📁 11-23

I don’t come from a stable family. Shit was rough for all of us because of a year long tour in the early years of the Vietnam war. It’s not like it was all bad. It was just something that not everyone could understand. We adapted to living in low income housing, and we adapted to the chaos that sometimes erupted both at home and around home.

Too hot for earmuffs/plugs.

Yea, he was primarily a chef, that’s what he was known for. It’s called a tour for a reason. All were assigned patrol and watch shifts. So most people on tour saw or did some shit they didn’t want to.

Some real shitty shit.

The donation button for this website redirects to the 🔗Wounded Warrior Project donation page, because even though I’ve been stuck in the same location for several minutes, a lot of people need the push more than I do.

This website is not an affiliated with the Wounded Warrior Project

The mystery of the mysterious new donation button has been solved.

For security reasons I won’t be posting any screenshots from the new (!) router config. Nextcloud/Snap and Jellyfin/Docker/Snap are all synced up and doing what they do best now. In the future before I sync Nextcloud with my phone, I’ll be sure to check the box to skip the upload of duplicate photos/videos. The fewer headaches the better.

Router related randomly rotated reticulating roadmap screenshots.

WiFi 6 is fun right? Disabled that within the first few hours for .. power saving reasons? Static IPs, DoS protection, Firewall, and SSH were all up and running in less than an hour. I had to re-read DoS a few times from the router config before it dawned on me what they meant. I’m so use to seeing 🔗DDoS that 🔗DoS may as well be an acronym for spacecraft parts.

Ah yes, I too have an SSH, and I have a DDoS.

It’s 23.10, what more can I say? With no prior information of 23.10, I have no idea what changes were made (other than wallpaper) from 23.04 to 23.10.

Way to research your subjects breh

What I can say is that I haven’t seen an interruption in any of the server-y stuff nor day to day desktop stuff. Pretty much.

Pretty much.

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### November 04, 2023 ###
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Swapped the Steam 🔗.deb for the 🔗Flatpak using Discover, and Nvidia from 525 to 535 (no GUI for a few minutes) with a 🔗vconsole. Thankfully, 🔗nmtui was already installed.

Seriously, nmtui should be packaged with everything! EVERYTHING! Fite me irl

At first I reinstalled Kubuntu Desktop and SDDM to be sure there wasn’t any corrupted files, then I updated Nvidia from 525 to 535 via Software & Updates and checked the 🔗radio button for Using NVIDIA driver metapackage from nvidia-drive-535 (proprietary, tested). First time I accidentally installed the open source 🔗Nouveau driver by mistake. Also installed nvidia-driver-535 via Aptitude, and then update-grub on the OS that generates Grub for this OS (whoops).

Da 🔗blob.

Most of my issues may have been from the brainiac moment of fixing grub by installing an additional copy of Kubuntu on the same SSD. Whelp, if nothing else, I have an additional copy of Kubuntu on the same SSD that I can use for work should this happen on a weekday. Will you help me remember to update-grub after every kernel change? No? Alright, I got this.

Games be damned. The work is more important.

Bloggers block? Shornt that title be for those that are mobile blogging these days? idk

Switching to Kubuntu 23.10 is going to be the most exciting thing in my life for the next month or so.

If I don’t post anything, I wish you all Happy Holidays!

Blah blah blah. Stuff about the x270 blah. Battery blah. Parts ecosystem blah. Linux compatibility blah.

Blog outlining extraordinaire.

Looks good so far.

SCIENCE? Science. Sprinkled in some 🔗razzle dazzle too.

After reading 🔗The Skeleton on the Skateboard book (1994), I made an honest and totally serious attempt to convince my friends to call me Skate. And I was totally and seriously 8 years old. I ‘invented’ tricks that were invented around the time I was born. Instead of calling one of the tricks a 🔗tictac, I named it the wiggle worm. For that period in time my favorite album was a coin toss between the Batman Forever Soundtrack and the original Ghostbusters Soundtrack. As proof, there’s a few songs from that era in the 🔗~/Music/Blog. My original Ghostbusters Soundtrack was on cassette. That’s just how bracingly cool I was back then.

The Wiggle Worm will forever be my new nickname. You’re welcome internet.

I never mentally grasped how to translate the physics of skateboarding in practice. But I was a participate for fourteen years before work life balance shifted the idea of injuries into the category of irresponsibility. I once did a very shakey 180 ollie down a six stair stairset at the local community college. I should have been a gap skater. I guess I was worried about becoming homeless from paying off hospital bills. A culmination of fourteen years of scrapped knees, elbows, and two busted wrists. There were a few attempts to 180 a seven stair somewhere in Downtown Gainesville (Florida); of course that was thwarted by the local police department.

The hoarders of skateboarding secrets scornfully looked on as I tried my best. Nearly certain I incidentally spawned the name of the local skateboard club known as ‘Lurk Nasty’. Lots of money was dumped into that endeavour. Hope it worked out for them–seemed like a lot of fun.

Hundreds of skateboard magazines, dozens of videos, dozens of skateboard decks, and all far too late.

🔗Pro stories often start with rolling around with friends, and sponsors taking notice a few years later

Skateboarding wasn’t a given for me. It’s not something I knew would be there when I stepped off the school bus. Some days I would unlock the back door to the house after school, and know I was coming home to a board I snapped yesterday. The first board that snapped was the last straw for my folks. I would sometimes go months without skating after snapping a board. It frustrated me to the point of selling all my video games and consoles to pay for skate decks.

NES, SNES, 🔗DMG Gameboy, Genesis, and my beloved Playstation 1. “Oh yah, he’s hard on shoes that one.”

It was something I thought about all day. It was what I was thinking about when I was looking out any window I would find while in class. For the classrooms with few windows, I looked inward instead. I believe one person noticed me looking at my math textbook book on top my uncomfortable desk. My gaze would have been as if the words of the book were 100 yards away. At first, I would try to comprehend the words, but my inner ambitions took over, and off my mind went; imagining how it would feel like to skate around the middle school. Nice new slabs of concrete. The thump of the wheels rolling over each gap in the pavement. And then my oversized pants would wrap up into the wheels, and there I’d go, spiraling out of control in my own daydream.

Skating around my middle school was literally a dream of mine. Shoot for the stars right?

The first board break happens simply because learning to land flip tricks exerts a lot of downward force on a glued stack of maple veneer. Oh course, when I did it, I landed in the middle of the board with all my weight on my front foot. I never purposely broke (AKA focused) a skateboard. There was a serious disconnect between what I said, and what my folks believed back then.

I thought I was mobbing varial flips. What I was actually doing was dolphin flips *shrugs*

I am now 39 years old, and it still pains me to think of all the fun I could have had, had my folks taken my interest in skateboarding seriously. Of course, this was after two years of carting around my boney self for baseball games and practice, and one eviction, so my story is a little different.

39 YEARS YOUNG! YOOOOOOO-LO!

There was also a knowledge disconnect at the time. My folks were reluctant to believe words on the internet. Whatever they learned about skateboarding outside of conversations with me (unbelievable conversations), where from action sports events like the X-Games. Professionals that land bolts all the time (feet over the axles/trucks). Accidentally breaking a board was inline with the legend of Nessie.

X-Games ‘street’ skatepark was more like a skatepark for vert dogs. Daewon Song still rips tho

All the magazines, and videos I ‘consumed’ were of street skating. A form of skateboarding in which there were fewer rules, a chance for handcuffs and an arrest record, but was more accessible to the average skateboarder. This also suited my ADHD temperament. The only skate park within a reasonable distance for a self starter youth was inaccessible, because it was part of a ‘club’ for the local university. In my town there was a real life chance of handcuffs and jail time for skating at a skatepark while young. That only stopped us until several police officers were called to kick us youths out of the park. I was sixteen, and at that point in time had only been to one other skatepark. A local rented a warehouse behind a Tacobell. The place smelled like a Christmas tree from all the unpainted pine wood, and it was only open for about a year. And at $5-10/day, it was not a place I could go skate at everyday. Flipside Skatepark (owned by Billy Rohan, and possibly Harold Hunter). Technically it was a pile of ramps and flatbar rails there were dragged out onto a tennis court every Thursday night. The local skateshop had a few flatbars for the locals too. Fluid Skateshop > Smoke Skateshop.

One time I read and re-read skateboarding magazines while I waited overnight at Toronto Pearson Airport. “…the [blah blah blah] is for unloading and loading only…”

At sixteen was when I realized skateboarding itself wasn’t something I could do as a career. Which was far later in the game than most people my age. I should have known this before I turned twelve. But I kept pushing forward with my obsession. Funds were tight, and there were hundreds of arguments. Had no control over my day dreams in class, and most teachers gave up trying to call my attention back to class after the first semester.

Poor sporting arguments. Use to envy those that could fall asleep in class. I had a backpack to guard–couldn’t do it.

There was a pushing force in the back of my mind that I’d later call ADHD that took over at a certain age, and made me realize that an early dream of becoming a Herpetologist was not a realistic goal. And so I pivoted to a dream of joining the U.S. Air Force. The idea of having my body subjected to the torture of flying in a jet was very appealing at the age of eight. It’s still one of the reasons I play first person shooter video games. Maps like 🔗DM-Morpheus (Unreal Tournament) come to mind–because flying. I was really excited about the prospect of signing up in ten years, and I guess I was so overeager that my father decided to test my resolve by regurgitating what he heard during basic training (from the early 70s). Since I was decent at catching a baseball, and had an awful batting average, and wasn’t capable of wrapping my head around surviving basic training (I would have excelled and learned computer science), my mind fully and totally pivoted to skateboarding. “I’m going to skate down Dead Man’s Curve one day. I promise.”

“Breh, you’re eight years old, how are you even going to survive basic training? Do you even basic training maggot lips?” Wait.. what?

When I saw that a new skateboard video review website was taking applications my sophomore year of high school for reviewers, I jumped on the chance. I wrote a three paragraph essay, and got a spot on their 🔗review roster. In a few weeks, a package of bright yellow tapes with handwritten labels were in my hands. With one package shipped free, my skateboard video collection grew by 90%. I was the original Granitesoul. I guess someone got out of jail and decided to bogart that handle while I was busy graduating high school. During the first semester of my senior year of high school I dropped out of reviewing for Skim The Fat (never liked that exclusionary name). I could either drop out of skateboarding, or drop out of high school. At the time I was also a fan of 🔗Bad Religion (which explains my Skimthefat.com profile picture).

When I was 16 I kickflipped in socks after a kid at our high school said he couldn’t skate my board because he wasn’t wearing his ‘skate shoes’. He also threatened students in one of my middle school classes. I was duty bound to wreck my socks.

With all that said, I’m pretty good at pretending I’m fluent in English.

Portioning out my weaknesses for the deranged 🔗pretendy-times since 1997.

If someone asked me if I skate today I’d say no. I’m no longer a skateboarder. That lifestyle drained out of me a long time ago.

Though I still see skate spots while driving around or watching TV. I can’t help it.

While I was still a lifestyle skateboarder at heart, I also started to teach myself table top skateboarding (fingerboarding). Learning how to ollie on a fingerboard accompanied 🔗28.8 baud modem sounds. At the time I was also teaching myself Photoshop, HTML, Quake 1 level editing and modding, and how to create Windows 98 sound themes (my brother’s partner at the time was thrilled with the new and very custom Beavis and Butthead sound theme). I learned a few tricks while waiting for instructional web pages to load.

The most difficult aspect of table top skateboarding is putting on the finger pants and finger shoes tbh. I’m one of the few to forego finger elbow and knee pads. I just like to go for it you know? “Whaaaaat?!” Also, Orcas are 🔗gnarly.

From outsiders of table top skateboarding, I was a kook. It was also a great past time to separate myself from women that were only interested in my mad wood chopping skills.

How many different and unique skills are involved in act of wood chopping? “Stay a while, and listen.” Probably a lot, I have no idea.

Just after high school, I had moved out of the apartment I staid at with my high school sweetheart, and her family. I found myself sharing a room with a long time friend, which was pretty cool. I had sent out a digital form of my demo tape to a fingerboard deck company out of Las Vegas, Nevada. This was before I transitioned from using a webcam to a S-VHS camera. I taught myself a little about video montages, and digitizing analog videos too.

5-0 pivot nosegrind, nollie flip 5-0, and hardflip 5-0 were kind of advanced back then

I found myself in a community of like minded people. We drilled out a hole in our Tech Deck trucks, slipped in a probably ok single axle, and used a tap and die set to thread the ends. Back then here was a decent amount of elbow grease that went into being able to use a fingerboard for more than thirty minutes without them falling apart. I borrowed my fathers mini manual drill for the job.

“Do you even single axle trucks breh?”

Switching to working full time, and dating someone that lived in Toronto, Ontario, Canada skidded my pro fingerboarding status to a halt.

Actually *adjusts imaginary glasses*, I filmed a pro level video part, but once I learned the video would be known as Amerikkka, I forfeited my fingerboarding ‘career’. I talked to one of the dudes that became a fixture in what is known as the fingerboard community back when he was this big nosed 15 year old working out of his father’s garage. I was jealous of his mad skills tbh

To be fair, the pay would have been like $2-5 a board. I’m not sure how it is now, but back then we designed our own board graphics, and the only professional fingerboarding equipment was all manufactured in Germany (~$300 for a complete fingerboard shipped to USA).

My design was really, really, bad. Let’s just say it was better for all of humanity that I never turned pro. I also included a very 🔗dissociative (to me) song in one of my contest submission videos. We also made all of our obstacles out of card board, and can-do-attitude scraps of whatever we could find. I made a big stair-set out of stacked, glued, and painted particle board, and a meticulously bent 5mm rod of nickle coated zinc.

It’s something I do now as a form of meditation. Meditation that involves a hint of practical physics.

“How about a hint of git off your high horse and mix me another cocktail.” “Breh, do you even Cosmopolitan?”

All these monies I’m saving from not drinking, binge snacking, energy drinks, or cigarettes has to be put to good use right?

“Breh, how many Starbucks is that fingerboard even worth?” Elevendy Starbucks my friends. Elevendy Starbucks.

There really was a somewhat logical line of thought involved in joining the world of skateboarding. And it all hinged off the idea that only way to continue my education (Air Force) was off limits.

My eight year old self still can’t watch Top Gun without thinking about how different my life would have been. If given the chance to go back in time, I wouldn’t change a thing.

Anyway, that’s my story behind the picture of the book I’ve included with this blog post.

“Breh, can you even ride down Dead Man’s Curve now that you’re all grown up?” Nope, not even a little bit.

Steve The Lamp just needs a USB conversion cord, and an RGB LED (smart bulb), and he’ll be set.

Alexa, turn on Steve please.. *Orc-ish chuckles*

In other non-Steve The Lamp related news, I may have found the ‘fix’ for this Avantree Oasis Plus Bluetooth transmitter I have on the desk. You see, under the rectangular non-skid rubber pad are four screws (one in each corner). With the correct plastic spudger it’s simple enough to pop the transmitter open. Once the case is open just need to remove the two screws that secure the antenna PCB in place. With that PCB removed, we have access to the micro RF cable connector. Unplug the cable, and tuck it safely away from PCB components. Bluetooth static issue fixed. This idea came to being after reading Amazon reviews for the 🔗Sennhesier BT T100–which does not have an external antenna. The antennae increased the range to like a 1/4 acre (0.1 hectares for those across the pond), which is well beyond an acceptable 20-30ft. If I was to order a new one, I’d 100% order the Sennheiser tbh.

“Where’s the video!?” Steve The Lamp is working on it ok? Give him time. His videos are works of art you know.

Alright, hear me out. My idea is a device that looks like an Amazon Echo with a motion detection activated camera. While that is not particularly interesting, what if the motion detector of this device FaceTimes your phone, so you can talk to your cat? In essence, Mr. Pimpkins can learn how to FaceTime you whenever it gets bored or lonely.

Mr. Pimpkins can now meow at you to fill its’ bowl from miles away! Because like seriously, the bowl is 90% full, and that is unacceptable.