

All the video players on my site were converted the other day to use an API somebody made and it requires the videos to bounce through their site and get back to mine. Well, the guy broke something and then went to bed I think. So at exactly midnight all my video players died.

That’s nothing. I was too busy to notice the video players because I heard a LOUD bang in the living room, when I was strangely for once in my bedroom and somebody else was using the projector to play my ps3.

The loud bang was the sound of my projector bulb EXPLODING.

This bulb costs just under $400 and I have been telling all my friends about how it might just last forever, since I have reset the timer twice and it probably has 6 or 7 thousand hours of use on it. I figured the “possible explosion” thing the guide book warned of was bullshit.

I can’t open it right now and see how bad the damage is and see if it was contained inside the bulb or if the projector itself is somewhat fucked because we have just got it mounted on the ceiling using some crafty shiznit and it will take effort to pull down.

So my thought is that my sister is haunting me, and she knew that I would eventually come to the conclusion that the bulb would have died soon anyways, so I couldn’t be upset about it.

However I am throwing a bigass party in her honor today and would have appreciated it if the projector would have been usable for the party. Or maybe to keep it interesting the bulb could have exploded at 11:59pm on the 13th while people at the party were watching it. I mean how often do expensive things explode at a party?

cheers & fu (hey, that’s my sister’s favorite camera pose)

Also here’s some new music for you. I stuck this and some new “magic” on the music player. This playlist is called Pain. So despite the things that have gone down at midnight I will try to throw a great party tonight. Should have a lot of people here throughout the day. Hopefully they are content to eat, drink and be merry and don’t feel like having a 12 foot video screen to entertain them.

Packers Vs. Vikings. It’s kind of like the age old rivalry between Pirate and Ninja. I mean anybody who goes for one group/team will clearly not change their mind unless they are a fairweather fan.

I have 3 roommates. Now somewhere along the line it got determined that we should bring a VCR in so that we can screw a cable into the back of it, and use that to output to my projector. This means that now anybody can watch mindless television shows with shitloads of commercials and brain rotting time.

I tend to NOT want cable or satellite to be hooked up. When it’s not I am much more productive and though I still download a ton of tv shows, none of them have commercials and all of them are not just being on for the sake of being on.

I am not much of a sports fan either. I mean I don’t mind sports, but don’t actively follow it. Too busy trying to create the world’s greatest website I suppose, but I just never got into it.

Well my projector is now projecting football games onto the wall. With the projector now on the ceiling it projects to be at least 10 feet wide. I have taken a picture to show this, however due to how large it is I had to angle the picture just to be able to show something besides the tv show itself.

Yeah, it really is that big. I assume most football fans would wet themselves to see such a rivalry like this projected onto a giant wall. However that is not where the real rivalry comes from.

Our house contains 2 Packers fans, and 2 Vikings fans. I mean that’s the weird thing about Arizona. Very few people who live here were born here. Talk about havoc, I mean every single play somebody cares.

To me it’s more of a people watching event, since you get to see how both sides react to the same situation and how once again perspective is everything.

Well, my only worry is that it will drain the bulb of my projector. I have reset the timer on it twice now. It continues to display a pretty damn good picture despite having thousands of hours worth of use. Perhaps the whole “light is only good for 3000 hours thing” is total bullshit just trying to get me to buy a new bulb. I mean the actual instruction book tells me that if it is used past it’s time limit or if the timer is reset that it might EXPLODE.

Oh well you will see something angry post about that when it happens. For now I will just let it go. I hope I just don’t end up with cable turned on all day while I try to work. I always end up watching some educational program, or some program about people being haunted that causes me to be unproductive.

So I got home and my roommates thought they were being clever and rearranged the living room. I get it… They wanted to have the couch so it was looking directly at the wall where the video gets projected.

However to do this they:

1) Threw my projector on top of a bunch of stools and flipped it upside down so that they could stick the couch in front of the projector… (It had been on the ground in order to get the full wall to be used for projector). Not to mention how safe I feel that that nobody will sneeze and knock over the tower of stuff that is holding my $2500 projector up.

2) Moved the couches into a place that totally eliminates the possibility for me to have my computer in the same room as the projector.

Now this was one of my main things when I moved in. Must have the ability to have my computer within an exact proximity of the projector and stereo and the ability to have a chair in front of it that can rotate and watch the TV.

I suppose since my desktop has been out of commission for awhile they have simply forgotten that I needed those things, but just last night I acquired something that Should let me hook up my desktop again. Once it is running I will need to have a f’n chair to use my computer.

Okay so fine, they forgot about the desktop and a chair. Fair enough. However I have already told them on more than one occasion why I can’t move the projector up off the ground. Seems that nobody was listening.

A projector spits out a specific angle when you shoot the beam forward. If you go and throw it up on a tower it will still be outputting at the same angle, which means it will be displaying the picture Mostly on the floor. To fix that you tilt the front of the projector up at an angle.

However when you do that it makes it go into a trapezoid shape where the top of the shape gets much smaller in order to compensate for being tilted at an angle.

This means to make your picture a rectangle again you need to go in and crop it to the smallest point of the trapezoid. Also noting that if we were to tilt up the projector up as high as it needs to go the fan would get in the way.

Now they didn’t notice because they were playing a super-wide screen blue-ray movie. Which means that despite most of the projection angle being on the ground they are still getting most of the picture towards the bottom of the wall. However they basically cut down the size of my tv by about 3 feet (and made it so i can’t watch it and work on my computer).

I almost went out there this morning and grabbed my computer, projector and ps3 and moved them into my room.

However I did not because I’m sure they were too stoned to realize they did either of these things… but still I will feel like a dick telling them they need to change it back.

Now IF we could hang the projector from the ceiling it wouldn’t be on the floor and the dog wouldn’t be getting in front of the beam. Still couldn’t have the couch there, but we can’t put the projector on the ceiling because there is a giant fan/light on the ceiling. If we could do that and flip it upside down it would project at the same angle that it did on the floor and would cover the entire wall still.

So I am at a quandary. I am rarely let things annoy me for longer than an hour, but nothing I say about this will make them happy (move stuff back, move it into my room, shove couch forward another 4 feet which is blindingly close so i can have room for a chair behind the couch and cut down size of picture by 3′ etc.. etc…. ). No matter what I do or say I will be the one causing the problem, and it’s total BS.

Update: Still not moved back. Roommates have agreed to remove the fan so projector can be on ceiling and say I can move the couch as needed when I build my computer desk and add a chair.

2 nights in a row there will be no sleep.

Last night I got to bed just before 3am. They were recording some new songs. However it doesn’t seem all that smart to START recording drums/guitars/vocals at 8pm on a Sunday.

Tonight dude came home from the bar with an after-party. However it was just a big sausage fest where some dude stole my lighter.

There was only one single girl who was pretty alternative and didn’t know when to stop talking. However I was a bit amused that she got Andrew to agree with her on her anti-christian views since he makes a big point to tell me how much time he spends at church.

Bah… Anywho, Mike&I were watching a movie when they came back. Actually a rather interesting one called Pathology… But they came back and killed the movie.

Dude promised he would have everybody out by midnight and then after 12:30 he had to start a movie. Well sort of… It’s actually a shitty British version of Jackass.

Anyway, I have had a lot of Brandy and in another glass or two I will be able to just pass out and bypass that whole need for quiet thing to go to sleep.

In other news I am REALLY far on the new theater design / database entry etc… I expect I should be able to launch the new automated theater design before the end of the week.

One of my good friends just got back from the Army. Of course he lives in Atlanta so I probably won’t be seeing him anytime soon, but it’s nice to have another friend to talk to again.

Okay, seriously “Dirty Sanchez” is not nearly as funny as Jackass. Just an FYI. Total weak-ass ripoff.

Well no place is perfect. However trying to transition from an extremely large country to a small one I figured I was at an advantage since $1 USD is worth $1.28 NZD. I figured this made the country very affordable, especially since the cost of petrol/gasoline was lower here.

Then I figured if you looked at the way their taxes work it was even better because though there is 12% tax on goods, it’s actually included in all items so you do not have to add it at the sales counter.
Everything looks fairly inexpensive given these factors. However you can do all the conversion you want and you will never find anything close for prices on computer stuff. Seems that everything I already knew I would want in a computer doesn’t exist in NZ, or it’s in such small quantity that the prices are jacked up.

No problem, I am an internet guy. I have ordered shit from Japan, China, Europe before and gotten it shipped to the US for extremely reasonable rates. I will just do the same here right…

WRONG

First I went on newegg.com. I am happy to pay jacked shipping rates from newegg because they are the shit and even w/expensive shipping they would still be cheaper than NZ sellers. Well that’s out because newegg does NOT ship internationally. Fuck.

Ok, amazon is universal. I checked their site and they themselves say they ship to NZ and they have tons of other people selling on there who have their own shipping rates who will ship it if they don’t. Well I spent a couple hours adding items to a shopping cart because most sellers won’t ship Most items to NZ. Seems even though amazon says they ship to NZ if you look at the item descriptions virtually all items say “this item is only available to ship to the US”, and then if you add the item from a seller who will ship it there you will pay a TON in shipping. I added $685 worth of stuff and there was $723 in shipping charges (before I cancelled my order).

Ok, it’s gotta just be that I know American sites and not the right NZ sites right? Talking to locals and none of them know any good sites to buy from at all except trademe.co.nz. That’s their only site. It’s like ebay / craigslist (if craigslist charged to list). So I did some internet research and found somebody else bitching about newegg not shipping to New Zealand and read through the suggestions people gave on there. The only helpful one was pricespy.co.nz. Which is the same as pricewatch.com in the fact that all the best rates are listed there from all sorts of different companies.

Well all the best rates STILL SUCK. Fine, I cave I must buy at shitty prices so I will go to those sites. Hmm, seems a trick to show up as the best price on pricespy is to list your prices on your site NOT including GST. Which according to Vicki isn’t legal, but I believe it is for websites since they still calculate it at the end. Still lets total everything I want up in 1 cart. Ok I still have $2400 NZD worth of stuff I need ($1867 USD) on one site here, and that is also assuming I drive there to pick it up and not pay to have it shipped. Might as well… Small country. Ok what does the same list of shit cost on newegg you might ask…. $1194 shipped to US.

Ok, lets just take advantage of friends/family and have them reship. Well that might work for the small parts like kbd/mouse, but for the 2 monitors, full tower steel computer case, psu, etc.. It would cost family $763 to ship it to me.

That’s slightly more than it cost me to ship myself here!!!

I have already purchased a processor and motherboard from my friend who works for Intel who has shipped it to me which kicks ass… Also I still have 6TB worth of hard drives that I took with me. What I didn’t know is the processor and video card I want require me to get a 750watt or greater PSU, that combined with a case and a water cooling system which seems needed for the quad core speed I am getting, makes the things that didn’t used to cost shit cost a ton. I used to buy $40 case that came with PSU.

Ok, I have started spouting too much computer jargon, which means I probably need to stop talking.