“The mind is everything. What you think you become.”

Subject says it all.

I picked up a Sector 9 Ala Moana at Zumiez today for $159. I wanted a shorter board that I can use for commuting around town with, Something that’s easy to carve with so I  went with this board because of the sidewinder trucks, The all bamboo deck was a big plus however.

I took this board out for a ride once I got home and managed to bomb a hill at about 25-30mph and it handled it pretty well. However I ride more mellow slopes and have prefer more of a surfer style carve, So I removed the risers which were included, dropped the board a little lower which helped with tighter turns. I weigh about 130lbs so this board has very little flex with me which was a little of a bummer. I figure riders at around 160lbs it should have some pretty good flex.

The hardware is top notch, The quality is top notch, This is a really nice board for the money. For surf style you definantly can’t go wrong with this board.

Deck – Bamboo – Surf graphic & clear griptape

Trucks – Gullwing Sidewinder

Wheels – Sector 9 69mm

Risers – 3mm

I havn’t skated in about 10 years! And I wanted to get back into it, Nothing competitive though as I tend to overdue myself and get injured! I want to flow, carve and just do something chill. So! I built a longboard!

I took an old skateboard and relocated the trucks to the tails of the board. I removed the metal caps from the bushing and ran the trucks pretty loose to help with carving. The board rode pretty good, However turning was an issue as I got wheel bite on the board.

So I took a saw and notched out the board so the wheels have more clearance. Rounded off all the edges and applied some paint. A few hours of work and I turned a regular skateboard into a short/long board (shlongboard)

I have a dark sense of humor, So this would amuse me. The Cannibal Cafe which is now a dead site and no longer accessible without the mighty

. It was home to cannibalism online roleplay. However Armin Meiwes and his victim took it a little further…

Taken from wikipedia

Looking for a willing victim, Meiwes posted an advertisement at a website, The Cannibal Cafe, whose disclaimer mentions the distinction between reality and fantasy. Meiwes’s post stated that he was “looking for a well-built 21 to 40-year-old to be slaughtered and then consumed”. Bernd Jürgen Brandes then answered the advertisement. Many other people responded to the advertisement, but backed out; Meiwes did not attempt to force them to do anything against their will.

As is known from a videotape the two made when they met on March 9, 2001 in Meiwes’s home in the small village of Rotenburg, Meiwes amputated Brandes’s penis and the two men attempted to eat the penis together before Brandes was killed. Brandes had insisted that Meiwes attempt to bite his penis off. This did not work, though Meiwes was able to burst both of Brandes’s testicles by biting them. Ultimately, Meiwes used a knife to remove Brandes’s penis. Brandes apparently tried to eat some of his own penis raw, but could not because it was too tough and, as he put it, “chewy”. Meiwes then sautéed the penis in a pan with salt, pepper, wine and garlic, he then fried it with some of Brande’s fat but by then it was too burned to be consumed. He then chopped it up into chunks and fed it to his dog According to journalists who saw the video (which has not been made public), Brandes may already have been too weakened from blood loss to actually eat any of his penis. Meiwes read a Star Trek book for three hours, while Brandes lay bleeding in the bath. Meiwes apparently gave him large quantities of alcohol and pain killers, 20 sleeping pills and a bottle of schnapps, and finally killed him in a room that he had built in his house for this purpose, the Slaughter Room. After stabbing Brandes to death in the throat, he hung the body on a meathook and tore chunks of flesh from it; he even tried to grind the bones to use as flour. The whole scene was recorded on the two-hour video tape. Meiwes ate the body over the next 10 months, storing body parts in his freezer under pizza boxes and consuming up to 20 kg of the flesh

You can check out The Cannibal Cafe @

I’ve been bouncing from distro to distro since the late 90′s and very few have made it on my computer for more than a month. Jolicloud is one of those distros. I’m a Slackware guy, and for me to convert to a more “newbie’ish” distro means something.

Jolicloud is a “cloud” based os. After installation all of your system settings are stored on the Jolicloud server which is nice if you break an install or want to try out another distro, Once you reinstall Jolicloud all of your settings are back to the last saved state, which includes system settings, configs, apps installed, updates, etc.

Installation; Jolicloud uses the Ubuntu installation tool so the installation is simplifed and very basic. An install took me about 10mins

Appearance; Jolicloud has a very simplified ui, it’s very quick and responsive. It took me a day or so to get use to not having a console handy considering I’m use to console based apps. The layout is very simple and to the point and is like most of the other netbook based distros. However, the speed and responsiveness of Jolicloud is far greater than that of the other distros I’ve tryed.

Apps; Jolicloud doesn’t have a huge selection of apps but it should have everything you would need for a netbook os. However most of the “apps” are just desktop links to websites such as the facebook app or the grooveshark app.

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“The devil has put a penalty on all things we enjoy in life. Either we suffer in health or we suffer in soul or we get fat. — Albert Einstein, physicist

So this month I’ve received on average about 200 hits. Which is 200 more than I was getting last month before any content was put up (30 days ago) In this time I’ve managed to get recurring visits from 19 different people those visits being 2 or more spread out over the month. I even have one viewer in NY that has viewed this site 465 times!

The majority of the viewers are using Firefox and are surprisingly on Netbooks running Windows.

I knew when I bought a netbook it would be loaded down with alot of extra software that I don’t need. However I had no idea Windows 7 Starter was so limited in it’s functions. HP loaded the Mini (210) down with ALOT of extra software that isn’t needed in a netbook.

So, Here is my basic guide to speeding up a HP Mini netbook.

Start by doing a Windows Update.

Then remove any software you don’t need, This won’t necessarily speed up boot/shutdown time or even system responce, but will save hdd space. I ended up removing all the office software, all the HP addons, Backup software, etc. Pretty much everything but the basics including drivers. Removing all that junk may take you awhile.

Now go to your start menu and right click on Computer and select properties. Goto advanced system settings & navigate to performance options. Disable anything extra you don’t need. I ended up disabling everything except visual styles and drop shadows. While you have the advanced system settings open click on the Remote tab and disable remote assistance.

By now you problaby noticed you can’t change the desktop background on Windows 7 Starter. This little application will allow you to do that, It will also rotate images at set intervals – http://renaudgerson.fr/StarterBackgroundChanger/

Now it’s time to get some applications that use less system resources. For web browsing I use K-Meleon instead of IE/Firefox – http://kmeleon.sourceforge.net/

Instead of using Media Player, I prefer Billy for my mp3 collection – http://sheepfriends.com/?page=billy

And for streaming music/videos I use – http://www.videolan.org/vlc/

For IRC I use irssi – http://www.irssi.org/

Another handy tool is inSSIDer for tracking down wifi connections – http://www.metageek.net/products/inssider

————-UNDER CONSTRUCTION————-

I just picked up a HP Netbook as my main system… Less power consumption than my old Gateway NVU.

Other than Windows 7 Starter Edition, It’s a pretty nice system. Installing Ubuntu 10.04 tomorrow.