A beg, plead and cry for help, from my parents.

A few of you that talk to me on a regular basis are well aware of the ongoing struggles my parents are having with health care, financial assistance and doctors in northern Alberta. They live in the woods, live off the land, and that’s where they should be as far as I’m concerned. These are people I have come to greatly admire, people who value our planet, and enjoy living in harmony with God’s creations. (Yes, my parents are religious, is it ironic considering my second last post?). But now the problems have simply gone too far, something must be done, and as two people with no money, few friends, and few that can fully understand how they live; they are quickly realizing what a cruel place Alberta can be. The following is a letter that my father painstakingly dictated to me over the phone, a phone that I must add has been paid for by an extremely generous and understanding neighbor for over 4 years. He has seen the problems, I have seen the problems, and now I hope you will too. Please remember that I have worked very hard on taking this down, correcting spelling, and editing for clarity. Now all I ask is that you do me a small favor and read it.

Hey Krystal Smith.

This message is for you, Krystal Smith of Employment, Immigration and Industry in Grande Prairie. Your email address is public information; it is provided to you by a tax payer funded service, the hosting, administration and all aspects are paid for by us, the regular tax payers. When someone has a complaint or a concern about your practices your failure to provide a contact only serves to raise the alarm bells about your actions. To make this point clear, that your email is public information, you have received an email from me. Where did I get your email address? Government of Alberta service line; they gave it to me no questions asked. (To bad for you, but your secretary mentioned Krystal with a ‘K’ as she was about to hand out your address, right before going to ask you if this was ok… immediately after finding out who my family was.) They know I should have it, I know I should have it, now, what do you have to hide?

The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins

I stumbled upon this video accidentally while searching for some Python seminars on Google Video. I must say I was rather entertained by Mr. Dawkins humorous take on such a sensitive subject, unfortunately while this lent a much lighter mood to the reading, I think it tended to show Dawkins as more of a witty comedian, rather than an educated man.

Belkin Wireless-G F5D9010 V3000 Installation Under Debian Linux

Update: I have started to compile this driver against different kernels to help out some users (please see comments below for a link to files and more information). I have now edited this document to include a place where you should start if you’re using the pre-compiled kernel module. This place has been marked in Orange text.

The following explains only part of the hassle I experienced while attempting to get the F5D9010 Version 3000 card working under a fresh install of Debian Testing. I started by compiling and installing the Open Source rt2500 drivers using Debian APT and module-assistant. This was due to my own jumping ahead of things after I read a few forum posts that seemed to suggest this would work. My card however has the rt2600 chipset inside of it (thank you lspci, should have asked you first), and will not work with these drivers.

After a lot of messing around, I finally came upon a post that suggested rt61 drivers would work for this card, however the link to download them was broken. Eventually I located the drivers at this site:

Did you come here looking for Electric Bike information?

Judging by my site stats, it seems that a lot of people are coming here searching for information on electric bikes. It should be noted that this blog was more intended to let me store information that I learned, mostly relating to web development and computers in general. I am not an expert in e-bike systems by any stretch of the imagination. However below I have compiled a list of resources that I so far have found helpful, in hopes that it helps others. Congratulations on taking steps towards a clean and healthy mode of transportation, I hope you have a good experience, and please feel free to leave comments if you build one of these systems, have something to add to the list, or simply find that this list has helped you.

YouTube Monitoring Group

I have read a lot of horror stories about sites like YouTube and other video sharing sites, with users uploading video of their crimes. I went looking for some information on how one would actually stop these videos and personally didn’t find much, about all I found was the “Report inappropriate” option. I assume that given the types of videos that can be put on YouTube, the definition of “Inappropriate” might be a little hard to set, and the possibility of many false positives would be high.

I have started a small group of volunteers. These volunteers cycle through a database of the latest videos posted on YouTube, watching each one after another. As they view videos they have the option to chat and share videos they find entertaining. There are various flags that can be set for each video, and the option to enter a user specified comment. Flags do not need to be set for each video, and should only be set when the situation calls for it, however flags are both positive and negative. Positive flags include videos that are educational, funny, and family friendly. These videos will in time be posted as a list to our main site, particularly for those that want a family friendly YouTube playlist.

A BIG Warning to Any Trillian Users!

Trillian is a fairly good program that allows you to use MSN, IRC, AIM, ICQ all from one client. However a new exploit has been found that could potentially allow an attacker to run code on your machine, simply by sending you a link. If you were to move your mouse over this link (not even clicking it) there is a chance that you could be exploited. Please see the link below for more information:

Public Advisory: 04.30.07 // iDefense Labs

My new favourite Firefox add-on

I don’t know what to say, a total loss for words. I installed this add-on a few days ago, happy with my current WebDeveloper plug-in and not too sure what to expect. Three days later I think I can safely say, this is the best add-on that I have. It does almost everything that WebDeveloper does, and oh so much more. If you do any work developing web pages, or are just screwing around for your own enjoyment and having troubles with things like your CSS alignments, or Javascript / HTML problems, I HIGHLY suggest you check this add-on out.

Free Beginners Yoga DVDs

If you are interested in Yoga, do not have the funds available to take classes or buy videos (join me, you cheap bastards), this site is for you.

It’s a free DVD, and has various different video qualities available. The DVD quality download can take a while, but it’s definitely worth the wait.The medium quality one is quite nice as well if you are standing back from your monitor a bit. Enjoy!

Free Beginners Yoga DVDs Video Windows Media Download

I’ll PROUDLY do ‘em ALL in.. even those little children.

Do I have your attention? Good.

I found this excerpt after watching a short video on the Phelps family. Nested within the comments you will find countless expressions of rage, hate and essentially exactly the same sins and sick mind set this family is demonstrating.

The same amount, you ask? Well, I suppose I could let you be the judge of that.