_23:27
Right now i’m sitting in a dorm room with Ben, Jason and some friends. Jason and I got up here to Northern Michigan College last night around 20:00 (8:00 EST) and haven’t been bored since.
Last night we just walked around and took a small tour of the area, but today we had a blast doing everything. We ended up seeing the sun around 10:30 and went to Sugar Loaf Mountain and did some hiking.
Sugar Loaf isn’t a crazy hard hill but it’s pretty good for being in flat old Michigan. I can’t really explain the beauty one encounters but something I would suggest for anyone looking to find a place of peace.
After all that we decided to tobaggan down the easy hill. For no reason other than to cheat death. After a couple near death experiences (which we documented on film) we finally got to our car.
We were already a couple minutes late for this “direct action meeting” that started at noon and decided to not go back to the dorms and change. O- so you’re wondering what a “direct action meeting” is?
Wow - how do I explain this? To be short - it’s a group of people that learn how to act in protests. Figureing out who your groups are, who is responsible for what factors, and what to do when/if you are ever rushed by the police and have to go to jail.
We spent 4 hours learning all this crazy stuff and could have easily spent more time just soaking everything in. We had some great teachers and I might end up doing a small paper on all this later. You’ll honestly love it.
If all that wasn’t enough we then stopped for a small bit for food and then went see a band called “LOGJAMMERS”. Not going to even try to explain these guys other than just imagine 10 people jamm’in on some bongo drum while a ton of people dance like their on hot coals.
I’ve been taking pictures and hope to have all those up when I get back. It will probably explain everything alot better - I’m just having alot of fun up here and never want to go home.
posted on March 31, 2002| 12:03 AM EST
_1:36
After alot of server config problems I finally got CHATTER set up. If you look to your right, you’ll see a new option. Chatter is… umm… well…. a place to Chat. Just log in with any name you would like and go to town.
Dave is one of the guys that worked on this open source project and we had a great conversation alittle earlier. Listen in to our conversation:
theparagon: Is there anything you would like to tell my readers about Chatter?
Dave from pushby.com: it’s small, lightweight, portable, open source and FREE!
theparagon: why did you guys decided to develop this?
Dave from pushby.com: just to see if we could. and when flash 5 came out with the ability to do persitent connections (via xml sockets) we wanted to see how well they would work. and we wanted a better chat system for us internally ( instead of IRC or jabber or any of the lame instant messenger things)
theparagon: What other projects are you guys working on?
Dave from pushby.com: we are always working on way to many projects…hehe
theparagon: haha - sounds like alot of programmers I know.
Dave from pushby.com: there are a few folks working on new “skins” for chatter. and some people are extending and re-writing parts of the client and server to do stuff they want.
These guys are doing some funny stuff with chatter: they’ve added commands like “/health” and “/curse” :-)
theparagon: Where do you guys see CHATTER going?
Dave from pushby.com: this is really meant more for smaller groups that have some sort of community (like for people who work together in an intranet setting or on people’s blogs).
theparagon: Thank you for the Interview…
Dave from pushby.com: Thanks for interviewing me - I hope it’s useful to you and your readers
For more information:
- Dave’s site
- Pushby.com
- Pushby.com’s future plans
posted on March 29, 2002| 1:55 AM EST
_22:35
Not to long from now you all will be celebrating, GOOD FRIDAY whereas I will be on my way up North with Jason Perton. We’ll be visiting Ben Doornbos and doing alot of hiking, snow-shoeing (w/homemade snow-shoes), and anything else that is cool to do up in the UP.
Ben goes to Norther Michigan University which is in Marquette. We’ll probably be sleeping in his dorm room but during the days only God knows what kind of trouble we’ll round up. Sadly Marquette’s website was done in Frontpage 5.0 and doesn’t give us very much information about what there is to do around there.
I’m sure we’ll have fun but what I’m looking forward to the most is just being relaxed and being able to write. So often I get stuck into writting crap and by simply going away my mind will be refreshed and I’ll once again remember how to put words together.
I’ll do my best to put these words on theparagon.ORG but one never knows what kind of connection good’ole Marquette has.
posted on March 28, 2002| 10:54 PM EST
_11:18
I never ment to become a greedy person. I’ve always thought of myself as someone that likes to give to others. Problem is that I do love the feeling of giving but hate the actual loosing of items. Whether it be money, time, resources, etc..
I found this out during breakfast this morning. The Hamilton School system pulled about 50 business owners and community members into a Holiday Inn room to give us breakfast and a talk. The talk was about giving speeches at their school and coming up with new ideas for school children to learn.
It was a good meeting but during breakfast someone at my table mentioned they really like this little side dish. They were sitting by me and I didn’t know this person from Adam and was hoping they had the respect not to ask me for mine.
I turned into horrible beast and started shielding my side dish as if it was my first born under attack. I wanted it and I wasn’t about to give it up. I decided it was either - offer this lady mine, or quickly eat it so any option of offering my side dish would be gone.
I’m pretty sure I did all this without being to obvious - outside my standing on the table yelling “This is my dish lady, quit making feel quilty with your woman vodoo powers!”
posted on | 11:32 AM EST
_18:34
Last night I came across a slick little chat tool built with Flash, Perl, and XML. I decided to download it and run in on my site as a neat little feature but couldn’t get it to work.
Out of frustration I emailed Dave (one of the creaters of this program) and he suprizingly emailed me right back. I made the changes he told me to and it still wouldn’t work, so I emailed him back.
Then all of the suddon he popped up on the pushby.com site in the public server area. We talked for a small bit and started working on why I couldn’t get this app to work. After awhile we figured out why it wasn’t working. I was trying to “nohup” a process but would die when I logged out.
This was horribly depressing and we came to realization that it couldn’t be done on my server :-(
I called my hosting company and talked them into giving me some space on another server (for free of course) but for some reason I can’t get in. Everyone else I had check could get in.
…Sigh - I’m just having a hard time with all these little problems.
posted on March 27, 2002| 6:55 PM EST
