The Internet has so many ways to entertain us and teach us. I sometimes come across extremely useful or interesting web pages on the interwebs. They usually get hidden in a notepad somewhere or in my favourites list.
I want to share pages that I have found useful throughout my Internet career. The list is made to grow either from places I stumbled across myself or someone wanted to share.
Feel free to make suggestions by sending an email to gems@cdahmedeh.net
I’m thinking about Ottawa where the two biggest sectors are gouvernment and technology. Both industries always wanted to experiment with all employees working from home eventually. However, the blessing came when the pandemic started and everyone was kicked out of the office.
This paradigm shift was a free experiment for consistent WFH. Soon, organizations started to see what an advantage it was to close down their offices. Rent, Internet, Utilities, Parking and so on were no longer a consideration for payment. These organizations reaped these benefits of huge cost savings.
Now that everyone is at home paying their own Internet services and whatever else needed to work from home such as larger desks, more screens and so on without having to expense them to the company.
There are currently hundreds of thousands of gouvernment employees working from home. Their offices are a massive maze and I can’t imagine how expensive it is to run their offices. Now, this is all gone.
As for me, I really can’t adapt to working on the same desk all day. I try to talk walks between work and home projects to gain a different perspective hoping that I would regain some of that energy lost.
I am hoping that soon enough I’ll be working in coffee shops and Universities. Essentially work wherever I want without my boss breathing over my shoulder. I vaguely remember reading research that working in theses kind of settings enhance creativity and productivity.
We’re currently in uncertain times but it seems that this forced experiment has been a success. I’m one of the very few people who hate working from home mainly from the isolation and the fatigue that results from it.
This was an April Fools joke…
When I first started this website back in 2013, I thought I was paving the way onto becoming a billionaire. I mean, other bloggers live and feed their families with the revenue of off theirs. Why not me, what did I do wrong?
I know I forgot to put ads but I don’t want my website littered with Viagra adverts and solicitation from Nigerian princes. I don’t like to sell farming machines either. Ads are so annoying anyways; they just get in the way of my perfectly written blog with subpar text from a marketer. I wouldn’t see my own ads anyways, I use an adblocker.
Despite all my efforts to go viral and annoying people with my links on Reddit, Discord, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest and for God’s sake even the start-up dreamers on Hacker News: I get nothing. At the very best, I get maybe one or two visitors per day from countries I’ve never heard of, like Germany or Brazil.
My exquisite English is ignored and no one reads my resume for some reason. I’m a very qualified writer and have tons of experience doing everything, even working as a mechanic back in the day. I don’t know why people aren’t so impressed by my skills. Recruiters just tell me to fuck off.
When I launched this website, I planned for it to be my primary source of income. I’ve seen many YouTubers, podcast authors, fiction book writers and Twitch streamers quit their job and I was hoping to do the same.
My blog began way after my website back in 2017, I wrote about the most interesting subjects like Automatic Transmissions, Drifting, Weekends, and very important aspects of my personal life. Surely everyone is interested in that, right? I sob, cry and weep every night after making a post because I get no likes or comments. No one on the Internet links to my blog and that makes me sad.
Two months ago, I quit my job and started to eat into my own funds. I’m in overdraft, maxed out all my loans and declared bankruptcy. As I’m writing this, it’s currently -39 degrees Celsius right now and I’m freezing to death. I’m outside on the street on the corner of McArthur and Vanier, where most of the homeless people beg for money. I stole someone’s SIM card so I could have Internet access.
Thanks to all the losers who ignored my website, now I’m in abject poverty. I’m addicted to cocaine and morphine and I lie by telling people that I need money for food. Getting high is better than starvation anyways. I’ve been applying for jobs at grocery stores right now, I think I have a lead at Loblaws on South Keys.
I can’t afford to keep this website up and my hosting provider is threatening me to shut my website down and delete all my content since I’m 3 months overdue.
*sniff* *sniff* I thought I was going to be rich! 😭 Houston, shut her down!
There’s an intangible experience that only video game music can provide. Known for their strong and incredibly consistent melodies, it’s easy to understand why many listen to this kind of music regularly. Unlike other types of music, video game music isn’t designed to take away your attention from the game but rather provide an ambience to the level and push you to move forward. This is why many study video playlists are composed of video game music.
While everyone has love for classic video game soundtracks from Mario, Zelda, Sonic and so on, it gets repetitive to listen to them all the time. Unlike my competitors, I dig deep to find the gems that are rarely heard but also balancing it with a touch of our favourite classics. There are many underappreciated artists who push chips to the limits.
Enjoy the masterpieces from Jesper Kyd, Matt Furniss, Chris Hülsbeck, Yuzo Koshiro, Tim Follin, Barry Leitch and many others. The station runs 24/7 providing a random selection of different eras from the Amiga to the Modern and everything in between. There’s never a dull moment on our station and hope that you enjoy VGMs as much as we do.
There are many ways to listen to the station but the simplest way is accessing the radio page. More methods to listen and additional information can be found on the Live at the Intro page. Our collection of music is ever expanding for the variety that we all crave. Enjoy!
This was the first project that gave me the illusion that somehow I was going to be big. The FreeBASE was a video game console built with the off-the-shelf parts that played free games and media. The swath of open-source games and freely-available content made the console quite the tantalizing concept. However, despite all the effort that went into design, cost estimation, prototyping, marketing and even building a team; this project lead to nowhere.
The most obvious flaw was in the business model. How do you make money when everything is free except for the console? Unlike other manufacturers like Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft, we couldn’t sell our system at a loss and recuperate them with licensing fees since we had no licensing of any kind. This poor business idea and inability to market the system properly meant that the first step was failure.
FreeBASE was a project destined to fail and never exist in it’s designed form. I remember spending hours learning Blender to design a compact system that used regular off-the-shelf x86 components. Unlike our bigger brothers, we couldn’t put everything on a small PCB and call it day; putting it in a tiny box.
I wrote a blog post about this that’s no longer on this website due to long hiatus in blogging. I spoke to a friend who was closely involved with me in the project and we agreed that the system was designed on an emotional basis. The imaginary walls that we encountered put a stop to our tracks.
We, as a team, didn’t feel like we learned our lessons from this project, and were destined to do more mistakes in the future. It’s not enough to fail but understand where the failures came from. Despite this project being dead for a long time, I don’t feel like I learned my lesson.
There’s even a stupid promo video that was made for this blunder.
Another attempt at fame that went into disaster at very last moment with a kickstarter campaign that never took off let alone published. The idea was a modular laptop that used off-the-shelf parts that would allow customers to design their own system with crazy ideas such as a DVB-T tuner and even a software defined radio.
It even went to point where I actually built a prototype that was fully-functional, a laptop made with my own hands. The failed kickstarter campaign was full of details up to a concept drawing and all sorts of other details that I wouldn’t even think of now such as our implication in the open-source world.
I’ll admit that near the end of the project, I got too scared to continue. I realized that it was too much to swallow especially being an individual project. The fear let me to giving up and realizing that I didn’t actually have the resources to make this possible with the biggest challenge was making it as depicted by the concept drawing, and yes, there was one, the I actually drew with my very hands.
I feel in love with aviation after my first ride on a plane. I wanted to relive those memories somehow and soon discovered there was something called simulation. When I was young, I got a hold of a copy of Flight Simulator 98. I was too young to take things seriously and the aircraft bundled with the game were incredibly simplistic. As I grew older, I started buying addons for the game which were more study-level but I was reasonable: just two of them, an airliner and a single-seater. However, my collector mindset kicked-in and I bought so much addons that I never ever would use all of them.
My goal was to prepare a YouTube channel with various adventures flying different kinds of planes. However, I never had the energy or the will to actually learn the procedures and practice. It was always a dream and bought a bunch of equipment impulsively like a podcast-quality microphone and an HDMI recorder. Soon after they were sold on classifieds.
Later on, I was really impressed with X-Plane 11 and bought a dozen addons for the simulator some not even being installed in the first place. Out of all the addons bought, I haven’t learned a single one of them.
My dream is to know a plane inside-out and fly on VATSIM with the correct procedures and ATC phraseology but it’s still a pipe dream.
I think about this ‘project’ quite often but these days are more and more full and I don’t know if I’ll have the time to learn unless I neglect say work.
Eventually, I deleted all the installers for FS2004 and lost my precious collection that will be a mess to recover. X-Plane 11 is currently installed on my system with all of the addons that I purchased. The last time I started that thing was several months ago. A unread collection of FCOMs, tutorial, QRHs, checklists all remain unread on my tablet.
School taught that the most sacred thing in the Universe was reading, something that I didn’t disagree with. As I went by the years through elementary and secondary school, I was made to read more and more books. However, they were all fiction and that left a very sour taste in my mouth. The last book I read was The House of Spirits and I promised myself to never read a novel ever again.
Little did I realized that I was missing on a pile of knowledge that is hidden within these pages. I bought a tablet, got the eBooks I wanted (Library Genesis) and only sat the first night reading a book. After that, it never happened again and I haven’t made progress ever since.
I’m intimidated by long running tasks for some reason no matter how small the tasks are divided in. When it comes to read a book, I make the biggest excuses not to do it, usually going to sleep. I have a list of books that I want to read but I feel like I have failed myself so much.
This one bothers me a lot. What started as my portfolio to show off, I wanted to grow into a window to myself. I started this blog which has been pretty active and kept cleaning up my website when it got messy. The centre of attention was this blog but I soon realized that no one read it. I’m just a nobody on the Internet and no one cares about what I’m thinking about or why I’m angry that day. My life isn’t exciting with a world full of travelling or anything like that. This was on purpose, but not having a niche that my blog-mind focused set me up for failure.
My projects also never caught on. Counting on what archive.org has shown from my past, I probably have had a total of 15 projects many of them thrown out or in unliked sections of my website. Several incomplete and code removed from my GitHub. My resume makes me seem like I’ve done a lot and even though it’s true, they’re not in the complete state that they’re perceived to be in.
Even the projects that on their way to fruition are unpopular. The only way I make myself feel better is by telling myself that they are ‘passion projects’ only done out of the love for whatever medium I’m expressing or what I’m trying to sell.
The store page has not led to a single sale yet. No one listens to my online radio except me. My suggestion boxes and emails have not received a single thing in their inboxes.
No matter how much I yell on social media and plant my website on anything that allows me to put a link, I get nothing in return. I’m screaming at a door of an empty house. I wrote about this before, but I’m just a dot in the sky. Seen but easily forgotten. I consider this website a failure but it’s not going down.
I’m deeming myself as a failure, a really big one; I’ll never grow and will never learn from my lessons.