Dallas Breeze

Websites

by Darren on Aug.27, 2011, under Articles

Well I’ve been working on building websites. I’m just getting started but so far I’ve got www.howtocarshop.com and www.mbrgfr.com under my belt. I’m currently working on another one and have plans to update the main page at Dallas Breeze soon.

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Working on main site

by Darren on Nov.01, 2010, under Articles

I’m working on the main page at Dallas Breeze. I want to bring the DFW community together on my site to share events around the metro. Feel free to comment and submit ideas.

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A Devil’s Love

by Darren on Jan.06, 2010, under Short Story, Stories

I wrote this short story many moons ago…

A Devil’s Love

He had been here a long time. He did not know how long but it didn’t really matter. This place was eternal. It was a lot like earth at times. At least for some people. It was not filled with fire and brimstone like many believed. It was the emptiness that caused people to suffer. For this place was beyond the reach of Love. Too deep and far from God for His light to shine here. People reacted to it differently. Some had only known this place even when they were alive but now there would be no end and that made it worse. Some reacted with anger and hate. Depression came to him. He remembered in the beginning he was alone. On earth he had killed himself to escape. Now though he would not be able to escape again. He had grown used to his hopeless situation. He was alone and isolated, stranded from his heart.

He would take a walk from time to time. Thinking of his loneliness, he had time for eternal reflection. At time he worried he might go mad, other times he hoped he would. Madness never came though and he began to think that he had never had a heart. That this was his true nature. It made sense to him, on earth he had always been alone.

It came to be that he saw a woman. She struck him as the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. He did not think it was Lust but in this place what other emotion could it be. He continued on trying not to think about it. Many here would have done differently. Most thought of this place as liberating, rejoicing in cursing their Lord, knowing He could do no more to them. He knew though that the Lord was not doing anything to them except let them be alone. He knew that that was more than any torture devised could ever be. Lust was common here as was guilt and apprehension. The material impulses on earth were mild compared to their strength here. He had no desire to hurt himself. He knew the woman he saw would be nothing other than an amusement. He would keep to himself, hopelessness had a grasp on him that seemed unbreakable. Time went on as it always did and on occasion he would see her. He did not talk to here though, he didn’t see the point. Despite his best efforts though, she looked more and more beautiful each time he saw her. He thought it was this place driving his material desires. But he did not lust for her, she simply seemed to shine, somehow she had a radiance in this place, perhaps it was hope. She seemed soft. She was not filled with anger and hate, she was like him preoccupied with being alone. She felt abandoned by her Maker.

He walked a different way each time he went. And while he wasn’t trying to avoid her it seemed he would be just as good not seeing her. However it was inevitable that they should continue to see each other Eternity is a long time after all and eventually they met and spoke. They became acquaintances to his surprise, he did not believe it possible. He had for a long time now tried to control his feelings and despite or because of this they became friends. Friends he thought, he would shut it from his mind as if merely thinking about it would twist it, he no longer had much judgement about such things.

Time went on and he began to learn that she too had always been alone, even on earth. While she had been with people she had always felt alone and isolated from them. He felt for her, he knew what she felt. He could not believe, but sometimes he mused himself with the thou ght that he might lover her or that she might love him. It did not make him feel better He had been here long enough to know that it couldn’t be true.

But something drew him to her, perhaps it was her hope, and as time went by his thoughts were filled with her. He began to think that she could redeem him, that her love could bring light to this place. He began to have hope again. His material desires had long since left him and he allowed their friendship to grow on it’s own. Love on earth had always involved lust, he did not want lust.

She had always longed for love and never gave up looking for it, but she continued to look in the wrong places as she had done Before. She allowed her material desires to be present in her search. She had continued to hope that even here there was love and that she would find it. Here though, hope was a dangerous thing. Eventually anger and hat began to fill her heart displacing her feelings of isolation and muting her hope. Over time she had succumbed to the desires of this place, it was where she had looked for love and now she was completely Lost. When he finally came to her to ask for her love she no longer had any to give. He cursed his Maker. Again, he knew where he was.

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Free Software

by Darren on Dec.27, 2009, under Open Source

You may have heard that if something sounds to good to be true then it probably is.  However it is also said that the best things in life are free.  I’m going to share with you some of the best free software on the web.  Most of it is open source, meaning the code behind the software is free to use, distribute and even alter.

Gimp (open source)

Silly name but Gimp is a great program for manipulating images (think Photoshop).  Here are some tutorials.  Plugins like resynthesizer (watch this!) expand it’s capabilities.

Open Office (open source)

Open Office like its name suggests is a free office suite.  It includes a word processor, a spreadsheet, presentation software and more.  It can open and save in MS Office format, PDF, and many more formats.  Have an old document but no longer the software to open it?  Chances are Open Office can read it.

DDO (free to play)

If you like World of Warcraft you may enjoy Dungeons and Dragons Online.  It’s not open source but it is free to download and play as long as you want.  The company makes money by selling features, items and add-ons in the game.  It takes time to download, install and update but once it’s setup it loads like any other game.  Definitely worth a try.

Blender (open source)

Okay this one is pretty neat but you have to take the time to learn how to use it.  Blender is what’s called a 3D rendering program.  It can be used to create computer generated images like those used to make a Pixar movie or add a space ship to Star Trek.   Take a look at this gallery of images made with Blender and these videos.

I hope you enjoy these.  I’ll list more in the future as well as expand on the ones here.

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Oil!

by Darren on Dec.21, 2009, under Questions

So my second post.  I thought I would put up my thoughts on a noncontroversial topic like  oil.

Well when gas prices started to near $4 a gallon in the U.S. a while back I was curious about the cause and decided to look into it.

I soon found out this is no easy topic.  Questions begat more questions.

How many gallons are in a barrel?  42

How many gallons of gas from a barrel?   ~19.5

What is oil? The decayed remains of ancient life

How does oil make gasoline, jet fuel, plastic, make up, medicine, vitamins, everything? It’s refined/separated

Medicine, Vitamins? These are made from petrochemical feedstocks.  Hydrocarbons.

How much oil do we use?  84.9 million barrel a day!

Those are the easy questions.

How much oil is left?  This is tricky.

Let’s break it down into more questions.

How much oil have we used?  1 trillion barrels

Ok how much altogether?  That’s where this whole thing breaks down.  There are several considerations.

First what is a P number?  This is the number geologist use to estimate how much is in a field before a well is ever drilled.  Three P numbers are generally used.  P5 has a 5% probability, p50 has 50% and p95 has 95%.  So a hypothetical field may have a p5 of 10 billion barrels, a p50 of   5 billions barrels, and a p95 of 2 billion barrels.

This means the given example has a great chance of producing 2 billions barrels and a slim chance at 10 billion barrels.  Here lies the root of the difficulty in estimating how much oil is left.  The only groups interested in compiling such data have an agenda.

On one side there are people that want to show we are running out of oil.  They always choose the p95 number and thus present a number that is at least what we have left.  On the other side are people that want to show an abundance of oil.  They choose the p5 number and present a number that is a slim chance at best.

From what I’ve read the number seems to be somewhere between 1 and 2 trillion left.

It gets more complicated though when you add in undiscovered reserves.  Here it is an educated guess at best.  Some argue that the biggest fields have already been found.  I liken this to the discovery of new continents.  Today we can safely say that there may  be undiscovered islands, but there are no undiscovered continents.

So are we medieval sailors with continents left to be discovered?  I leave that up to you, but I think we have already discovered the largest fields.

Ok so we think the amount of remaining oil is between 1 and 2 trillion barrels.  If we’ve used 1 trillion then the total ever available is between 2 and 3 trillion.

Now our original question.  Why does gas cost what it does?  That gets even more complicated.  We’ve got a grasp now on the supply and we know the demand is 84.9 barrels a day.  Where is demand headed?  Where is supply headed?  Unfortunately it will have to wait for another post and a look at Hubbert’s curve.

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Welcome!

by Darren on Dec.20, 2009, under First Post

So after several trials and errors trying to get Wordpress running on GoDaddy I have finally succeeded.  I went so far as to install Wordpress on my home computer.  I had to install Apache, MySql, PHP and Wordpress.  It took one afternoon to install everything and get a blog setup on my home network, but GoDaddy proved more difficult.

I tried off and on for a week or so to get it working on GoDaddy with no luck.  Finally I took some advice from one of the many forums I had been reading and changed my Godaddy account from Windows to Linux.  It doesn’t matter what you’re using at home but apparently it makes a big difference if you want to use Wordpress on GoDaddy.

I hope you enjoy the new site!

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