Category — Daily Musings

So in a few shorts hours I will be on a plane on my way to Europe for 5 weeks. The trip will take me through Spain, France, Iceland and Germany. I will try throughout my trip to give little updates via my blog: http://blog.kloppmagic.ca, as well as upload a few select photos to my Flickr account: http://www.flickr.com/photos/kloppster/. Thats all for now.

This Saturday in Vernon I built my brother a website for his new business. Check it out: ltwakeboard.ca. Also if you need some kickass wakeboard towers, racks, accessories for your boat, let me know!

ted.com is:

TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from those three worlds. Since then its scope has become ever broader.

The annual conference now brings together the world’s most fascinating thinkers and doers, who are challenged to give the talk of their lives (in 18 minutes).

Anyway ted.com showcases videos of these conferences. I have found myself completely addicted to this site lately. Some really fantastic presentations. Here is a list of a few of my favorites so far:

Hans Rosling reveals new insights on poverty:
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/140

Blaise Aguera y Arcas demos Photosynth:
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/129

Anand Agarawala demos his BumpTop desktop:
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/131

Evelyn Glennie shows how to listen:
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/103

George Ayittey on Cheetahs vs. Hippos:
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/151

Euvin Naidoo on investing in Africa:
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/154

What are your favorites?

What better way to recover from a weekend of binging than on the Arrow Lake in a canoe.

Departing Paris Sept 12 @ 2:15pm Arriving Reykjavik 3:45pm

Iceland better get ready for a couple of Canadians.

Today I had one of my geekiest conversations online with someone from work. It all started with me sending him a link to an OSCON review where the author said:

“The day ended with the Mozilla party off-site. The band was good, but the free (as in “free beer” and “freedom”) beer was awful. Someone should fork the beer and make it better.”

Well that kind of sparked this random conversation:

tom: hahahaha

tom: LOL

tom: then there would be a bunch of forks and the base beer would become watered down

stefan: yeah, and several of the forked beers would stop being actively developed on, and would eventually get exploited causing mass food poisoning

tom: then Linus would take the side of one of the more obscure beers and it would enter the mainstream trunk

stefan: hahaha yeah! Eventually a smooth, easy to drink beer would hit the market, with an african name meaning “Goes down Easy”. It would start gaining popularity due to it’s over simplicity to pour into a glass or mug.

tom: LOL!

tom: but there will be the “hacker” beers with names like Deviant that have a huge amount of drinkers loyal to it

tom: and fring beers that come on strong then after a few years the taste changes becuase the hops and barley
maintaners give up, and people start drinking the African one

stefan: Anheuser Bush, not wanting to miss out on the action, starts selling hangover cure vouchers to one of the fledging OS beer companies.

tom: Molson takes them to court saying they are inrfinging on their brewing patents

tom: then fails to tell them which ones

stefan: The talk in the OSB community is that Molson is full of it, and that you cannot patent simple hops and barleys

tom: ….but the average beer drinker continues to drink it molson becuase its the dominant brand on the market, even though it sucks and makes your bladder crash on an hourly basis

stefan: A once fringe beer, is now starting to make waves as well in the beer market. Building on top of the OSB recipe, they release iBeer with a strong marketing campaign of silhouettes of people drinking beer to trendy indie music.

tom: Molson then tries to revamp its product to compete by adding trasparent labels and eye-candy, but it takes 5-years of developemnt and the product inside still blows

tom: hahahah….”Hi, I’m a Molson Canadian”

tom: “And I’m an iBeer”

stefan: “Whats the matter Molson Canadian?” “I am just sooo bloated. My maker things it is ok to fill me up with preservatives, and other bad things that just make me so very unpure”

tom: “Oh see iBeer doesn’t have that problem. I just taste good right out of the box”

stefan: hahaha oh this is so awesome… I should blog this conversation

tom: I was thinking the exact same thing

The Touring Van crew are proud to present: Touring Van – World Wide Tour.

Go get it here: http://www.touringvan.com/dvd.html

I finally got around today to booking my flight to Europe. Will be leaving on the 25th of August and bumming around until the 26th of September. Tentative plan is to meet up with Jason in Valencia for La Tomatina, the big tomato fight festival. After that will likely spend some time in Spain, Portugal, and maybe a stop over into Morocco. Then I will loop back and start heading towards Germany. Likely a stop over in Paris to visit a cousin, maybe a dip into Italy, and then finish it all off in Bavaria for the Oktoberfest.

Got a new monitor, the HP w2207. Probably the best 22″ widescreen on the market right now… Let me just say, it is fabulous.

You have to give it up for them for doing the most on their Canadian tour. This is just awesome:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UOl1e5FRAUc

I just went through my photos from the past 3 months or so and uploaded a whole bunch of them. Not to mention a bunch from Coachella. Check it out at: http://photos.kloppmagic.ca

So Lester and me arrive into LA around 4:30pm. We pickup our rental car, head down to Snata Monica for a little breather, then pickup Joe. After having some dinner, and waiting out the rush hour traffic we make our way to a grocery store to stock up on camp food, then head out of town. As we are heading out we inadvertantly miss our exit, which turned out to be a good thing. As we were driving I ask Joe, “Hey, where in LA is that ice cream sandwich place you took us to last time we were here?”

Well it just so happened we were right in the neighborhood. So another short detour, and we were all munching on some fresh Diddy Riese ice cream sandwiches. We finally got going out of town, much later than expected, but alas we had nothing but time, and lots of road to drive.
We arrived at Coachella around 2am thinking we would have to be tip toeing into camp to setup our tent. To our surprise however there was a solid stream of cars going into the campground. It was shocking actually, my first glance at what would become my home for the next 3 days. A giant open field with thousands of tents already setup, and hundreds of people in line, or in the process of setting up their tents.

We ourselves got in line and in no time at all we were given out a plot of land to setup our tent. The first thing that struck me about the setup was how organized things were. The field was completely segregated into small organized plots, in which you were given to setup your tent. Depending on how big your party was, determined the size of plot you were given. The plots were organized in lines, with pathways in between them.

By the time we got our tent up their was already a new line of plots being filled up, and after our walk around the campsite (where we watched the drum circle get busted by cops) there was another row being setup. We finally headed to bed sometime between 3 and 4am as the campers continued to pour in.

The next mourning was like waking up after a first snowfall, where you look around in disbelief at how different your surroundings have become. instead of snow however, we were looking around and seeing tents, loads of tents, tents where 4 hours ago their had been no tents, and of course that constant stream of new campers flowing into the camp grounds.

I took a second walk around the campgrounds now in the light to discover that things were even more organized that I had gathered the night before. Their were rows of porta-potties around the outside of the campgrounds, a bunch of portable showers, a food court area, an internet cafe and phone charge station, and a general store. Got to love roughing it.

Around noon we met up with a friend of Joe’s named Sandeep and his friend Nick (or Nico) who would be camping with us. We had requested a larger plot so they could setup beside us, so that all worked out well. Sandeep and Nico where both really cool guys, and was glad to have them camping with us. They got their tent setup in no time, and afterwards we were ready to hit the first show of the weekend.

My Coachella story starts at the beginning of the year when they announced the lineup. Their had been rumors that Rage would be making a comeback at Coachella, and when they announced that it would be happening I knew I had to be at the show. So I sent the word out that I would be going to see if any of my friends wanted to come with me. Lester was in, and so was Joe. Lester and me had talked about possibly going to SXSW this year, however the lineup for Coachella was too good, so we figured this was the way to go. Anyway after the tickets went on sale we quickly all bought 3 day passes, and Lester and myself picked up cheap flights down to LAX for that weekend.

Now to backtrack a bit. In November of last year I tried to renew my passport, only to have it rejected due to a problem with my guarentar. I didn’t have time during the holiday season to get a new application done so I waited until the new year. This turned out to be a huge mistake as the new passport regulations imposed by the US government were just taking effect that required all non US citizens flying into the country to have a passport. This meant massive lineups at passport offices, and huge backlogs of applications.

After sorting out a new guarentar I sent out my new passport application in the middle of January. I figured it would be quicker to send the application than to go into an office. how wrong I was.

Fast forward a few months to the beginning of April. I have still yet to get any word back regarding my passport application, when I get another problem on my shoulders. Lester sends me an email and says, “Hey Stefan, did you remember to buy your camping pass, because it looks like they are now all sold out.”

So not only do I not have a passport, but now I don’t have any accommodations for that weekend. Things are not looking good for me. I call the passport office to inquire about my application. They tell me they have still not processed passports from the day my was received. They tell me I should wait another week and if it is still not there go and do an express application. So I go back to my parents place for a week to relax, and hope that my passport will be in the mail when I get back.

I get home from my trip to my parents to find a package from Canada Post. I quickly feel it out; the situation looks bad, the envolop appears too narrow to contain my passport. I then tear it open to find another rejected application. This time not because my guarentar was rejected (that part was fine), but because I failed to have him sign a photocopy of my drivers license. Retarded.

So now here I sit a good 10 days away from Coachella without a passport or accommodations, things couldn’t get worse could they?

Well I start to fill out my new passport application, and in order for the passport office to do an express application you need to show prof of travel. So I go and print out my flight only to notice that I made a huge flight, the date of my flight down to LAX was completely wrong. It had me leaving Friday instead of Thursday, which would have meant I would have missed an entire day of Coachella.

At this point I broke down. It seemed as if everything was going wrong with this trip, and that on some higher level something was conspiring against me to make this trip not happen. That is when I came to my senses and realized two things. All of these problems were my own doing, and all of these problems were fixable.

So that night I payed the $300 additional dollars and got my flight changed to the right date. The next day I brought my new passport application down to the Richmond passport office at 5am and waited with hundreds of others. Finally I did an extensive search online for people selling Coachella camping passes and reserved a car for the weekend.

In a few days I found a person in Vancouver selling camping passes for face value, and my passport was due for pickup a day before my flight.

Stress subsided, mistakes corrected, trip back in motion.

Thursday, 2pm sitting in an Air Canada plane, I finally realize the trip is going to happen, and that in a few short days I would be seeing Rage Against the Machine.

–

I will be posting my Coachella review and photos soon. Stay tuned.

So this week I got a new laptop. It is a pretty sweet little unit. Anyway it came preinstalled with Vista, which after trying it out, was somewhat cool, but nothing really too mind blowing. My plan was to do a dual boot on this machine, the Vista partition so that I can have a gaming platform and a second partition of Linux for my coding/everything else. I installed Ubuntu on the laptop, which is overly easy and painless. After tweaking things up nicely I decided to try out this package I had seen mentioned around a few times. It is called Beryl. After spending a good part of a morning trying to get it to work I finally got it going, and let me say, WOW. Beryl is simply amazing. It blows Vista out of the water in terms of what it can do, and the potential of it as well. I made a little video of some of the fancy features it has. Check it out here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ROXaWNJMrX0

I highly suggest doing a youtube search for beryl and you will see some other kickass versions of it. It literally blew my mind when I first got it working. It takes user friendly to a whole new level!

So last Wednesday I got a little over impulsive and bought a weekend pass to the Coachella music festival in Indio California. I am pretty excited about it. There are 30+ bands I am looking forward to seeing, and most importantly, I will get to finally see Rage Against the Machine.