cody chamberlain

public transportation has a side-effect i never expected: making me painfully sick of all the music i have. my iPod must be completely worn out, both physically and emotionally.

this inability to deal with my current library of music has forced me to find something new. however, i scratch cds like its my job, and i hate not having music on the iPod. the most logical solution is transferring to a completely digital delivery mechanism for all of my new music purchases.

i have needs, believe it or not. i want a large collection of music, and i do not want to be locked into a certain service / hardware platform <cough>iTunes Music Store</cough>

the answer? amazon.com. yes, the schizophrenic online retailer has opened up a drm-free music store offering mp3-format audio files available from a great catalog. i have so far been able to find any artist i have craved, and their “other customers also purchased…” feature has led me to a few bands i had never previously experienced.

there is one caveat, however. if you want to purchase an entire album (which usually gives you an overall savings than buying each song individually) you will have to install their amazon-mp3-downloader software. from what i have seen, it has no impact on system performance, and even automatically adds the songs to your media-player library. the software is also available for osx, and various flavors of gnu/linux!

so, go ahead and check it out. i highly recommend atmosphere’s new album, “when life gives you lemons, paint that sh** gold” and vhs or beta’s album “night on fire“

first impressions can be deceiving. approaching the mpls farmers market on lyndale brought visions of a county fair. signs for mini-donuts, brats and fried cheese curds were visible blocks away. hundreds of people walking awkwardly amongst traffic and patrolling officers. the annoyances of these suburbanites randomly stopping in front of me, a well-trained efficient urban traveler, became intolerable.

making my way thru the crowded aisles i slowly forget about all of the oddities of the situation. everyone is talking. every step you take you get something affecting another sense. with every step its a new smell. the fresh herbs, flowers or on-site smokehouse. the smells are incredible. continuing on, everything is fresh and abundant. everyone is smiling. they are planning today’s meals based on whats out there. the couple arguing about whether or not he actually likes broccoli made me smile. apparently not everyone is having a great time.

with no real agenda, i keep wandering. seeing anything that attracts my eye, i keep filling my bag. exchanging pleasantries and moving on to booth after booth i reach a family-owned farm. while purchasing my dozen eggs, the man behind the table informs of his family-run operation. with a twinkle in his eye, and pride in his smile he informs me his daughters have been gutting chickens since the age of six. the older daughter, apparently now in her teens, is unaffected by her father’s banter. this is clearly not the first time he’s bragged.

walking away i realize to myself that this is true minnesota. everyone pleasant and helpful. plenty of fried cheese and grill bratwurst, before 9am.

you need to experience this.

this is a script i created that gives a quick .txt report of all locally installed printers on a machine. mostly useful for a windows print server. you can change what attributes are displayed pretty easily. this helped us find discrepancies between the printer name and share name on the printers.

vbscript:parse local printer names / share names

The Minnesota legislature recently passed a transportation package with a price tag of 6.6 billion dollars. This is being paid for with a tax-hike on a commodity in which prices are crippling families. At this time of economic recession, at a time where our state doesn’t have enough money in our budget to fund transportation corrections following a catastrophic bridge collapse, a developer has the audacity to balk at a bill that publicly helped fund their private enterprise?

The Ghermezians’ are threatening to abandon their expansion plans? I saw we call their bluff. The basic principles of our country are built in the capitalistic ideas of letting a business thrive, or fail, in an open and free market. If they don’t feel that there plan will be cost-effective without public financing, its time to re-write their business plan.

The tax dollars we as Minnesotans pay with every check should be used on projects that will benefit our society. I don’t see how a bunch of hotels and a water-park will do this. The developers are throwing around numbers, like that of the potential number of jobs that will be created; 14,000 the last number I read in the Trib. My question is how many of those jobs are above minimum wage? How many of those jobs will offer health-benefits and opportunities for growth? Call me a skeptic, but I am not seeing the same economic benefits as our friendly MOA owners.

Any of our elected officials that said we need to generate more money for our bridges and highways with our gas tax-hike should look at this bill and chuckle. If we can’t afford a bridge, we certainly can’t afford a water park.

if you are unaware of the culinary reality shows currently on cable programming, then you will likely have no idea what i am talking about. for that, i am sorry. watch more tv.

for those of you who are familiar with the television reality show, top chef, then i hope you will agree with me. this show is unbelievably ridiculous. i am still deciding if thats a good thing or a bad thing.

thru the challenges they are presented with, bravo feels their hired judges will be able to find a shining 4-star chef. how are they able to find such qualities? well, thru tailgating, block-parties and improv clubs. in one of the first episodes a chef was asked to “pack his knives” after being unable to make a high-quality corn dog for a neighborhood block party. another chef was asked to leave after being unable to create a dish suitable for a chicagobears tailgate party. riiight.

the most irritating aspect of the show would be the ‘prizes’ these mostly executive chefs take home after win. the last episode i caught awarded the winning chefs with $2500 worth of cookware. thats right. they gave executive chefs macys-grade cookware. why don’t they give these people something they actually need? you’re telling me some of the best chefs out there are in need of more cookware? taking a lesson from anthony bourdain’s tales, maybe they should pay for a years worth of std screening; or pay-off richard’s banana republic credit card.

then again, the fact that i am writing this right now does show that these people are at least entertaining. they work hard, and take these b.s. assignments in stride. if you haven’t checked it out, maybe you should.

stop after stop. i cant help but wonder: “where is this guy going?”

11pm and trying to live green, im heading back to uptown from the warehouse district. my social awkwardness prevented me from  asking the bus driver for a transfer and paid for two separate bus rides. then again, i just made it round-trip from my house to the bar using two buses. my urban survival skills are honed. im ready for anything, now.

iPod ear-buds are in, and rocking gordon lightfoot. i realize that im most likely the only person on the bus listening to the ‘wreck of the edmond fitgerald’ and i enjoy the moment. luckily not many people are traveling at this hour, and there is plenty of room for comfort. unfortunately the word comfort may be an exaggeration. my knees are still hitting the seat in front of me, and i certainly can’t describe the stare im receiving from a gentleman as comforting.

the guy across the aisle from me is still asleep. i can’t help but wonder if he was supposed to get off stop after stop.  i have these over-dramatic situations going thru my head. what if he has a wife that is sick of him working late. tonight, he promised, he would be home in time for little johnny’s basketball game. unfortunately he fell asleep on the bus. now his family has left him. his little johnny will never forgive his father.

how do i come up with this stuff?

ars technica has a great article regarding the legality and morality of using open wifi access. my favorite quote gives a great perspective into the reality of how ridiculous it is to consider it theft:

“It’s time to put an end to this silliness. Using an open WiFi network is no more “stealing” than is listening to the radio or watching TV using the old rabbit ears. If the WiFi waves come to you and can be accessed without hacking, there should be no question that such access is legal and morally OK. If your neighbor runs his sprinkler and accidentally waters your yard, do you owe him money? Have you done something wrong? Have you ripped off the water company? Of course not. So why is it that when it comes to WiFi, people start talking about theft?”

before i made the move to minneapolis i had gotten lost while trying to find my way from duluth to the walker art center. after travelling in a strange area, and becoming more and more frustrated, i pulled into the parking lot of a few stores and opened my laptop. i connected to the first open wifi, and pulled up google maps. looking at my intersection, i was able to see where i was and where i needed to go. is that something that should be considered and illegal or immoral act?

this is a call-out to all the tech junkies out there. get an old system, toss linux and toss in some extra network cards. google around for tutorials on using your linux box as a router/gateway. or, go ahead and take it to the next level and read up on how to convert linksys routers into full-fledged public wifi-hotspots with open-source/Free software. 

i recently came across an interesting phrase: “organic software.” im intrigued. i like the idea behind it. today’s society is slowly becoming more and more aware of the importance of organic foods and sustainable living. perhaps this is a fantastic opportunity to create a similar campaign for community-derived software projects. according to the spread firefox campaign organic software is summed-up as:

The “100% organic software” concept sums up a fairly complex situation using a metaphor people can easily recognize. Organic stands for something that’s better for you, something trusted, something of higher quality…all key ingredients of Mozilla and Firefox. 

their usage of the term seems to have a very large scope, and encompasses the principle of the mozilla foundation as a whole versus a specific piece of software. this then begs the question, “what standards should a piece of software meet such that it can be considered a truly organic project?” i have thought about this question, and i thought of a few basic rules to start with:

1. the project should be open to the public, and built by an open community
2. at no point should the software contain any proprietary code, or depend on any kind of proprietary library
3. the software (mostly web applications) should conform to all cross-platform standards
4. there is some kind of community-driven support system
5. the development process should make some kind of good faith effort to reduce its carbon foot-print

at this point, i am hoping to engage to the internet community to help give more ideas and refine the ones i have made. please comment accordingly or e-mail me at cham0169(at)d(dot)umn(dot)edu

the importance of freedom. everyday we have the ability to choose. choose between right and wrong. we distinguish between good ideas and bad ideas. we know there are certain things we can do that would get us fired, or dumped or harmed in some way. we base the decisions on our past experience, our education, social norms and common sense. unfortunately the average computer user cannot rely on a majority of those things when choosing their technology freedoms.

we live in an age of large, monolithic corporations that decide what is best for us. we live in an age where the average person doesn’t realize they have a choice. giant billboards, commercials, and newspapers all telling us why we need to buy their product. companies like microsoft use tactics that trap a user into being forced to use their products.

when you buy a refrigerator you have certain rights that come with that refrigerator. you can take that refrigerator apart. you can repair, replace or sell that refrigerator whenever you please. if i so please, i can learn how that refigerator works. i cannot do this with microsoft windows. i cannot do that with adobe acrobat. software everyone in the world uses. why don’t i have a right to look at what i paid for? am i not free in being able to customize a product i rightfully purchased from a company?

while the average use might be asking themselves, “why would i care how windows works?” it is important to remember that i don’t care how a refrigerator works. but i place a great deal of importance on the fact that if i don’t like how my refrigerator works, i have the right to try and make it work the way i want it to.

there are currently many different software titles available that follow these principles. many pieces of software that, in many instances, out-perform their proprietary counter-parts. if you are interested at all in your Freedoms as a software user, check-out the following resources:

www.fsf.org - free software foundation
www.gnu.org/philosophy - gnu is the organization behind the most popular Free software license, the gpl
www.getfirefox.com - firefox. a fast, open-source, Free web-browser.

my ability to write interesting things is debatable. hopefully you are the type of person who finds what i have to say interesting. if not, i hope you don’t feel as though your time has been wasted.
either way, good luck out there. the world can be a pretty crazy place.

this is going to be a place for me to talk about life, technology and information.
feel free to contribute by chatting with me at cody (at) codychamberlain (dot) com.