Alright, I’ve finally got some spare time… So, I moved to Auburn last weekend, and I love it here so far. I love being on my own. I love this house. I love my new job. My roommate is cool. Life is good.

I think I’m going to like working for my current employer. I’m enjoying work a little more than I expected, now that I’m finally getting a better handle on the computer language I’m using. My boss is pretty cool, too. He’s younger and a little bit more laid back than my last boss, which is a welcomed change. He also has a background in I.T., which means he’s more likely to understand what it takes to make things happen. A realistic view of things is a welcomed change. Of course, people at the office don’t know I’m here yet – so, I haven’t had to deal with the, uhm, well, let’s just say people aren’t coming to me with questions yet. I’m afraid that could turn into a strain on my productivity, not to mention that I’m not exactly the most patient person in the world, but if you’re reading this, you probably already knew that. Maybe I’m just worried about nothing; I hope so. We’ll see.

Anyhow, Donald left for Birmingham today, so I’ve got the house to myself for a week. Auburn is vacant right now. I hope it doesn’t get too boring.

Brittney is coming visit tomorrow. It’s been a while since I’ve seen her, so it’ll be nice to catch up.

The thought of spending my New Years with a certain someone makes me happier than all of the things listed above combined. We haven’t called each other yet tonight, but I hope that wherever she is, she’s enjoying herself — I’m thinking about you. =]

So, whether you wanted to know or not, that’s what’s on my mind. I hope all is going well for everyone else too.

I’m gonna go try to find something to do in this ghost town. Later.

I’m way too tired to say much about this right now, but tomorrow I’m moving to Auburn for a semester of work, for those who didn’t already know. I’ll be living with Donald and Joseph, and I’ll have the house with a hot tub, heated pool, and big screen HDTV to myself for two weeks while they’re in Birmingham for the holidays. =] You should come check it out.

Okay, don’t get me wrong… Life has been great lately for the most part. But… I would like to take this opportunity to get some things off my chest.

Gripe 1:
As many of you know, I’m moving out soon. So, I switched my house from DSL to Cable for our broadband pipe… It’s cheaper, a little faster, and tends to be a little less reliable. The reliability makes DSL worth it for me, but my family will never know the difference. So yeah, I made the switch about three days ago, and like clockwork Charter started having city-wide outages. Every fucking 15 minutes the cable TV will go out and, unlike before, take my internet connection with it. I can’t begin to explain how annoying this has been.

Gripe 2:
Silence is Defeat is a free shell project that I co-founded and have been running with a friend in California since the year 2000… The primary server has been up for over a year now without any major security breaches, which is *incredible* to those who completely understand the technical side. Basically, there are hundreds of very talented active users, some of which who are aggressively trying to take over the box, and to this day no one’s been able to do it. Since we haven’t had any problems, I started to get a little lazy and forgot to set certain file permissions back to the way they should have been set. So, some douche bag decided it’d be fun to abuse apache’s file permissions and delete everything apache had write access to. He or she ended up deleting all of the PHP files on chrisbrunner.com, silenceisdefeat.org, and wordsfromiraq.com/forum. Naturally, the latest backups from silenceisdefeat.org are a month old and I hadn’t yet backed up chrisbrunner.com or wordsfromiraq.com… That *REALLY* sucked. I was ready to break something. I thought everything was gone. I was so pissed.
It sucks even more for the idiot users who chmod‘d their entire home directories to 777 out of ignorance…
Well, I (obviously) ended up being able to recover chrisbrunner.com since very few files had their permissions set incorrectly. We are in the process of recovering silenceisdefeat.org from backups, and I was kind-of able to partially recover the WordsFromIraq forums. Anyway, I’ll live.

Gripe 3:
For those who don’t know, most of my programming experience is with C++ and PHP. I knew BASIC when I was 6 and learned QBASIC pretty well at some point in elementary school, but I haven’t touched those much since. I love C++ and PHP. They’re excellent languages in my opinion. Well, I agreed to learn ASP.NET for a new job that’s coming up. In all honesty, I don’t really want to touch ASP. I like PHP a lot and would much prefer not to learn a language that was invented by Microsoft. But, I figured, no big deal. It’s just a language. I’ll pick up a book, spend a few days on it, and add it to my list of experience. The problem is that in order to use ASP.NET, I need to learn either VB.NET or C#. C# has a good bit of support in the OSS community, and I’ve heard a lot of good things about it. Since I already know and dig C++, C# would be an easy next step, and it seems cool that I’d be able to develop stand-alone apps with the same language that would enable me to code web apps. In addition, there is lots of support for C# in the OSS community. So, I could code apps for both Linux (my primary OS) and Windows with the same language.
But, the people that I’m going to be working for already stated that all code must be in VB.NET. As a C++ programmer, this really sucks. Instead of being able to spend my time learning the “next step” that would be ultra-advantageous and of interest to me, I’m going to have to take time to learn an inferior language. It feels unnatural… like I’m taking a major step backwards… I want to puke.
Of course, I’m going to do it anyway. I’m sure it’ll pay off. I’m sure it’ll be easy, so it won’t be so bad, and it never hurts to have another language and more experience on your resume.

Gripe 4 (Bonus!):
I’m starting to question the merits of a CS degree thanks to slashdot articles like this one.

Wow, I hope you’re not still reading. If you are, thanks for listening. That had to be boring as hell. Anyway, that’s all for now. Later.

So, uhm, yeah… this weekend was great. It was Donald’s 20th birthday. So, of course we had to celebrate. It just so happened that the Auburn/Alabama game was going on the same day only yards away from us.

While I was down there, I invited some old friends from high school to the party, who in turn invited several of their own friends… it got pretty crowded… (sorry Joy)
We had over 200 drinks, but the poor guy next door was kind enough to offer us free access to his keg… with a big crowd outside, we started volunteering people to do keg-stands… Donald did it for the first time and was able to hold on for about 30 seconds… we were proud.

Needless to say we floated the keg in less than 20 minutes… Sucks for Joy’s next door neighbor. We felt kinda bad, but he was too drunk to care… oh well.

So… after a keg stand, and god-knows-how-many more beers, Joseph and I started taunting eachother, like we’ve been doing every time we get drunk for the last year or so… I always tell him that I’m gonna beat his ass (which is funny if you know us well — I’m out of shape and he’s a built almost-pro boxer), and he always says something to the same effect, but he never has a pair of gloves handy… Well, this time he did, and we boxed for almost half an hour. It was crazy. I had a blast… Joy took pics:

See the look on the people’s faces? That’s the oh-my-god-Brunner-is-crazy look.

Ouch. He obviously got some good punches in.

…but so did I =]

It was all in fun… Today I can barely type with my right hand because it hurts from repeatedly punching him as hard as I could for half an hour and my entire mid-section aches… but it was worth it because I had a blast. =]

Justin’s birthday is next weekend… I’m looking forward to it.

I haven’t posted in a while… a lot has been going on… I’m not really sure where to start.

I switched from Blogger to b2evolution, which is why everything looks different and things got kind of weird for those of you using an RSS aggrogrator. It shouldn’t make a difference to readers from here on out, except that it should be a lot easier to comment. The only major differences are on my side.

Anyway, I mentioned before that I might “start a section of my site that’s dedicated to what’s going on in Iraq [that] will feature news written by Iraqis instead of news from Western media networks.” Well, that’s exactly what I did, and it turned out so well that I ended up giving it its own domain name… check out wordsfromiraq.com. It’s pretty cool, if I do say so myself.

I spent the weekend in Auburn. It was *alot* of fun. I also got a call that confirmed that I’ll be working down in less then a month, and Donald and Joseph insisted that I should live with them while I’m down there. I’m definitely looking forward to it. I can’t wait to get out of the house, I can’t wait to get started at the new job, and I can’t wait to live in Auburn.

I’ll blog more later… Peace.

I bet you won’t see these videos on CNN…

This is a video of US forces neutralizing (blowing up) an ammo dump in iraq, taken by a soldier. Cool, ehh? And you thought you’ve seen fireworks…

Ever wonder what’s it’s like to be shot at? This one is of US troops moving through the streets of Iraq as they’re fired upon by insurgents.
Click the images to start the download. Obviously, BitTorrent is required. Enjoy.

I think I’m going to start a section of my site that’s dedicated to what’s going on in Iraq. If I do it, it will feature news written by Iraqis instead of news from Western media networks… I’m so tired of this idea that this is another Vietnam. It’s not. Americans seem to think that what we’ve done is a massive mistake or that our help isn’t wanted. According to almost every Iraqi account I’ve been able to find, that’s bullshit. Here’s just one example. Tens of thousands of lives have been saved because we took Saddam out of power. Polls indicate that a majority of Iraqis believe the country is going in the right direction, and the personal accounts of Iraqi bloggers back this up.

The sign reads: “Our people support the reconstruction!”
The media is incredibly biased and Americans aren’t questioning any of it. Wake up, people. We are fighting the right war, and we’re slowly winning. The Iraqis need our help, and we’re saving lives.
Click here to learn about the myths and facts about Iraq

Alright folks, I’m about to sit down and decide who is going to be our next president. Yes, that’s right… when none of the news networks or even their pollsters have the balls to make the call, I’m about to do just that. And mark my words: I’ll be correct. Watch me.

No, I’m not going to make a random call. I’ve spent a couple hours reviewing every fucking poll I can find for each of the battle ground states and now I’m prepared to play out a couple of scenarios.

Before I can create any scenarios, I have to make several assumptions with regard to states that everyone seems to feel pretty confidently will go one way or another. I’ll start with the most obvious and work my way down. It’s a given that Kerry will take California, Connecticut, DC, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, New York, Rhode Island, and Vermont. That’s 146 electoral votes for Kerry. It’s a given that Bush will take 18 states of his own, which I’m not going to list out here. This gives Bush 144 electoral votes. Pretty even ground so far. Kerry is damn likely to take Delaware, Hawaii, New Jersey, and Washington. That’s another 33 for Kerry. Bush is just as likely to take Arizona, Arkansas, Louisiana, Missouri, and Virginia. 49 for Bush. Here’s where things get a bit iffy. Maine, Michigan, and Oregon are all leaning towards Kerry. That’s 28 for him. Colorado, North Carolina, and West Virginia are all leaning towards Bush. So, 29 for Bush.

Now… based on all of the above, which is an almost, kind-of, but not really safe bet, Kerry has 207 and Bush has 222. Keep in mind that it takes a majority of 270 to win.

Here’s where the fun begins. There are 9 states left that represent a whopping 109 electoral votes. They will be the ones to decide the election, but the pollsters are all too pussy to call them because they know that if they’re wrong, it’ll look like shit. Well, I don’t give a fuck how I look… So, based on all the poll data I could find, here’s how I’m calling them… Zogby, Research 2000, ARG, and Gallop all give Iowa to Bush by a margin of approximately a single point. Not much of a margin, but since they all agree, 7 for Bush. Zogby, Rasmussen, and Research 2000, and some radio polls give Nevada to Bush by a larger margin. Another 5 for Bush. UNH Tracking, Franklin-Pierce, Rasmussen are giving New Hampshire to Kerry. 4 more for Kerry. I’m tired of listing specific polls. Bush gets New Mexico… that’s 5 more. Kerry gets Pennsylvania in several polls by a margin of 3 points. Score 21 for Kerry.

Now… after all that… Bush is at 239 and Kerry is at 232, and 4 states are still left. This is so close it’s fucking ridiculous. The states I haven’t called are within a fraction of a percentage, which is so close that no polls agree. The problem is that none of the states are small. Minnesota and Wisconsin are both worth 10 votes, Ohio is worth 20, and the bastard state of Florida is worth 27. These states can’t be ignored. So, here’s where the scenarios begin.

My first scenario is – and at this point I’m basically just guessing – Kerry takes Minnesota, Kerry takes Wisconsin, Kerry takes Ohio, and Bush takes Florida. This would result in a win for Kerry. However, if Bush wins any of the three that I just gave to Bush, he takes all.

There are two more complications to keep in mind. One is that a lot of the polls I considered tend to lean liberal. If that holds true this year, Bush will win one of my four true battleground states. Second is that these polls do not include cell phone users. That means that a lot of kids my age, who have completely abandoned land lines for cell phones, have not been included in the polls. K5 had a good article about this. Kids my around age (19) tend to lean liberal. So, this could mean a surprise bounce for Kerry.

One thing that I haven’t mentioned yet, which happens to be one of the most important things to consider, is the incumbent rule. The Incumbent Rule, as I understand it, basically states that in an election involving an incumbent, people tend to consider whether or not they want to keep the incumbent before even beginning to consider the possibility of voting for the challenger. If voters think both candidates suck, they tend to break for the challenger at the last minute. I’ve heard a lot of people say they hate both candidates *cough* Michael Moore and followers *cough*, so this could result in the jump Kerry needs to take a majority of the final four. A better explanation of the incumbent rule and evidence to support it can be found here.

All in all, this is the closest race I’ve ever heard of and will probably be the closest race all of us will live to see. All things considered, unless a major news event occurs, which is *very* possible, I’m betting that Kerry will win.

So, you’ve got it all figured out. You’ve heard the word on the street. We have a moron in office and you can’t wait to get him out – never mind that his standardized test scores are much higher than Kerry’s. You’ve participated in all the jokes. You went to see Fahrenheit 9/11. You’ve accepted it as truth. You talked about it with all your friends. Well, now it’s time to WAKE THE FUCK UP. I hate to break it to everyone, but spending an hour and a half listening to Micheal Moore bash our president does not constitute a reason to walk around with the idea that you know what you’re talking about. I’m sick and tired of these young slaves of ignorance running around regurgitating, almost verbatim, the bullshit Moore fed them.

Don’t worry. There’s still hope. Yes, even for you. Follow along:

• Step 1: Remove your head from your ass

• Step 2: Install Bittorrent if you don’t already have it
  

• Step 3: Click here to download FarenHYPE 9/11

• Step 4: Ditch your biased mindset

• Step 5: Watch the movie

Do not vote based on what you saw in Moore’s movie without watching this first

Just went clubbin with Katie… Tiki Bob’s is never as good as Banana Joe’s… Tiki’s music sucks and Joe’s always has hotter girls.
I’m looking forward to this weekend… I still haven’t told my parents I’m going to Nashville yet, but I suspect they’ll figure it out… Right now I’m hungry and tired. Night.