Well, it’s that time of year again. I made up another CD of the songs I’ve been listening to all year, and I present them to you here, for your listening pleasure. This year has been excellent musically, and required the creation of two editions of the brettmix. The first is the collectors edition, which is 2 CDs and a good representation of the year’s music.  Next is a single edition, where all the songs would fit on one CD. And so, without further ado:

Collectors CD; Disk 1
[01] Queen - Bohemian Rhapsody
[02] Scott Weiland - Lady your roof brings me down
[03] Thom Yorke - Analyse
[04] Kid Koala - Skanky Panky
[05] Blue October - X amount of words
[06] Paul Oakenfold - Faster kill pussycat
[07] Death in Vegas - Dirge
[08] Broken Social Scene - Handjobs for the holidays
[09] The Beta Band - Lion thief
[10] Tricky - Black steel
[11] Bright eyes - Sunrise, sunset
[12] Paul Simon - Diamonds on the soles of her shoes
[13] Kalyanji Anandji - My guru
[14] Captain Tractor - The last saskatchewan pirate
[15] Daft Punk - Technologic

Collectors CD; Disk 2
[01] Tom Cochrane - Lunatic fringe
[02] Stan Getz - The girl from ipanema
[03] Gare Du Nord - Pablos blues
[04] AR Rahman - Mumbai theme tune
[05] The Herbaliser - Mr Chombee has the flaw
[06] Thunderball - The panther
[07] Sian featuring Rachel Roberts - Beautiful Day
[08] Gnarls Barkley - Crazy
[09] Wolf Parade - You are a runner and i am my fathers son
[10] Evanescence - Sweet sacrifice
[11] Brooklyn Bounce - Get ready to bounce
[12] DJ count - Sesame Street on ecstacy
[13] William Shatner - Has been
[14] John Prine - Its a big old goofy world
[15] America_a_horse_with_no_name.mp3
[16] Smog - Bloodflow

Single CD
[01] Queen - Bohemian Rhapsody
[02] Scott Weiland - Lady your roof brings me down
[03] Thom Yorke - Analyse
[04] Blue October - X amount of words
[05] Paul Oakenfold - Faster kill pussycat
[06] Death in Vegas - Dirge
[07] Broken Social Scene - Handjobs for the holidays
[08] The Beta Band - Lion thief
[09] Gnarls Barkley - Crazy
[10] Tricky - Black steel
[11] Bright eyes - Sunrise, sunset
[12] Wolf Parade - You are a runner and i am my fathers son
[13] Paul Simon - Diamonds on the soles of her shoes
[14] Kalyanji Anandji - My guru
[15] Evanescence - Sweet sacrifice
[16] William Shatner - Has been

They are split up into CDs, and all fit on that archaic and highly scratchable media. As most of us use mp3 players, I’d recommend grabbing the Collectors Edition, and just enjoying some good music. Hope you enjoy!

People <30 who smoke
What is wrong with this demographic? More on them specifically in a moment. Smokers in general really bother me. They seem to have this idea that as smokers, they have special “rights”. Wrong. I am tired of you congregating right in front of the entrances to malls and office buildings so that I have to make my way through their filthy haze. I hate walking behind one on a sidewalk. I hate going places that have a smoking section, cause we all know, thats not going to work.

But I have a special hate for young people who smoke. I pose this question to them: ARE YOU STUPID? Seriously, did you not know that smoking is bad for you? I don’t want to hear all of these lame excuses like “my parents smoked so I was addicted.” No. At some point, you made the decision to go the store, buy cigarettes and a lighter, put it in your mouth, light it up, breathe deeply and repeat until you had smoked the whole pack….and then you made that same decision again. You are part of the AADAC generation. You were taught better, it was mandatory. You went to the assemblies in the gym. You sat on the hardwood floors with the rest of us. You were warned; warned thoroughly and in no uncertain terms. I was there and I saw you start smoking anyways. You seem to have no sense of self-preservation. And that baffles me!

I understand that they are addicted and I know that’s a hard thing to overcome. You see, NOW you are addicted. But there was a point at which you were not. You chose to become addicted.
I have really tried to understand the logic in this decision. Did you do it to look cool? To impress someone? To rebel against someone? Perhaps you thought these were valid reasons at the time you started to smoke. But now that you are addicted, how important do those reasons seem now? Was it worth it?

People love to debate health care, especially in Canada where public health care is almost a lyric in our national anthem. But the leading cause of lung cancer is smoking. This is no secret. Every time you smoke, you kill a tiny piece of yourself. And it’s costing ME money. I don’t know how things should be setup, but why do responsible people have to pay a price for people who make stupid choices?

The research is absolutely undeniable. Smoking will kill you. And not just kill you, but kill you in a gruesome, prolonged, torturous manner. Please stop now. You are smarter than this. It’s disturbing to see so many people committing mass suicide.

So, have you ever wanted to just screw around with some sort of UI that gave you access to manipulate a few very core elements in some sort of virtual world, where you could destroy it all with fire? Well, I aim to ease your pain. Check out this site!

Some instructions - you can control the amount of water, salt, sand and oil that come down.  You can control the weird spirally thing, and you can use the controls at the bottom to setup spouts, light things on fire, or erase lines you’ve done.  The cera stuff burns like a candle.  It’s all very fun with a bit of playing.  For example, try to pool up some oil, and light that on fire - it’s fun!

Last night I was at Wal-Mart, doing some Christmas shopping and just casually looking around the store, hoping that something would pop out and say “BUY ME!“. Christmas shopping is one of my least favorite activities, because everyone I know has everything they want.

So, as we are wandering, a woman comes on the PA -
 ”Your attention please, we have a code blue…”

What? I thought this was Wal-Mart, not K-Mart. What is a code blue? Is it something someone I know is going to want?

“….Please exit the building immediately. Code BLUE! Evacuate immediately!”

I thought it was a joke, or at least something minor. Some kid puked, or there was a mustard spill at the McDonald’s. No big deal, so I wasn’t running for the doors. I sort of milled around for a bit, looking around to see what everyone else was doing.

As I was walking towards the door, one of the Wal-Mart ladies, you know who I am talking about, 37 pieces of flair, came up and started to prod me.

“Sir, you have to leave the building immediately! Right now, sir!”

I, of course, was in a joking mood…

“Um, sure, I’m going. So what is a code blue anyways? Wouldn’t a code red be more serious? Why do I have to leave?”

Whoa! OK Wal-Mart lady, I’m going. I don’t even like your crappy store.

As I was walking out, I did notice that the people who were in the notorious “Customer Service” line did not evacuate. And I can’t blame them. I once stood in that line for an hour and half.

As soon as I got home, I had to find out what a code blue was. I point you to Google Answers. (R.I.P.)

As I read that code blue is a BOMB THREAT, I sort of had this eerie feeling. I didn’t take the threat very seriously.  But neither did a lot of the people in the WTC. And I don’t blame them, I would be like.

“A what hit the building??? A plane??? Yeah, OK, say hi to the ‘Fan Man’ for me.”

Interesting thought anyways.

I don’t think anyone’s posted about the DS, so I will. I bought mine a couple weeks ago - mostly to copy Brett, but also because it’s awesome ;) If you’re looking for a sleek, easy to use game system that’s just plain fun, you cant lose.

It’ll run you about $150 + games ($20-$50 each). You’ll want to buy a screen protector & game case, too (~$20).

I’ve never owned a hand held game, but I have owned most of the Nintendo consoles + an XBox. Hand held games never interested me until I played this one. Soon after, I wanted my own!

Nintendo is doing a really good job of making things that are just plain fun. It’s easy to use, and loaded with features. The game titles I’ve played so far are totally addictive.

My favorite things about the DS:

• Wireless multiplayer - is no hassle. It just works!
• Internet Play - is almost just as easy.
• Game Sharing - I don’t have to own a copy of the game if a friend wants to play it with me. This is brilliant on Nintendo’s part.
• Dual Screens - seems like a dumb idea, but isn’t.
• Sleek Design - face it - it looks cool!
• Fun Games - Nintendo has a legacy of great titles to build from.
• Alarm Clock - It’s just a small feature, but I think it’s cool. I always want to take an alarm with me when I travel - now I have it! (I guess I have my cell phone, too…)
• Demo Games - You can download a demo of games from your friends, or from retailers. Take EB Games, for example. If you bring your DS, you can download demos of games & movies. You don’t even have to ask.

There’s one thing that bothers me - the Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection (IE - playing on the internet for free) is confusing because your WFC ID is connected to both your game card and your DS. Frankly, I don’t understand it. But it sounds complicated if you want to share your game card with someone.

Also - you can only download one demo (from a friend or a store) at a time. And once you turn the power off on your DS, it’s gone. I think that’s fair, though.

Opera has released a DS web browser in Japan & the UK. It’s supposed to come to N.A. any time now…

By popular demand, I’ll finally write up this trick. I’ve been using this for a while now to upgrade one Fedora install to another.

Basically, I hate CDs. Especially burning them for an install. You can use this trick to install Fedora with absolutely no disk. It does, however, require a previous Linux install and grub. I’m sure you can do this with Lilo, or whatever, too. This will work for any Red-Hat based distro (CentOS, RHEL, etc…), and the basic idea probably applies to others.

Note - I’m assuming you know what you are doing already. This isn’t really a ‘how-to’; it’s just a quick reference.

Basic idea:
There is a boot disk .iso on the first CD. You can copy the kernel & ramdisk from the boot disk to your hard disk, and tell grub to temporarily boot that instead. This basically amounts to booting from the boot disk. From there you can do an NFS install, HDD install, or whatever.

Step-by-step:
1 - Put the .iso’s on a publicly shared NFS server
2 - ‘mount -o loop disk1.iso mount_point‘
3 - ‘mount -o loop mount_point/images/boot.iso mount_point2‘
4 - cp mount_point2/isolinux/vmlinuz /boot
5 - cp mount_point2/isolinux/initrd.img /boot
(note - make sure you aren’t wiping out something important in those steps)
6 - reboot
7 - when you get to grub, edit one of the definitions, and boot from /vmlinuz with an initrd of /initrd.img, rather than your usual kernel & ramdisk.
8 - This will boot you into anaconda, which will let you load from the NFS server you set up

1. People who ride the elevator for 1 floor.
I work in a building of 14 floors and I work on the 11th. I don’t think it’s unreasonable for me to ride the elevator. That would be a long walk up the stairs. But every morning when I get on, there is always someone who gets off on the 2nd floor. And this is after waiting for 3 or 4 minutes for the elevator. The same company that has the 2nd floor also has the 3rd floor, and I often find people riding the elevator in both directions between the two. LAME!

2. The phrase ‘In terms of’
Concise language is somewhat of a lost art. It is my opinion that the best way to say something is the easiest way. Let’s look at an example:

Incorrect
“In terms of taste, these Apple Jacks are great.”
Correct
“These Apple Jacks taste great.”

“In terms of” doesn’t have a purpose. It doesn’t actually communicate anything or enhance the communication. It doesn’t describe anything or hold any meaning. It is the equivalent of starting sentences with “Um…”. I am pretty sure that people just use it to sound smarter. But concise language sounds smarter. Adding redundant words to sound smarter is like adding perfume or a lace border to your resume. It will probably have the opposite effect than the one you are going for.