I was surfing around, either on fark or Flying Hamster and came upon this article (alternate link).

Basically this article is a little about how people’s online image (via sites such as FaceBook, MySpace, and other social networking sites could possible harm then when they go to apply for jobs, but more on how there is a business that will take a look at how a person appears online, and if the image that is given is a bad one that could be detrimental to someone getting hired (or accepted to college or graduate school), then recommendations will be given on how to improve the image. One of these is to contact the website that is hosting the material, and ask that it be taken down. If that fails, they will bring in the lawyers.

Does anyone else besides me see a problem with this? While if something is truly wrong, I see no problem with the owner being asked to take it down. But if Joe Schmoe really is a drunk and a liar, and I in some way, shape, or form post that somewhere, then why should I take that down.

I think the problem (one of them, at least) is that people in this country are sue happy. There are so many lawsuits that I read about where the only thought I have at the end is “uhhh…they are suing why?!” I’ve even heard of people suing against the advice of their lawyers, but the lawyers file the case anyways because that’s what the client wants.

If people took care not to do things that are stupid, illegal, or could have a negative impact on their reputation if posted online, then we wouldn’t have this problem, would we? But who am I kidding? That’s never going to happen.

So it’s only been 18 days or so. There’s a list of things for me to post about; I just haven’t either been in the mood or had the time to post about them. If it wasn’t midnight right now, I probably would knock a few out. But I’ll get to them tomorrow.

Over the next few months, I plan on redoing the site completely, and there may be a few surprises as well. Only time will tell.

In other news, I had fun on my little adventure today

I saw this posted by an admin of a tech forum I help at, and felt like posting it here, if only because I still have a few minutes before I can go to bed.

How it works. You get at least 5 things (try to keep it under 10) that start with “I believe”. Just post it here. You don’t need to leave your name (you can just put AAA instead), and for your email you can just put n@n.e).

Since this is my site, I guess I’ll go first.

I believe…

–that any couple that wants to get married, whether it be guy and girl, two girls or two guys, should have the right to.
–that the government needs to solve the issues at home before trying to solve issues in other countries.
–that my college needs to rethink how its only meal plan is laid out.
–good guys finish last
–that there’s a special someone for everyone, and if you’re not happy, you just haven’t met yours yet.

So what do you believe?

This past Tuesday was Election Day in the US, and the people voted on several issues that effect their individual states. In eight states, the voters got to decide whether or not their state should ban gay marriage. In all but one, the voters said that they did want in banned. CNN reports the eighth state as still processing votes, so it too may ban gay marriage. I think that the voters in these states have made a mistake that eventually will be corrected, it just may take some time.

Now, for those of you that believe that marriage is an institution that will be weakened when a gay couple is married, do you also believe that it is weakened when a married couple is divorced? The divorce rate in America is at an all time high. I would like to argue that when a married couple gets divorced, they are weakening what marriage means. If two people are in love with each other, who are we to say that they should not be able to become married?

“Oh, but its just wrong.” you might try to argue. Well, so was interracial marriage until a few decades ago, but most people are fine with it now. Maybe all the American people need to get used to the idea of gay marriage is time.

Have a thought, comment, argument you’d like to say? Feel free to leave a comment here. Unless your comment really crosses the line, it won’t be removed.

Haven’t posted anything about school is a while except for complaining about the internet, so I guess now would be as good a time as any.

Couple of weeks ago I had a physics test. I had missed a few classes, because well, this is the third time I’ve taken physics classes, and everything we go over in class is a review for me. So I go to take the test, and I drop my calculator…so I had to do the few problems that needed math in my head/use paper and pencil. Got the test back…got a 86 on it.

Then last week was an economics test. I’ve gone to all the classes, studied for it, did well on the problem set that was due the week before. Got the test…didn’t remember how to do the problem that was 25% of the test, bleh. Ended up getting a 66 on the test, so I need to do better on the final. The weird thing about the multiple choice section was that the problems the class did well on overall I had gotten wrong, and the ones the class had trouble with I got right. How I managed that, I may never now.

I had been thinking about doing a dual major for a while, and I finally met with the department chair for Computer Science to talk about it. The meeting went well, and we planned out the spring semester (and the summer) about what do take to play catch up. The way that the CompSci courses are offered will make this difficult to do, but I will just have to take classes over the summer and take 6 courses every semester until I’m done. I have no idea what my CJ adviser last year (different one from the CJ adviser I have this year) was thinking when she said I could do it in two years…well actually, I think she thought I meant a minor.

That’s it for this post, although there is one other thing about school that I want to talk about, but I’m going to save that for another post.

Well, the time right now as I start this is 6:46, so we’ll see how long it takes me to type this out. For the past 7 hours or so, I have helped three different people set up UnrealIRCd+Anope Services local servers. What this means is that they are now running an IRC server on their home computer. Now, there is nothing wrong with this, as I am running one on my laptop (I’m also making an mIRC bot, so having a local server is good for testing). Since they were using the same tutorial that I used (Phil, the article is great, thanks) we were all on the same page as to what had to be done for this to work, and I really didn’t need to walk them through that much, just help where the had some trouble, which was mostly the same points that I had trouble when I did mine a few months ago.

The last person to set theirs up though, I don’t think he followed the second half of the tutorial much, if at all. Besides having to keep saying the same thing over and over, he wasn’t listening to what I was saying. No matter how I formatted what I was saying, he couldn’t figure it out. I finally had to spell it out for me. Doesn’t give me much confidence in him, so luckily this server won’t get many users, let alone be a target for spammers and (most) hackers. And the fact that he’s a dial-up user means that more than probably 10 users will crash his connection.

As you should have already noticed, I have chosen a new theme for the blog. Thanks to Jeff at BestTechie.net for using it so I could go down to the bottom of the page and get it, and for helping with the language issue (some of it was in German when I installed it). The AdSense code that I talked about last time isn’t in this yet, I’ll get around to it when I’m not tired and can actually make sure that the colors are all right…yeah, all 6 of them.

As I posted about a few weeks ago (and commented about in a sentence above), I’m working on an mIRC bot. mIRC is an IRC client that has its own scripting language, making it good for bots. Of course, this also means that the bad guys also use it for their bots, but mine is a good bot. The connection stuff for it has been done since the first day, and most of the code that makes it sets modes on users has been done for a while. I finally finished making the kick/ban commands work correctly, that was a pain. If you tell it a ZIP code or a Town, Country, it will give you the weather. That was also a bit tricky, but only because I was helping the third person setup his server while I was working on it. The trickiest part so will be remaining a secret until either I find something that was harder, or until I’m done with the bot and its been tested.

I gotta say, I am so glad that Firefox 2 has a built in spell checker. Because well, I’m tired, and I made a few spelling mistakes I might not have caught. Took about 30 minutes to write this, not bad since I was adding my two cents into a conversation in IRC.

So apparently its been a month since I last wrote something here. Its not that I’ve been busy, I’ve had time to write, and ideas about what to write about…its just that by the time I get around to writing, I’ve lost the rush that the topic (of the entry) gave me, so I just put it off.

So for about a month I’ve been debating putting ads on the blog, and the other sites that I host. Well, yesterday I finally decided that i would put ads on, at on the blog at first. So I signed up with Google for their AdSense program. I placed one of the smaller ad units here, we’ll see what happens.

For some reason about an hour ago, I decided that I felt like checking how much bandwidth I’ve gone through already. Turns out that the Google bot has gone crazy on the WWWOW site, using up 15.2 MB in one day. Well, long story short, there are now ads there as well.

My point isn’t to make money off of the ads, because I know that it is not likely to happen. If I can make $6.67 a month though, that will be just enough to cover the cost of the domain and hosting for a year. I doubt that I will be making that much, but every bit helps defray the cost.

I have one class tomorrow, so hopefully I will be able to make some time and be able to cross some things of the the “Things to blog about” list…its getting around three post-its, which is a bit long for me.