It never occurred to me this way. While riding down the highway having friendly chit-chat with the driver, I was suddenly enlightened to the truth of the whole situation. My usual lapse into insanity also known as winter triggered the rise of some forgotten feelings.
It was the usual feeling of loss. The atmosphere cold. Ice wreaking havoc on the rocks, snow dusted pavement swimming like a lure to our destination. The feeling of danger — inherent in winter driving. A plaguing feeling of wrongness filled me.
I reflected, when its summer I feel the same sort of longing for winter. I think I hold too superficial of an image in my head for each season. Where white covered meadows lay lightly glimmering in all the beauty of a clear sky and a hot sun with a backdrop of trees dusted in a sparkling layer of snow. I used to remember the browned snow banks, the darkened over-casted sky and the deadness of winter but it seems with age I’ve grown to cherish the beauty of things.
The same goes for summer, when I think about it I think of thick green forests and red rocks blanketed in a patchy layer of grass and moss. I think of clear skies with the sun high. I think of the sparkle found floating in the waves of the lake as the sun sets. I don’t think of the days I lay sweating in bed with three fans labouring over.
I hold onto the beautiful parts of each season.
Fall, the season of my birth. I’ve always had some strange connection to this season. Colors floating, falling, changing. Fall is largely a time of change and I think thats why I love it. My whole life has been an ever-changing adventure. As with anyone were essentially lost as children, finding ourselves, finding our way.
But other than the deeper connection I just plain love the colors. I love walking in fall where an updraft at your feet can fill your senses as a confetti of leaves rises and falls all around you. Its almost like a celebration — fall. A time to celebrate the season past, and the season to come.
As I sit here on the bus writing this, my longing for summer days imagining myself climbing rocks, swimming, biking, hiking, doing things I’ll probably never get around to. But one thing is for sure I’ll enjoy the beauty while its here even if I am longing for another season. Because in the end the only thing that sticks is the beauty of it all anyways.
Hey everybody, I have some cool news for you.
This blog has always been my personal blog but it is going to be pretty much solely personal information that you can find here about me now.
My friend Jerry from North Bay and I had the idea of starting a blog circle between our close friends from back home. So we did.
Infact, it’s being hosted here right from this very domain!!! Are you as excited as I am?!
You can find the new blog at:
http://www.tjbro.com/wafn
Your probably wondering: “wafn…?” Well! That’s the exciting part of it all. We popularized a gaming acronym that is widely known. Not only did we popularize it, we INVENTED IT! So we named it that! Also called “The WAFN group”, “The blog project”, “The WAFN project” etcetera etcetera.
So go check it out!
Not only are we doing weekly, scheduled, topicizededed blogs we are free to do random blogs anytime of the week AND, this is the big one, WERE DOING PODCASTS!!!! Yayyyyy!
So once again go check it out! I hope you enjoy it, we’ve been working on it a bit the past few days. The look was a little wonky in Internet Explorer so preferably view it in Firefox but I cleaned it up and made it functional for both.
Alright, we’ll be looking forward to your comments and ratings everybody! Take care for now!
Thomas Brown.
Hey guys,
Quick update. I’ve been doing a lot of brainstorming in the past few days and have a pretty thorough system design that I think will be really useful for several different purposes. Aside from that the database design is finished and I’m just doing my homework about these sort of systems before I jump head first into it. Hopefully things keep running as smoothly as they do. I’m contemplating whether I should go through the actual system design steps or not? I think I will since this is for a portfolio and all.
Justin, your gonna love what I have in store for this system!
Well for now everybody, take care!
Thomas Brown.
Hey guys,
I’m back! Sorry about the wait, after writing that tutorial on triple booting your PC I was kinda pooped out for a week or so, but I am back now!
Life is good, love living alone! Gotta pay the rent soon — thats about the worst part of it all but I’m cool with it as long as I am without all the stress of living with someone else.
I couldn’t believe it when I relaized this but I never blogged about received the RROD (Red Ring of Death). Whcih I’m sure sound really weird to everybody that doesn’t know what it is. It has to do with the XBOX 360. Basically when you get the RROD it means your XBOX is f*cked. So I called Microsoft and they are kindly sending me a new one. (Writing that makes me think I’ve written about this. *sigh* I did write about it didn’t I? Argh! Whatever theres updates to do with it anyways. ) After waiting about two weeks I still hadn’t received the box and called Microsoft back. It seems one of two people screwed up. Either the delivery man never left a note or my landlord never gave me the note but the box was shipped back to the Microsoft factory. But they resent it and I received it a day later just fine. I’ve packed it all up but have yet to send it out. I think I’m going to have to do home pickup because I simply dont have time to go hunting for the UPS place. There will be updates about this.
This weekend that just passed I went home for the weekend, mostly to help out with the house but ended up doing mostly not-helping-with-the-house and other things. I went to a Rik Emmett plays Clapton concert which was simply amazing. Songs I never thought I’d ever get to hear in concert I got to hear and they were done *whispering* quite possibly better than Clapton himself would have done them.
Job update: SUPPOSIVELY… my work account is fixed with CMCI but I tried it and it still doesn’t work so I don’t know what I’m going to do in terms of that.
Other than that this weekend is mine and Anh’s second Anniversary on the fourth of February!!! So this weekend she is coming to visit me, in fact she’ll be here later tonight!!! Yayyy yare you all as excited as I am!?! 
Anyways there was one other thing I wanted to introduce you guys to: Summer Samaritans 2.0! Summer Samaritans are in the process of getting a business license and I am in the process of recreating their online presence using the wonderful tools included in the .NET library. There are great things in store for this so keep your eyes open. But don’t worry the day it is put into production I will be so excited you’ll all know about it for sure!
Alright everybody, take care for now.
Thomas Brown.
Alright so to start this off let me just forewarn you: your hard drive will be formatted in fact we will be deleting the entire partition altogether and then creating new ones. So to answer that we will backup all our important files to some sort of medium like CD’s, external harddrive or just a USB key if you can fit it, whatever works best for your situation.
For security purposes you should really scan all your files you plan to backup for viruses to ensure you wont be carrying any infections over to your new configuration.
One other thing if your not sure how to work in your BIOS configuration be sure to research that before you delete any partitions. Print off any BIOS, Operating System installation, requirements*** instructions etcetera that you might need later on. Be sure to think this out thoroughly before you begin because if your short a second computer this could become a major issue.
So lets get started.
In this tutorial I am going to teach you all how to install what I call a ‘triple boot’ where you will be able to run three separate operating systems (not synchronously, although there is some tricks I will mention after.) Also the Linux file system uses a different geometry than that of the NT based file systems so that is a neat configuration challenge we will overcome in this tutorial as well.
We are going to be installing Microsoft Windows XP Profession SP2, Microsoft Windows Vista Business, and Ubuntu (a Linux distro.) This setup is a software developers ideal setup. So here we go.
The first thing were going to do is boot from the Windows XP installation CD, because most BIOS’s use different ways of booting from the CD I can’t tell you exactly how to do this but it will be in your BIOS configuration somewhere. Most of the time on the first screen of the boot process it will say “Press <Some key> to interrupt normal boot process”. But I’ll leave that to you and you ability to find things on the internet to find out.
I should mention that you should make sure all USB keys, SD cards, external storage devices etcetera are not plugged into the computer before you begin these next steps as you could accidentally delete the partition on them rendering them virtually useless. I say virtually because if you do accidentally delete the partitions you will lose all the data stored on them but you will be able to create a new partition to make them usable again! Yay.
Once we boot from the XP CD it will do all its regular loading of files into memory (Memory means RAM so its not loading anything onto your hard drive permanently, don’t worry!) After this its going to give you some options at the bottom of the screen they will each timeout after a few seconds so just ignore them. The loader will bring you to another screen where you will need to hit ENTER to continue and then ‘ESC’ to cancel. This will bring you to the partition screen. You will notice that there are existing partitions (maybe just one for some of you) on your hard drive, it will also show the file system being used whether it be FAT32 or NTFS. You will delete this partitions by hitting the ‘D’ key when you have them highlighted. This will bring you to a warning screen, don’t worry about it just hit the ‘L’ key and now everything is gone. Are you scared? Don’t worry about it too much were going to make things better soon.
Next thing we want to do after all the partition(s) are deleted is to create new ones using the ‘C’ key. You will have to decide how much room you want to allocate for each operating system based on your needs and hard drive size. So I will leave that up to you. The partition tool works in megabytes (MB) so you will need to add three zeros after the number of gigabytes you want to allocate unless of course you are only allocating megabytes which would be relatively useless in this case unless you want a separate drive to just store backup data or whatever on in the future. You will not be able to install an operating system on megabytes because it just isn’t enough. You should have researched the requirements before beginning this process anyways so your aware of that anyways we don’t have to worry.
So you should create two partitions and still have enough unpartitioned space left for your Linux installation. The reason we’re going to leave the room for the Linux distro unpartitioned is because Ubuntu and most others will create the partition for you and can be very confusing if you create the partition ahead of time.
So we have virtually three chunks of hard drive created. Go ahead and highlight the partition you created to install XP on. Press ‘I’ to install XP on this partition. It will prompt you to choose a file system, preferably you will want to choose NTFS most of the time. But its up to you to decide based on your needs.
Go ahead with the regular XP installation, you should have the instructions for installing XP printed if you did the research I warned you to. Or you should just know, or be able to follow instructions, if your a nerd like me! But I wont make any assumptions other than you have some way of knowing how the regular XP installation goes based on your own knowledge or a document of some sort.
XP MUST be installed first because it does not come packaged with a loader which is a tool which creates a menu in the BIOS to choose different Operating Systems from. Either way if it did it would be over written by the other loaders anyways.
After you’ve done the XP installation you can leave all the updates and whatever else you wanna do to personalize/update it until a later time because we still have 3 other Operating Systems to install lets get on it!
Replace the XP CD in the drive with the Windows Vista CD. Reboot your PC from the CD drive again.
This time were going to choose the space you partitioned for Vista to install Vista on. Go ahead and install Vista. You have the instructions right!?
Once again you can save all the maintenance stuff, whatever it is until later. Now we have something called the Longhorn loader installed on our computer which will enable us to choose between XP and Vista when we boot. Thanks Windows Vista! The presence of this loader is crucial to the ‘Triple Boot’ capability of our PC.
So after your all done with Vista, once again replace the CD in the drive with the Ubuntu CD and reboot your PC! Were getting close!!!! Are you excited!?
Ubuntu is something called a ‘live cd’ which means you can boot from it so once again boot from the CD drive once the computer restarts. You will receive a Ubuntu menu on-screen. Choose the start from live CD option and Ubuntu will load some stuff into memory and start running! Thats the beauty of the Live CD you can test it out before you commit to installing it. But in this scenario we know we want to install it so were just going to go ahead and double-click the ‘install’ icon on the desktop to start installing. You should know how to install Ubuntu except one small detail when choosing the partition you need to choose ‘largest free continuous space’ and that will first create a special partition on your hard drive matching the file system geometry used in Linux, where we left that unpartitioned space when we were doing all the partitioning stuff in the beginning, then it will install Ubuntu onto that new partition. Along with which it will install the Linux loading tool which will give you the option to boot to Ubuntu, Ubuntu recovery mode, and will have a section called ‘Other Operating Systems’ where it will have Windows Vista listed. OMFG what happened to XP!? Well why don’t you scroll on down to the Vista option and hit the ‘Enter’ key. WTF OMFG! Well isn’t that spectacular the Vista option actually bring you to the Longhorn loader where you can choose between Vista and XP!!! Yayyy we did it! I told you we’d make it better soon! So now you can go ahead and set up each of your operating systems on your own, install all your drivers etcetera etcetera. But that was up to you to research before we began so I’m not going to worry about that here.
Hope this was useful to you all! And thanks for reading.
Thomas Brown
So today I got off on a little rant about the garbage disposal system recently set in place at Seneca. Instead of one garbage can with nothing written on it they have now placed three garbage cans one for paper, one for plastic and glass, and another for good old garbage. All labelled of course.
So I’m a little worried that this new garbage system might be eliminating jobs for some of the more unfortunate people who work sorting trash. Does this mean cutbacks in the trash sorting industry? What about the pickup of it all? We all know what garbage trucks look like and I’d hate to think after all the trouble we go through putting our garbage in the right place and such that it all jsut ends up in the saem garbage truck in the end. Although that would mean good news for the garbage sorters of Toronto. But they should be at least sending a recycling truck now unless they have a special truck for picking up paper. So now we’re facing new issues, they are investing in driver jobs which are probably more expensive to pay than garbage sorters. The garbage companies are also investing in these neat little garbage cans that have three different sections for different types of trash. But also, the garbage companies are polluting the atmosphere just a little bit more.
But my real problem lies in the labelling of the garbage cans. As we all know Toronto is the more culturally diverse city in the world with new immigrants arriving everyday. Most of which can barely speak a word of english let alone read it. So what can we expect? Were going to have these neat garbage cans labelled to be sorted by the trash-throwee and yet there is still going to be paper in the glass bin and garbage in the paper bin etcetera etcetera. So now we’re laying off the garbage sorters and processing unsorted garbage. No ones to blame here. Business is business, I just fail to understand the strategic value of this move on the Toronto Garbage Disposal and Recycling companies part. Because its not like anything is getting done, the trash is still unsorted, they are investing a bunch of money into extra drivers to drive recycling trucks, they are polluting more etc. Although I’m sure there is some explanation for all of this it jsut seems like they are making things more difficult for the trash-thrower.
And what happens when the garbage bin is overflowing. People are inherently conditioned not to litter (RIGHT!?) so we try our best not to throw it on the ground and in turn end up jsut tossing the garbage in the paper bin or the plastic/bottles bin. What a dilemma!
So not only have we seperated the potties from the toilets and the urenals from the potties and the short urenals from the regular urenals now we have seperated the garbage that in the end will still neeed to be sorted anyways. So tell me for the new people in Canada whose home countries weren’t fortunate enough to have companies throwing away their money on urenals and little urenals or even just toilets, what are they to think when they walk into one of our washrooms here? People are going to start shitting in the piss holes and pissing on the floor out of confusion. Not that a labelling tactic would work either as we’ve seen with the new garbage disposal system.
I must admit though that those who are coming from countries who mostly cant afford toilets (let alone urenals) are doing a pretty good job. After all it is mostly literate people who are the ones shitting in the pissers and pissing on the floors. Sigh. What does this say about society?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~IMPORTANT INFORMATION~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Its been brought to my attention that I completely omitted some very important information about my Christmas break and such that I am going out of my way to mention now in my first ever “special notice”.
It all began the a day before I left to head home for the break when I picked up my friend RapidFire068 (A.K.A. Mike Ammerata) from Yorkdale bus terminal. Him and a group of friends from my program and I all went to a pretty fancy restaurant named Moxy’s where we had some beer and good times. F.Y.I. Go to the washroom at Moxy’s — most beautiful washrooms in the world!
So RapidFire068 traveled home and back with myself and my mom. When we came back he stayed another night as well sharing great times in my new lone apartment! Guest’s have their own room now! ISN’T THAT EXCITING!
And now! RapidFire068 is coming back yet again to visit me in Toronto here where will continue on yet more incredible adventures in the big city.
Hope you are all well. I will be posting again soon this is just a “special notice” remember! So don’t be sad everybody!
For now,
Thomas Brown
Good afternoon everybody!
Hope the holidays treated you all well. Not much news or anything really to rant about because — well to be honest I just haven’t even thought about blogging because I’ve been so busy. My roommate, I guess ex-roommate would be more appropriate now, has moved out and upon my return to Toronto my Mom helped me wage WWIII on my apartment and cleaned everything to a livable state. I have been living alone since then, surprisingly not too lonely although a little bit lonely sometimes but not really .
Anh came to visit me this weekend that just past and we had a superb time together this weekend gallivanting about Toronto. We actually went to ‘The Orbit Room’ which is the bar in the little Italy district that Rush’s Alex Lifeson (Zivojinovich) owns. We didn’t stay long however we moved on and explored some more of the city. All in all this semester is off to a great start with 5 great courses that I am very excited to learn about. On top of all this, this semester is leading up to our internship this summer which is another aspect of the BSD(Bachelor of Software Development) program that I am stoked to experience.
Game wise… ugh. My XBOX gave me the RROD(Red Ring of Death) which is gamer slang for ‘broken’. I did call Microsoft however and as good of world dominator’s as they are, they are shipping me a new XBOX 360, extending my warranty by 3 years AND giving me a free month of XBOX live to make up for time lost with my baby.
Been playing lots of acoustic guitar lately as well. Been writing some pretty songs on it too. Its rare for me to get the urge to go ahead and write lyrics to a song but with the recent venture back into the acoustic world I’ve had the urge to sing many a prayer. But haven’t. Oh well. Thats CD I’m supposed to make… ya well heres some more news…
With my program I’ve been introduced to many interesting things including new Operating Systems. An operating system I have been itching to get on my laptop for a very long time now is a Linux distribution of some sort. So before the break I ordered some CD’s, which were free by the way (gotta love open-source), to install Ubuntu (A Linux distribution) on my laptop as a dual boot to Windows XP. HOWEVER, when I tried to install Ubuntu as a dual boot it appeared as though I chose the wrong partition to install it on overwriting my current XP installation. SO I figured ‘what the hell’ I’ve lost everything now, might as well do it right while I can. I spent nearly 2 days trying to perfect this but I currently have a TRIPLE boot of Windows XP, Windows Vista, AND Ubuntu the Linux distro. I did lose all my files and programs in the process of it all though which is rather disappointing. But I will be writing a tutorial of how to do it properly in the near future but you have to be willing to compromise everything on your hard-drive so the easy work around to that is to back everything you want to keep up.
How does that explain the lack of recording in my life? Well with the loss of all my data I lost all my software and I have no software to effectively record music with at the moment but I will get to it everybody. I’m just trying to get ramped up with everything I need for school first then I will be getting the mini-studio going again as soon as possible.
For now, I hope life is treating you all well. I will be back with a tutorial and some news soon!
Thomas Brown
Dear reader,
After the recent sepulture of my third semester at Seneca College, I’m relieved to know I am one of two students from a group of thirty who have survived this long in the hell known as BSD (Bachelor of Software Development). Although it hasn’t been easy I’m proud to be where I am. Recently, I was nominated and picked to receive a job offer as a tutor for students in my program which has proven to be a rather provocative offer making more dollars an hour than I did working in the software development firm I worked in this summer. Who I still do work for I might add, although it is on a contract which gives me the flexibility to do work when I want and still maintain an employed status, which is wonderful and will look good on the resume someday with the contract details omitted.
As I’m sure all of you know I am dating a Vietnamese girl named Anh. We’ll have been together for two years in February so I’m pleased to report that to you all. Anh is in her second year at Laurentian University doing her Bachelor Degree in Science specializing in Biology. She is working towards becoming a professor at the university level someday.
Hard Rock Cafe - Yonge & Dundas - 2007 sometime
Please contain your aww’s.
Living alone in Toronto is a challenge I will meet head on in the upcoming semester as recent conflicts between my roommate and landlord have left me without a roommate. Unwilling to sacrifice this gorgeous apartment or the awesome location I have chosen to stay and fill in the rest of the rent money with yet even more money that I don’t have *sigh*.
I’m also working slowly but surely on a small CD which will hopefully contain five tracks of original songs I’ve written and maybe a couple bonus covers. But don’t expect to see that in the near future with school the way it consistently is every semester. Speaking of music though I did attend yet another Dream Theater concert this year. I also attended a Rush concert with the family but as big of a Rush fan as I am I have to admit Dream Theater was a hundred times better along with their crowd.
Other than that I have been playing my guitar actively and running a small blog which can be located at http://www.tjbro.com/blog: not for the faint at heart.
Anyways, thats my little update for the year I’m sure there are about a million other things I could include here but due to limited space; wont. If you want to contact me, please feel free to do so at tjbro@hotmail.com. Don’t forget you have a Software Developer in the family and if theres money to be made I want to know about it! Take care everybody I wish you the merriest of Christmas wishes this year. Looking forward to a greener 2008 — turn the lights off when your not using them!
Thomas J. Brown
So this is going to be a quicky just to keep everybody up to date since I didn’t write one all of last week. Oopsie! So first thing in the news I want to share with you guys is talk over opening nation mobile tracking. Basically, the government in their efforts to follow in the states’ footsteps has proposed the idea of monitoring cellular phone activity throughout Canada. D00d were CANADA! Give us a break Harper! As if that wasn’t enough, the recent soar in our dollar has made our sister nation stop buying as much as they used to from us. Understanding that this is just business I still think its a bit pathetic that Americans can’t go even a year paying a little bit more for importing goods, after all Canada has been doing it for years!
In other news, a group of 8 year old hockey players got in an awesome brawl last week. I thought it was wonderful but its raised alot of controversy. I’m sure if Jack Thompson had anything to do with Canada he’d jump all over this as yet another opportunity to put the gaming community down. Perhaps would should start banning sports games with fighting since you know thats probably where the 8 year olds got the idea anyways.
Reading the star I came across an interesting article pointing out that out of all Ontarians the Toronto population are among the poorest group of them all!!! This is bad news for me as you know since I live in Toronto! Seems as though everything is going downhil with the upcomming internet bandwidth dilemma and this whole poor thing in Toronto. But living in Toronto you see alot of people driving around in Mercedes and BMW’s etc. So this makes we wonder if this poverty issue is more than a cost of living issue or might it be a population issue, an materialism issue etc. People seem to need to show off their money down South whether they have it or not which always baffles me but what can you do.
My ongoing struggle with the geese has continued, once again finding them all still in the field at York. Except this time was especially interesting. The geese were up to their stomachs in snow. So after classes that day a friend and I decided maybe we can scare them South. So we ran into the field waving our jackets in the air and yelling but despite our best efforts the geese remained. I guess its only a matter of time now before they freeze to death in that stupid field of frozen geese shit.
Other than that theres not much else I wanna tell you guys about. My girlfriend got into a dilemma with school last week but we’re planning on doing a joint blog to explain that to everybody. Until then, take care everybody I’ll be sure to start writing again after exams!
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