What is on Fred Smith’s mind

If you want to see the details of my road trip go visit http://fredstriptoca.fredsmithjr.com my new home looks interesting.

Many tend to use their choice of font and textual arrangement on a whim rather than following good design practices, or functional goals¹. A prime example of this is those who use the automatic^A justify alignment on small blocks of text, such as the center of the paragraph in the image.

IT LOOKS LIKE THIS

(more…)

Allowing actions like this to take place could be the beginning of a very slippery slope. I am not a Netflix user but I disagree on the ability to have a communications provider, such as Comcast, charge both ways for the same service. Comcast customers pay a premium for the access to the internet under the assumption that There is only one internet. Actions such as this are the first steps in creating a tiered internet.

Allowing Comcast to impose a fee to service providers on top of what service providers would be the equivalent had the land line phone companies decided that they would charge all businesses extra to receive phone calls from customers. An example of this using the land line analogy would be: ” A customer of the local General store has a question for the store manager about one of the products the store sells. He calls the store’s phone number only to be disconnected with the phone on the other end never ringing. The phone call did not connect because the store owner had not paid an extra fee to talk to customers on top of the store’s existing phone line connection for general use.

If this action is allowed, a precedent will be set that may cause prolonged damage to the open communication pathway that is the internet. A world where communication companies are allowed to charge both their customers and any organization their customer’s interact with.

Worst case scenario only involving charging extra fee’s to businesses: New technologies may not be able to be developed by starting businesses with great ideas due to the increased overhead of paying potential fee’s.

My Background:

I am not a Comcast customer, nor a Netflix customer. I am a software developer by trade.

If you prefer to not sign the petition I urge you to call, tweet(@FCC), or write the FCC.

Thank you for reading and good luck,
Fred Smith Jr.

Link to petition: http://act.boldprogressives.org/sign/petition_netflix/?source=fredsmithjr
Link to reddit thread:  http://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/edq8x/breaking_the_new_york_times_just_reported_that/

And this is where we stop pulling punches. I am just under halfway to my goal. Our Team is doing awesomely, but why only do awesome when we can DO BETTER!
Therefore I am willing to offer a few incentives.
I will randomly pick 2 donors to the charity to receive 1 of 2 codes for xbox live each

To read the rest of the update proceed to: http://thespartanssanctum.com/2010/10/15/86/

To Donate: https://www.hospitalshelpingkids.org/ExtraLife/m.aspx?i=199635BA6FB+052F1

Currently: $381/$1170  Let us fix that :p

~Fred

Hi All,
This year I have signed up to participate in a charity known as Extra Life. Extra Life is a charity for Children’s hospitals around the country. In this charity the participants marathon any type of game for 24 hrs and donors are encouraged to donate $1 per hour. A few friends and myself will be marathon my favorite game series, Halo. I would greatly appreciate any donations to help reach my lofty goal of $1,170.00. If you would like to see a themed post for the whole team please read the post written at The Spartan’s Sanctum

Donate Here
Thanks for your time,

Fred

It’s been a “fun” couple weeks. (Vote on a choice at the bottom:P)
Rasputin has finally past his limit. The Jeep’s alternator may be on its way out and that is only one of the current issues (Transmission, suspension, and a few other issues.) This happened on Friday.

The events on Sunday go as follows. Hanging with a friend of mine at his family’s cabin on a lake. Then the lake said something about my mother and I decided to fight it(or maybe I went tubing fell off and landed ear first on the water), sadly I lost and walked away with a ruptured tympanic membrane (ear drum). That was one interesting weekend . Needless to say not much productivity has been happening since.

This is your ear on lake impact.

I was planning on getting a new (to me) Jeep in September, but seeing as I am in need of one much sooner I have been perusing the want ads.

2 questions
A.Wrangler or B. Cherokee?
C.Manual or D.Automatic?

I’m thinking A,C
~FredSmithJr

Yes this post took me a while. I forgot how hectic some work weeks can be and it was a hell of a release at work. Anyway without further ado GIVE CAMP!

For the most part there was some sleeping after the first night of Give camp, some people were even sleeping in style!

Now this is sleeping in style!

We awoke to find a tasty layout for breakfast,

(more…)

So I’ve been meaning to post about this event, and now it’s here so now is a perfect time:P

New England Give Camp is the first Give Camp in New England, and so far it is shaping out to be awesome. It goes from today (Friday) @ 5 pm through Sunday @5pm. 48 hours of helping to create, update, and upgrade software for non profits. I am currently assigned to a team to work on updating and upgrading CatchingJoy.org ‘s website with a good amount of Bells and whistles .
(more…)

On April 1st (Teaching on a fool’s day, quite awesome) I took up my friend Sara on an offer, teach the students of her school how to be safe online. St Joe’s is a small parochial school in Dorchester, MA of ~ <80 students.

Teaching people how to be safe online is not an easy task.

Problem: Catch the students’ attention spans long enough for them to learn something
Solution: Use proof by induction, show them a hack in a safe environment to open their eyes.

My Lesson Plan :
Verified all the students have or had an IM account at some point. Then I loaded up aim on one machine, sent an IM to a remote machine and packet sniffed the message. The looks on their faces were in a word: Classic.
This peaked their interest as I described that there is no such thing as 100% security on the internet.
(more…)

Found Monitor arms on craigslist for a great deal:). My Goal to have as many monitors as possible is nearly complete . Currently 2 monitors per system (L to R, Deja, Mack, DeepWinter)

~Fred