Why is advertising considered evil?

So the past few years have shown a bend in current trends that pushes against advertising, and I must admit that I've been for and against advertising during these years, but in the end I must admit that advertising isn't always as evil as it seems.

I've been sitting here for the past few hours watching online videos and was shocked that forced advertising has made it's way into YouTube. I had to sit through the same misogynistic Allstate advertisement 3 or 4 times in the past hour and it made me realize something. If it weren't for these advertisements I would have to pay for a subscription to something as worthless as YouTube.

Things like Facebook and Google would be subscription services if they didn't make their bread and butter by forcing us to look at their worthless ads. So maybe we need to embrace these ads as a part of our daily lives and look to them as the future of our Utopian society.

So on this day of Thanksgiving 2010 I give thanks to the positive effects advertising has had on our modern day society.

A few more months down the line and I return again

So I'm not even going to read what my last post was about, I don't even remember. I was just cruising the web looking for song lyrics and stumbled across someone else's crappy blog on Blogger and it reminded me that I have a blog on Blogger too! So, I came back to post something to it.

Recently I joined the Army and even more recently I graduated basic training and am on my way to become an officer. Funny, eh? Well, if you're reading this then you probably have no idea who I am, so that's cool. Either that or you're the FBI doing research on me before you grant me any sort of security clearance. About that, Mr. FBI guy, call me, I need to explain a few things first before you make any decisions. Continuing on. It's amazing that a guy like me would ever think about joining the Army. The most active job I've ever had was at the Wal-Mart Deli and I held that for 2 weeks until I found another boring desk job. Every other job I've had in life has been behind a desk. So you can imagine my shock when I get to basic training and they tell me to run 2 miles. I managed to scrape by on my running to graduate basic, but now that I'm looking at becoming an officer they want me to run even faster. I failed once, now I'm a mere 10 days away from my second chance. I've never really gotten a second chance before, so it's kind of a new thing to me, I don't quite know what to do with it. I just seem to want to make it through the next 3 years of my life so I can get back to my wife. I've never liked those who quit, so why would I want to quit?

OS Bashing

Okay, so I got bored and was searching random terms and decided to google "Linux sucks". I didn't really intend to get so deep into the topic, I just wanted to hear some valid opinions on my OS of choice. What I read made my head hurt about as much as when I first asked, "What's the best distro?"

There are so many heated flamewars over such a silly topic and it makes no sense.

Windows has it's disadvantages and Linux has it's disadvantages. Some people really need to accept that and move on. If you really really really don't like Windows, go ahead and try Linux. If you don't like that, there's a hundred others, but don't expect them to be anything like Windows. Complaints like "It's not compatible with my hardware" should not be blamed directly on Linux. Linux is a community of developers, they didn't build the hardware. Most of the time when a hardware vendor releases a new product it's built for Windows because that's what sells. Usually there's a linux geek or two hanging around in the back that take the time to build the drivers for Linux, but not always.

People complain that their games don't work on Linux, and linux geeks scream about how computers should be used for more than games. Well, if you want your games, run Windows. Nobody is holding a gun to your head. The games were written for Windows because that's what sells. There are ways of getting certain games to run in Linux if that's what you really want, or you can play games that were written or re-written for Linux.

Linux isn't trying to take over the market, it's just trying to exist as an alternative.

I guess it just amazes me when people will argue for hours, days, and months about something that boils down to just a personal choice. I will be the last person that tells you that you HAVE to use Linux, but I will point out the advantages and disadvantages.

The Airlynx Returns

Well I do declare that it has been quite sometime since I have feigned any interest in blogging and it is for good reason. The matters in which I want to write about have very little news in my life, things don't change very often. Although I did manage to successfully write an audio CD in my Fedora Core 3 box the other day.

FEDORA CORE 3! you scream? Why haven't I updated years ago! you scream?

Because it works. I've loaded so much crap and done so many experiments that everything is in that almost working condition that I don't care to mess with it.

An audio CD without Roxio's beautiful little GUI is a complicated thing.

First step, open up your computer. If the computer you are using was WinXP before you slapped a Linux CD in it then odds are it does not have a cable attaching the CD drive to the sound card (or the motherboard in the case of integrated sound chips (which means that your soundcard is directly on the motherboard as opposed to in a separate PCI slot)). No cable? No CD audio! Simple. Locate a cable, slap it in there the best you can and play a CD with your linux. Easy enough.

Now on to this other crap, who the hell invented cdrecord? It seems simple enough, it even automatically detects music files versus data files. WooHoo! But there is something weird about how it reads audio data. Unlike your typical fancy GUI burner it only wants wav files. So all those illegal mp3's you just downloaded need to be converted. Now I'm doing this from my own music so naturally I have original "high-quality" wav files of everything I do, so I could skip that step. But it seems to want those audio files in easy-to-translate blocks of 2352 bytes. Now I do not think or operate in block sizes of 2352 bytes so I gave up right there. Screw that. Several months later I sat back down at it determined to figure it out once and for all. I opened that man page up and read again the -audio flag options. Duh. If your files aren't in 2352 byte blocks you can use the handy-dandy little -pad feature.

Lesson of this article: Read the Frunkin' man Pages, they know what they are talking about, even if you don't understand them.

So in review my little cd command went something like this:

cdrecord dev=/dev/hdc -pad "File1.wav" "File2.wav" "File3.wav" . . . and so on

So while I bang my head on a brick wall in victory I can listen to my new CD rather than sftp'ing all the files to a Windows computer to be burnt.

I hope this info helps somebody out there

#fedora on Freenode

I would like to take a moment to thank anyone that answers anyone's questions in #fedora on Freenode. It seems that out of all the distributions I've tried, Fedora seems to have the most helpful IRC channel devoted to it. Perhaps that it is so easy to install that it gets geek-wannabe's like myself in there asking seriously newbified questions. But it seems that if someone has the time to answer your question they will. Not once have I witnessed the l33t RTFM command, reffering the seeker of knowledge to the obfuscated manuals.

To thee, gods and goddesses of #fedora in the Kingdom of Freenode! I hail to thee!

And oh yeah, drop a penny into my virtual peddler's cup by clicking on the Google ads on the page. Some of them are actually rather interesting, you'll never know.

Linux Addict

Hello my name is Airlynx and I am a linux addict. Linux is like a plague, afflicting useful geeks and turning them into Open Source advocates. I have tried approximately nine different distributions of Linux and I still have not settled.

I started with it all under a year ago, telling my parents they needed a new computer. My wife and I had one that got very little use and it was newer than the one they had, so we traded with them. I reformatted it with Windows ME and installed all of their commonly used software on it. In return I recieved their old Windows 98 machine which needed reformatting badly. I spent a whole day downloading the latest version of Debian on my laptop and burned the CD's the next day. Not knowing anything about Linux or partitioning or anything really, Debian was a poor choice for a first distribution. The monitor was so badly burned out that I could hardly read what was on screen, so I took the computer to work so that some of the other Linux geeks there could help me. One of them suggested Fedora Core 3, which he had the CD's for, so I put that on the computer.

I took it back home and in the lack of having a computer desk to sit the thing on, I stuck it next to my digital piano and put the monitor, keyboard, and mouse up on top. Ideas started to formulate about using the machine for a recording station. Someone else at work had donated a monitor so that I could actually see what I was doing and they also donated a couple old soundcards because Fedora could not read the onboard sound card that was on the machine. I started researching Linux audio apps and found Planet CCRMA. I managed to clunk my way through setting that up on the machine and a whole new set of headaches arrived. I also had the idea that I wanted the machine to serve as an FTP server, and I managed to get that running with few problems. The FTP server was running just fine but I couldn't get MIDI working with the keyboard, so I downloaded and installed Agnula/DeMuDi. That of course wiped out the FTP server and all the work I had done previously, but I didn't care, this machine was more or less an experiment. After messing around with Agnula, I realized that I didn't like it, so I tried a LiveCD version of Dynebolic. Again, no luck with MIDI. At that point I was taking a class in Webmastering and the teacher was showing us all the different sorts of server software, so just to show him up I went back home installed Fedora Core 3 again and turned on Apache. I futzed around with that for a week and went back to school and loaded up my own website hosted on my own server. It was worth impressing him, I think.

Just a month ago (or so), someone dropped off another junker at work. It was a little bit better and a little bit worse than the computer I had, so I grabbed it and put Agnula on it. I still couldn't get MIDI working, so I had the bright idea to try Gentoo. I knew a little bit more about Linux at this point and spent about 3 days installing Gentoo only to get to a point where I could not install Gnome (the GUI). I'm no good without a GUI, so I downloaded and installed Fedora Core 4 (which isn't all that different from Fedora Core 3). I turned on Apache and SSH and a few other things and that's where it stands for now. I have never done anything productive with Linux and I just keep installing stuff to see what it does. If anyone wants to give me some ideas of useful stuff to do with this computer I would be happy to hear them, because up until now I have spent more time installing and fixing issues than I have actually using the computer. I still want to use it for a recording station. If you want to donate money to me (because I am always very broke) you can send it to my wife's PayPal account. Contact me for more information about that.