IRC Freak

The Race Card

2008-08-01T12:45:00.001-07:00

This is my first presidential election in which I can vote, and because of this I've been paying tons of attention to the news, trying to gauge both the candidates and try to make up my mind on who I am voting for. Sadly I am registered as a Democrat, but will not be supporting Obama in November. This has to be one of the worse electoral seasons on record and truly makes me not want to vote, as voting isn't voting for a good candidate, its voting for the lesser of two evils. The one thing really bugging me about this election is the whole issue of race, and what you can and can't do.

On McCain and the race card, Obama had this to say in Missouri:

So nobody really thinks that Bush or McCain have a real answer for the challenges we face, so what they’re going to try to do is make you scared of me,You know, he’s not patriotic enough. He’s got a funny name. You know, he doesn’t look like all those other presidents on those dollar bills, you know. He’s risky. That’s essentially the argument they’re making.

I'd challenge Obama to provide ONE instance of McCain saying any thing like this! Seriously one instance, that's all I ask for.

This statement came in response to this ad run by the McCain campaign:

Some how that commercial has been labeled as racist! How the hell is that a racist commercial? It raises a valid point, Obama ran around Europe gives speeches to huge crowds, yet the US economy is in terrible shape, foreclosures, weak dollar, and so much more, and yet Obama runs over to Europe. Europeans can't vote for him, so why does he need to give a massive speech in Berlin? McCain's ad is attacking the valid point that Obama is failing to care about people here at home. In no way is putting spears or Hilton in the ad racist, they are simply people see as celebrities. Should McCain have put black celebrities in the commercial instead? McCain can hardly say anything without some organization labeling it or morphing it into a racist statement. Obama knows hes not white, and he uses it to his advantage. Today alone Obama said McCain has spent the last month talking about him and not his ideas. First I think McCain has talked about the issues, and discussing your opponents stances is a major part of the election cycle. You are suppose to debate issues, but apparently Obama feels McCain shouldn't talk about him. Same goes for Obama's wife. You can't touch her, but Cindy McCain's taxes is fair issue. I'm sick of Obama's hypocrisy. I'm sick of the race card, I want to see the election move past it, but Obama has shown he doesn't want to

Absurdly low cap

2008-07-31T05:27:00.000-07:00

DSLReports has an article up today that states one of the dsl providers in the Rochester, NY area, has added a 5 gb per Month cap. Compare to what my college, University of Tulsa found exceptable, 3GB per day (roughly a 100gb cap a month).

Frontier details just what you can do with your 5gbs in each month:

* 500,000 e-mails
* 1,750—2,500 High Resolution (6 megapixel) Photos
* 35,000—40,000 Web Pages
* 335 Hours of Online Game Time
* 1,250 Downloaded songs

Notice they fail to include video, one of the staples of web2.0. I also feel bad for anyone on the network who uses linux, as downloading a 700mb is gonna kill your wiggle room.

China blocking sites

2008-07-30T20:06:00.001-07:00

I've always been against China being allowed to host the Olympic games. The chinese government is far too oppressive and its track on human rights violations is far too long for any blog to list. On top of that there is the rampant censoring of the media and what citizens can see, whether its on the TV, radio, or internet. Take this clip from the AP ahead of the olympics:

Face it, the IOC made a terrible mistake in giving the games to China. Who knows what will go on behind the screens, in the testing fatalities, or in Olympic village kitchens, but the thing I can be sure of? Chinese athletes will preform better than ever.

Update: Seems the IOC is openly condoning The chinese censorship practices, as Rueters is reporting that the IOC and Chinese struck a deal to allow for continued censorship.

My Stuff

2008-07-28T17:05:00.000-07:00

***Note: I wrote this as a comment for this lifehacker article, but figured I'd post it here as well.

The Basics
Firefox 3 for most web browsing, through opera,safari, and IE are installed for testing
Notepad++ for coding, notepad2 to replace the default, and MS Office (10 dollars through the school) for papers and boring stuff
mIRC for IRC chat, Pidgin for IMs
uTorrent
thunderbird with more extensions than I can name
Miro for video torrents
Filezilla for all my uploads
GIMP for the small photo editing I do
Imgburn to burn anything to cds
Launchy when in windows and gnome-do in ubuntu

Primary OS

Time is pretty much split amongst Vista 32-bit and XP Pro. Lesser time on the dual boot of ubuntu 8.04.

Hardware

Dell Latitude D620 laptop (2.0 ghz, 2gb of RAM): used for little stuff, class notes, travel, runs a mirc bot most of the time
HP slimline desktop (2.6 ghz, 2gb of RAM): primary desktop with vista and ubuntu dual boot.

Peripherals

500 gb external HD, numerous usb drives, 22 inch monitor, unused printer, and an iPod Touch.

Webapps

Google Reader: synced across PCs, quick, tons of extra via greasemonkey
Plurk: Twitter's issues forced me to find another "micro-blogging" site, for now I use plurk full time.
Flickr: bought a pro account and love it
Ping.fm posts to all the social networks I'm on easy syncing, and a godsend to bloggers to get the word out.
Friendfeed: Great conversions
Blogger: never been into the whole hosted site. I wanted a blog and blogger offered what I need

Self Assessment

Outside of my flickr outside my motto is, "if it ain't free, I ain't using" You can almost always find what you need for the task in free software.

Extreme Commute

2008-07-26T18:23:00.000-07:00

Not sure I would ever do this but its one way to save gas

...and this is not

Sick of the Media and Obama

2008-07-24T06:56:00.000-07:00

Seriously I'm sick of the media and all of Obama's supporters praising him as what we need, because he is "change we can believe in". Bullshit. Obama is nothing better than McCain. For one, all during the primaries he was against the FISA bill (or warrantless wiretapping), what does he do the minute it comes up for a vote? He votes FOR it (Clinton voted against it, McCain didn't vote). Then he has his lies.

We all know Americans didn't liberate Auschwitz. Yet he basically said he spoke wrong and walks away.

Again Obama claims to be on a committee, one he is NOT on. I doubt you can claim you mistook what committees you are one.

John McCain is pissed at how much press Obama has received, and I don't blame him. The media is continuing to glamorize Obama, glossing over the stuff we actually should know about.

Wordpress iPhone app

2008-07-23T19:41:00.000-07:00

Meant for this to go in the weekend recap post. Anyway the wordpress app for the iPhone gets my same review as the others ones like it got: dumb. the iphone (or any phone really) isn't condusive to blogging. If you want to post something quick use a micro-blogging site. The iPhone can't even cut and paste...so out goes adding links, or hyperlinking, or anything of substance. Only think it could be good for is approving comments, but most people have got to sites like intense debate / disqus.

Weekend Recap

2008-07-23T18:34:00.001-07:00

For those who didn't know, I was on vacation in Old Orchard Beach Maine since the 19th. Sadly I had no internet access during this time, so when I got home I had a lot to catch up on. This is a recap of the vacation and the stuff I missed while I was away

Vacation
First the photos I took while there:

Most of the vacation was great, though a lot of the French Canadians who were down in Maine were rather rude, I lost count of the dirty looks I got, or the times they cut use off walking around. Plus almost all of them smoke constantly and don't care where the smoke goes. For a person with ashtma, this was terrible, and then to see a women bury her cigarette in the sand and cover it, was the worst. (Found this article today, made me laugh.)
The food in the area was great, if I had to pick which place was the best, I would have to give it to Fat Bellies Deli, located a block from our hotel (The Ocean House). I was also lucky to be able to go to my first Tim Horton's, and have to say I enjoyed it more than Starbucks or Dunkin Donuts.
Most of the activities around the area was small amusement parks, or outlet mall shopping. Seeing as how this was done for my sister's birthday, we spent a lot of time wandering around outlets, in Freeport and Kittery (along with the Maine Mall in Portland).

News I missed
Seems there was a few major things in the tech blogosphere over the weekend:
1. Twhirl adds identi.ca support: While its great to see twhirl makes steps away from twitter, I'm unsure whether to be supportive of the move or disappointed. identi.ca is new and has a small user base. I would much more care for support of jaiku or pownce, or better yet support for plurk. Plurk is surging with the average user of the internet and unfornately is being ignored by most main-stream techies.

Twhirl has also position itself to be to these micropost what Trillian and Adium are to IM

Until it adds full support for jaiku, pownce, plurk, brightkite, kwippy, tumblr, etc. twhirl is hardly comparable to trillian or adium. I hope to see more plurk support for things as it does have an API.
2.MobileMe sneaks onto Windows Machines: Apple tried this with safari, would have figured they learned their lesson. Instead they installed something I supposedly need without asking. Last I checked if anyone else did that it would be labelled as wrong (and god help Microsoft if they tried this). I submitted MobileMe to my spyware software/malware/anti-virus software, as a rogue program installed without my permission.
3. Read Full Magazines at Mygazines: Free and it works. Not into the whole social aspect.
4. Apple to bring macbook under $1000: its 100 dollars give me a break.
5. 50 Firefox 3 Add-ons That Will Change the Way You Surf the Web: Great list if you need to find some new addons. I recommend almost all of them.
6. Should I still jailbreak my iPhone: Yes, apple is more closed source than MS, jailbreak it because more apps will come along.

Twitter is fail (Final Straw)

2008-07-23T16:05:00.000-07:00

Back from vacation (look for a recap post soon), so I signed into all my services to check on things and was stuck my my followers/following numbers on twitter. Before I left on vacation I had over 200 friends and followers. When I got back and signed in I had 88/85, it has since risen to about 97/85. That is still a drop of over 100 people, and unless twitter has backed up all of my connections they are left for me to figure out who is missing. I'm lucky as some people had drops of over 500 people. Twitter is currently down to correct this problem, hopefully for the people still sticking with it, this is simply a problem with twitter not seeing followers right, and not an issue involving actual de-friending. Either way, this is the last straw for me and twitter. Every time I log in, I have issues, I'm sick of this "progress" as they call it. Find me on plurk.

P.S. Yes Plurk, take it seriously. And no I won't move to identi.ca

Update

2008-07-18T21:00:00.000-07:00

I'm sure everyone has kind of seen it, but I decided to continue joining IRC. While all of the post is true, I felt I couldn't punish people who did nothing, by quitting. I'm hoping to continue chatting, but hopefully moderate myself when it comes to it (ie class and when homework needing doing)

On a site note, the domain I bought isn't panning out like I was hoping it would. I've been messing with wordpress but it seems like I just want to stick with simple blogger. I never sent out with the intention of having a site, just a simple blog.

IRC Ruined me

2008-07-17T21:06:00.000-07:00

As the name of this blog implies, I am huge into IRC, well was. I found it fun to sign in and join chats and have a fun time with people from around the world. I met a ton of great people on IRC over the past year, but sadly all good things must come to an end.

As the saying goes "The sh*t hit the fan". I won't go into a lot of depth about what has been happening on the IRC networks I visit, but rest assured, I have no home anymore. For one I have been all but blacklisted for voicing support for people when they had problems with the network, I followed them to their new server, and worked my way up in the standing there, even getting an o:line. Everything seemed great, but now they have moved on, the network is in question, and I am questioning even more.

When I showed up for college last fall, I didn't know many people, I made friends, but a lot more of my time was spent on IRC than it should have. My grades slipped, but I was happy because I had finally found a place where people seemed to care and seemed to have some respect for me. I would get out of class and run back to my dorm to check highlights before running to dinner or another class, I snapped at a person I truly care about because my scripts for mirc got over written, I gave up true friendships for more "power".

IRC is great, its great for conferencing, for general chatter, but never should have been my life. To all those people on IRC (you know who you are) understand I will be on, but it will be harder to find me, I don't know where my home is, if I even have one.

Fox News Doesn't have anything on CNN

2008-07-14T12:27:00.001-07:00

Fox may be "fair and balanced" but CNN has aliens!

Yep Brian Todd is an alien. The user also updated a second video of "evidence" from the same segment:

You decide...

Touch 2.0

2008-07-12T23:06:00.000-07:00

Ok I said I wouldn't be upgrading to 2.0 on my iPod Touch because of the price, well I decided to give in an upgraded. And I gotta say I'd upgrade solely for the remote app. I'm sitting across the room from my PC atm and I'm changing songs and lowering the volume. The remote is a godsend. Highly doubt I will be jailbreaking it either.

Apps I love:
1. Remote
2. Pandora-my radio on my time and place
3. Facebook-in college, facebook is king, need mobile access
4. Weatherbug-much more detailed than the default weather app. includes cams and radar
5. Evernote-great for syncing organization

Apps I want:
1. Friendfeed
2. Google Reader
3. Plurk

Yeah I can use web based versions of all of the ones I want, but it just seems so much more slick to have them as as app as opposed to in the browser.

Why I won't be updating to 2.0

2008-07-10T13:03:00.000-07:00

There has been a lot of talk and posts as of late about the new firmware for the iPhone/ iPod Touch, version 2.0. This firmware updates the devices to use the new appstore, allowing users to buy and download approved third-party apps for their iphone or touch. The iphone firmware was leaked today, and is supposedly coming out officially tomorrow, July 11th, the day the new iPhone 3g is released. I for one will not be updating my iPod touch to the new version.

Why? Because I don't agree with Apple's policy of charging Touch users for major updates (last time we had to pay 20 dollars for the iPhone apps back in January). I was one of the first people to buy the Touch, placing my order, the day it was announced (5 September 2007). Correct me if I am wrong, but when I bought the touch there was no announcement that when it came time for major updates I would need to fork over 20 dollars. Sure iPhone users pay monthly, and we only pay once for the touch, but I still think it should have been made public that use touch users would need to pay, while iPhone users get it for free. If Apple had told me I more than likely would not have bought the touch, opting instead for the 160gb iPod. I am currently on 1.1.2 and it runs fine, and that is what I'm sticking with

Marylin Manson Is Bald

2008-07-10T08:22:00.000-07:00

Apparently he is

Bought a New Domain

2008-07-07T12:31:00.000-07:00

Bought a test domain for the site, it currently has nothing on it. I plan to use it for testing wordpress or other CMS systems out there. Currently it has nothing on it, as the web host did a bad install of wordpress, working to install a working one.

Real IRC

2008-07-05T13:23:00.000-07:00

As a discussed yesterday ustream provides and IRC server to host chats associated with shows, but they also allow users to switch to other approved servers. One of these servers is Wyldryde, and apparently according to one user Wyldryde is "real IRC".

Here is his quote first off:

(Sat || 03:59:02 PM) <@cooldude13233> welcome to Real IRC

His reasoning? Wyldryde provides many services not found on a lot of the older IRC networks, ie botserv. This user felt IRC is only good when one can bring in a services bot and set it to kick for caps, flooding, and so on. He also raves about the greet messages, and this and that.

I wonder if he considered these facts:

EFNet one of the first IRC servers out there, and currently running about 50,000+ people daily still doesn't have registration services or any of the fancy things find on the newer servers. Even Dalnet, which broke from EFNet due to its lack of services, doesn't provide a botserv.

Calling a server real based on the amount of stuff offered is naive and rather dumb. Instead of taking what you are given and making it work, you take the easy way out. It is rather easy to script a bot to idle in a channel and kick users for various offenses, it is also easy to set a bot to notice users on join.

Real IRC is not just a server full of bots that can be programmed in two minutes. real IRC is connecting to a server and chatting. That is IRC. If you don't have a bot, don't complain make one. Next time cooldude realize there are more IRC servers out there besides wyldryde and its easy to use fantasy commands

Should I switch off Ustream's IRC server?

2008-07-04T13:00:00.000-07:00

Questions like this have been coming into me more and more as of late. People are saying that they are seeing people leave ustream's IRC server (c.ustream.tv) in favor of other IRC networks (at the moment ones that can be used are iPocalypse, Wyldryde, AceIRC, and SummitIRC). People who advocate the switch say you have more control and options, but they also fail to consider somethings of importance.

1. Name confusion. When you side into ustream, you side into chat also. When you choose to switch servers, your users will not be sided into the new server when they sign into ustream. They will need to register with that server and then sign through nickserv. If a lot of your users use ustream's flash chat, this can cause some problems as the flash chat is not known for expecting other servers commands very well. Switching servers can also cause problems if the ustream nick a user uses is taken on the new server, for instance if Bob from ustream joined a wyldryde connected chat he would be switched to unidentified**** after a minute as that nick is registered on wyldryde.

2.Commands needed double. If you run on ustream's server there are a limited number of commands. People generally say this is why they switch, but for people who don't really have the time to invest into setting up a chat room on another server, the commands provided by ustream are more than enough. So if you plan on switching plan on learning a lot of new commands to run your chat.

3. Help is not provided by Ustream. When something goes wrong on ustream you know who to go to, ustream. If something goes wrong on another server do you know who to go to? If you have a problem with ustream you have to go to ustream, problem with chat you have to go to the chat server for help. Neither provides support for the other, causing problems.

There are other reasons to not move, but those are the biggest three to consider when making the decision. Personally my advice is if you are big into streaming and do it daily, and have the time to invest, then yes it is a benefit. But if you stream once or twice a week, and generally your chat isn't active outside of show times, you won't see much of a benefit.

Worst Song?

2008-07-03T21:45:00.000-07:00

Taking suggestions for worst song ever created. My nominee after the jump

lets see mullet? Check. Annoying Lyrics? Check. Constant Repeating? Check.

leave your suggestion in the comments.

Videos of the week

2008-07-01T16:39:00.000-07:00

I kind of want to start a videos of the week, a recap of the videos I find around the net, during the week. The video of the week post should be up every Friday night, but for the time being here are two of the funnier videos I've seen on the net in a while. Topic for the two is oddly old people. Enjoy

Motorized Scooter Chase (I tend to think this one isn't what it appears but its still funny)

Its a Dildo Grandma

New Ustream layout, Improvement or Cheap Knockoff?

2008-07-01T11:47:00.000-07:00

I wandered over to ustream.tv today and much to my surprise I noticed a new look, and this new look caused me to do a double take, because it looks eerily similiar to another popular streaming sites' layout.

First lets take a look at how ustream use to look, before todays update:

Clean, simple, easy to see the main stream, and other live streams. Good sized announcements, and underneath an organized list of popular recorded content. Now I will admit the colors aren't all that attractive, but the basic layout, excellent.

Now for how it looks today:

One word, cluttered. Things are everywhere. Announcements, featured announcements, everything just looks thrown on the page. Oddly, this is what caused me to do a double take, because one reason I never became involved in the other live streaming service, justin.tv, was because it was ugly, and unappealing to look at:

Now, doesn't these two look incredibly similiar? For one the main live channels window is basically the same, with featured, and most viewers. Then you have the side column full of announcements.

Instead of ustream making it easy to browse all the current live feeds, it instead feels it important to feature only a select few people on the front of its site, everyone else is listed on the "live" page, but instead of providing a preview window, you are instead forced to go to the live page of the user and then come back to the live page if you don't like the feed. There also seems to be bugs in which some ustreamer's profile pages give you a 404 when you attempt to access the live page, take TJENN for example, here is his profile, now click on the go to show page. 404.

Ustream has failed to provide a useful update to their site, instead they favor top users, copied Justin.tv's look and feel, and more than likely annoyed a good chunk of their streaming community.

RSS Bandit Alpha release test

2008-06-30T16:09:00.000-07:00

In the last week I had heard news that a desktop RSS client, RSS Bandit, was going to enable you to sync your desktop client with your online Google Reader. I had always held back from using a desktop client because when I am away on vacation or on my laptop I use Google Reader, its online, fast, full of features, and gets the job done. So when this alpha release was announced I decided to download it and test it out, needless to say its definitely an alpha release.

The program itself installed fine and works when I add an OPML file like I normally did when I used a desktop client (Feeddemon was my choice). The problems started to happen when I synchronized my Google Reader feeds with RSS Bandit. Bandit found all the categories and feeds fine, the problems started when I attempted to update the feeds. Clicking update all feeds, only brought a slew of errors, and timeouts

Now I shouldn't be all that surprised, Ghacks first profiled RSS Bandit, then panned it and compiled the results of others testing. The result? Fail

To be fair, outside its problems syncing, Bandit is a generally good desktop client, its look is comparable to Outlook and other Windows programs so it fits in nicely with the desktop. It is also not lacking in options some of which include (untested): Remote storage, Web browser, search, attachment/podcasts downloads, newsgroups, and all the standard features found in a desktop client. The latest stable release, 1.6.0.2, is generally seen as a decent desktop client, hopefully the development team with work on the problems in the alpha and have everything sorted out for the final release.

New Ubuntu Theme

2008-06-30T13:39:00.000-07:00

The first alpha of the next ubuntu release, version 8.10, code named Intrepid Ibex, was released (full coverage on Ars). The one thing missing from the current release of ubuntu, Hardy Heron, was a new theme. Many people find the current theme to be a tad too bland and not all that appealing.

So with the release of 8.10 will come a new theme, a new brown theme.

Not sure how changing the color of the current theme constitutes a new theme. Hopefully as the road map pans out, the theme will be tweaked more, but at the moment, the current theme comes off as a step back rather than a step forward

Posers are Sanctioned Spam

2008-06-29T14:03:00.000-07:00

So, my advice to you internet pundits, either crap or get off the pot.

So is the advice given today to high powered users who sign up for services and then abandon it.

This quote came from an article that scored quite a few friendfeed comments and shares today. This post goes along with another one I did centered more around ping.fm, but the general principle is still the same. "High Power" users sign up for services for whatever reason, and either give the allusion of being in the community or simply do nothing. The more troubling of these two options is the allusion that you are involved in the service. I ragged on Chris Pirillo for signing up for plurk and never actually visiting simply posting by ping.fm. Scribkin, had a problem with Steve adding 2 services, yet never being active.

They are essentially telling us, yeah well I don’t like FriendFeed, but I’m still going to use it for PR until my primary publicity vehicle stops working (in this case Twitter)

Thats my general view on people signing up for services and pretending to be active. If they didn't care for publicity they simply wouldn't post or add services, that simple. In my opinion signing up for services simply to blindly post to it, is no better than a spammer sending Viagra ads or adult links.

A prime example is this message Chris Pirillo sent out to all his services:

l0ckergn0me I signed up for Pownce since ping.fm calls it. hi5, Xanga, Tumblr, Plurk, too.

Chris, you simply signed up for services because another calls it? And then you claim you don't like plurk? How can anyone defend this kind of practice? Why do you continue to comment on them? You know they are listening, yet you continue to support spam!

I've blocked all people who feel the need to do this kind of practice, I don't need you ads in my stream, if you care to actually use the service and understand you sign up for services you like not to simply spam!

(note: I don't blame services, friendfeed has an equation that works, its the people who continue to prop up these spammers, and the spammers themselves who are to blame)

My Messy house

2008-06-28T13:03:00.001-07:00

I said my house was rather messy and someone said prove it.

Heres the proof. Rooms in this part:
1. My room
2. Bathroom
3. Sister's Room

Rooms in this part:
1. Living Room
2. Dining Room/kitchen
3. Family Room

Sorry for the bad lighting in the videos, I did it at 11:30 at night with a still cam that had no lighting on it

Twitter Death

2008-06-28T11:07:00.000-07:00

Was checking my Google reader this morning and stumbled upon a lovely article over on Mashable! about the death of twitter and Mark 'Rizzn' Hopkins expressing his anger at the service.

All the major metrics point to an evacuation: Alexa, Google Trends, and Quantcast. Compete’s analysis doesn’t show up to the day stats for people counts, but the following velocity trend graph shows some very negative numbers

Of course they're leaving the service is unusable, and little appears to be getting better. I doubt IM or track will return any time soon, and who knows when replies will be usable. As Mark went on the say:

“I hate having to rely on the web version of Twitter, first of all, then having the reply tab bork, and THEN having to go to summize, and hit reply there and pray that twitter works. It’s why I only check Twitter once or twice a day now.”

Yep I said the same thing a few days ago in my post on twitter raising funds yet still not working. I'm glad to see sites like Mashable! finally see the fact that twitter isn't the end all for social networks. If press like this can't force biz and the team to step it up, what will?

Also as far as my withdrawal from twitter goes I had times where I thought I would have to go back, namely after reading posts by Robert Scoble while he was in DC. Twitter is still has major players behind it and hopefully they will soon realize that twitter isn't king.

UPDATE: Seems Michael Arrington is fed up as well. Good to see people are actually starting to see twitter as unacceptable. Twitter should probably step forward and address the issues rather than providing small scraps on what is happening. Talking full blown blog post about it biz. Seriously. Do it.

Microsmoring

2008-06-27T18:16:00.000-07:00

Gotta love infomercials and this is another great one. This one is for microsmore, a product that allows you to "microsmore at the office or make your next party a microsmore one". basically it heats up the marshmallow and then compresses it down, all in the comfort of your microwave. Check out the video after the Jump.

(props to the kid with the fire for bad acting)

Tale of the worst OP

2008-06-26T16:24:00.000-07:00

As you can tell from the name of this blog, I am big into IRC and hoped to devout a litte more time to the subject than I have. Well here is the first post on the subject and it concerns an op and quite disturbing behavior. (Note: I ask anyone who was involved in this to look at it with an open mind, and I also thought about changing the names of people involved but because I will be linking forum posts it would have been useless)

First some background. Chris Pirillo, former techtv host and owner of lockergnome (host of Gnomedex) decided to start live streaming on ustream a little over a year ago, and when he started the live stream he asked some of the regulars in his lockergnome chat if they would care to help with the new live community. One of these people was blaster. When I first started joining the channel blaster was still a halfop, and was a great guy to chat with, friendly, knowledgeable, and fair in his bans, and decision making. As I slowly drifted away from the channel (due to the number of users, and lack of good content), blaster was promoted to op, which was only fair as he had been a good halfop since the start of the channel.

Slowly things began to change in blaster, the power seemed to be going to his head. First he started using a personal "shitlist" to auto kick people out of the channel that he felt weren't good chatters. Next he decided he needed to add a kick counter to all of his kick messages, so the whole world knew how many people he had kicked.

* chrisisawanka was kicked by blaster (|¯| <- there's the exit (500))

In the last few weeks blaster's actions have dipped even lower, lower than any respectable chatter should go. First we have this log of him taking a shot at mentally challenged people (the log was rather long so I removed the parts not needed):

(Tue 07:10:41pm) you know, fighting on the internet is like running in the special olympics: even if you win, your still retarded.
....
(Tue 07:10:58pm) defil3d, dont be rude
....
(Tue 07:11:23pm) <@blaster> Stuzilla that's the funnies thing I've heard in a long time

Instead of telling the person that their "joke" could be offensive, blaster decided it was ok to basically tell someone who did the right thing to shut up (Note: I am the cousin of a handicapped person, regardless the statement was offensive). I decided to email Chris Pirillo and make sure he was aware of the stuff his ops said, and I was simply told he would follow up (chris has the word tard on his kick list, so I figured he would be supportive of my position, and his quote also makes it seem ok to make fun of people). So later that week I posted a thread to the wyldryde forums, and was told it was handled the night it happened, so basically a slap on the wrist.

I can understand a warning for that one, but a few days later a much more troubling tread appeared, showing that blaster ghosted a user who accidentally posted his password to the chatroom.

[22:20:37] /msg NickServ IDENTIFY ****** (Password)
[22:20:40] arrg
[22:20:43] :P
[22:20:45] hahaha
[22:20:48] rof
[22:20:48] Notice from HostServ@IRC.WyldRyde.org; Your vhost of iPhone.vhost is now activated.
[22:20:56] Closing Link: iPhone[pool-privatehost.nwrknj.east.verizon.net] Cylon.WyldRyde.org (NickServ (GHOST command used by blaster))

That one is a little harder to get out of as, I have seen users killed and/or glined for the same offense. Needless to say he was deopped and given halfop instead. I would have been fine with that decision as it removes most of the power outside of kicking and banning a user.

But not anymore, not after what I witnessed today. When asked about why he was deopped today, blaster replied with:

(Thu 07:02:46pm) <+h4|Away> yo blast :) . . . hop??? O_O
...
(Thu 07:02:52pm) <%blaster> yes h4|Away
(Thu 07:02:55pm) ohhh
(Thu 07:02:55pm) <%blaster> :((
...
(Thu 07:03:14pm) <+h4|Away> omg *sob*
...
(Thu 07:03:21pm) <%blaster> it's ok it was worth it
(Thu 07:03:22pm) <%blaster> :D
...
(Thu 07:14:32pm) <%blaster> fyi Stuzilla it was worth it :D
...
(Thu 07:25:02pm) <+Dark-AleX> why hop?
(Thu 07:25:07pm) <%blaster> I was a bad boy
(Thu 07:25:08pm) <%blaster> :D

The conduct of this op is appealing to say the least. I have never seen any op allowed to publicly brag about "stealing" another users nick name. It is disgusting to see #chris continue to sanction behavior of this nature, as it encourages others to "be a bad boy" because an op did it why can't I. There are various other problems with the chatroom's management and what goes on in there but for the sake of a short post I'm going to leave it solely on their choice of blaster as an op. I would hope Chris Pirillo takes a good hard look at the kind of stuff that happens in his chat, and the kind of people he has put in charge of his chat, maybe then I would chat in it

Twitter Raises Funds....still doesn't work

2008-06-25T14:17:00.000-07:00

This morning Biz, one of the founders of twitter announced the results of a new round of funding supported by "Bijan Sabet with Spark Capital in Boston and Jeff Bezos of Bezos Expeditions in Seattle". Bijan is also now a member of the board of directors

Later on in the post, Biz announces Project Runway:

Twitter will become a sustainable business supported by a revenue model. However, our biggest opportunities will be worth pursuing only when we achieve our vision of Twitter as a global communication utility. To reach our goal, Twitter must be reliable and robust. Private funding gives us the runway we need to stay focused on the infrastructure that will help our business take flight. We will continue hiring systems engineers, operators, and architects, as well as consultants, scientists, and other professionals to help us realize our vision.

Great more funding, yet the site is still limping along. Not on is IM and track still down and out (with no mention of a return, replies, one of the key (if not most important feature) was disabled last night and remains disabled. According to the twitter status site:

The replies tab remains disabled today as we rework some of the queries that were causing problems yesterday. This has also been reflected in the sidebar of the status blog for the web features.

One way you can see replies directed to you is to search on Summize. You can search for “to:username” to see all updates directed at you.

Yep twitter is now so unusable they are directing people to third party sites in order to simply use the service. You'd expect more out of a company that closed a 15 million dollar round of funding and it's valuation is at 80 million. What are they doing with the money? Obviously not putting it into the service, maybe then it would work like it should

HP Dragon Giveaway lies

2008-06-23T13:33:00.000-07:00

This post is about a rather old thing (in internet terms that is), but has been in my mind for a while now and finally decided to get it out in the open.

HP partnered with Buzzcorps to do the 31 Days of dragon giveaway during May and early June. They found 31 sites and told them to give away the dragon (a 5,000 dollar laptop) anyway they saw fit. One of those sites was Windowsconnected.com, and they told people they needed to promote the site as best as they could. Well tons of people entered and the winner was William Ragan (a.k.a Zane Savage). Heres his video he submitted for the giveaway:

Awesome video Zane, and touching story:

...At work I'm allowed to be on the computer all night long, and I currently have a laptop that is inadequate for what I need to do. So I really need to Win this dragon Computer...I really really need it

Just how much did he need it? Just enough to stick it for sale on ebay the day it came in.

Yep he really needed that laptop. I'm not sure how much he sold it for, but lets assume he sold it for 5000 (about what the thing is worth), total that with the 5,000 Buzzcorps was going to give him to off set any taxes he'd have to pay, and zane made out with 10K. I was one of those people who entered some of the contests, and I really woud have used the dragon if I had won. Not turn around and sell it on Ebay. So Zane if you read this, care to explain why you lied about what you would do with it?

(I should also make it clear that zane was probably not the only person to do something like this)

George Carlin R.I.P.

2008-06-23T07:52:00.000-07:00

George Carlin the man who gave us the Seven Words you Can't Say on TV died. From MyFox LA:

Carlin, who had a history of heart problems and survived three previous heart attacks, died at Saint John's Health Center in Santa Monica about 6 p.m. Sunday after being admitted for chest pains. The apparent cause of death was heart failure.

So here are some of his Greatest acts:

On Religion

Dirty Words

The Seven Dirty Words

Stuff

Any I missed? Share in the Comments

Banned from Yahoo! Live

2008-06-22T21:41:00.000-07:00

Apparently I am banned from yahoo's video streaming service. Oddly I only remember getting a TOS notice. Oh well no big loss, ustream is still far better service for online video streams

Quit Your Complaining

2008-06-22T17:29:00.001-07:00

I submitted this to the local newspaper for publication

People need to stop complaining about gas prices. This problem isn't a new one, it isn't the Dems fault, its all of ours. Europe has paid substantially more for gas for quite a while now, us Americans have had it incredibly easy on the pocket. Instead of understanding that the ride wouldn't always be smooth, and working on other alternative fuels or making cars more efficient, we instead continued to buy gas guzzling SUVs and trucks. We made no effect to help the situation, and now that it is here all we can do is complain. Just like if you don't vote you can't complain, if you didn't do anything, you can't complain. I pay 40 dollars every two weeks and have no problem with the gas prices

Why ping.fm is killing social networks

2008-06-22T13:09:00.000-07:00

There are quite a few micro-blogging or status update sites out there. Some used more than others, but the one thing constant across all of these is that the techies of web2.0 are on them. All these profiles would be a pain to update everytime you had something you wanted to share.

That brings up to Ping.fm, a site that lets you update 16 different services at once, ranging from sites like twitter, jaiku, pownce, to facebook, mashable, and even blogger. Of course all the linked techies of web2.0 at least have an account on all of these, many of them simply to make sure no on else steals their name on the service. So when ping.fm came around many people flocked to it, to update all these sites at once, while this would be fine for people for actually USE the sites, many of these updates are being sent to sites they never bother to log into. Chris Pirillo is a prime example of this. Taking a look at his plurk profile we see he has a karma of 37.61 (and climbing) yet he hasn't made any replies, and all of his plurks are the same as his tweets, and every other network out there (also amazing that when he started with ping.fm his replies to other twitters stopped). Ping.fm does keep people up to date on what you are doing, but it also gives the view that you are actually using the service, but in all reality you haven't physically logged in since the day you signed up. If you don't care about a service why do you use it?

The second problem ping throws in is not one caused by ping itself but my the people using the service. Friendfeed has become the dangling of web2.0 in recent months, buoyed some by twitter's downtime, but with the initial rush to sign up for the service many people failed to think about the annoyance of using ping.fm and feeding multiple services into friendfeed. Mark Delfs from The Tuesday Night Tech Show is a prime example of this (and also of signing up for a lot of sites to preserve a nickname). I am a real user of friendfeed and to see all these entries saying the same thing is annoying and because of this I have unsubscribe from many people on friendfeed.
The last problem with ping is over connectedness. Last night on Wyldryde we had a tweet come in saying a chatter on the server died in a car crash. Well the user who twittered this was passed on an email from another user, and instead of asking questions, he hopped on ping.fm and sent the message out to all his services. This then caused quite a bit of a problem when it was revealed that the whole thing was a childish prank to gain more attention.

So my question to anyone reading this, is why do you bother updating all your services, if you really don't use them? Wouldn't it be enough to point people to the one or two services you really do you?

Personally I use plurk, none of the other ones, and yes I do have a ping.fm account, that I use from time to time to post updates to the status blog here, or if there is something I want to make sure gets out to all the people that follow me.

Twitter Withdrawal: Day 1

2008-06-21T11:26:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I posted the fact that I was hanging up the twitter account in favor of the other social networks floating around the place. I figured it would be weird to withdraw from twitter after all it was the first real social network I was active on, but it hasn't been all that hard, though there are a few things I miss:

1. extendability. Twitter allowed me to tweet from almost anywhere, my phone, my desktop, from launchy, from google reader. On and on, none of the other networks really have that power. Also the amount of good useful bots running around on twitter, remember the milk, gcal, make updating your lists and calendars on the fly incredibly easy. Nothing like that anywhere else

2. Getting the word out. Twitter is king at this, over 7 million people on a network is a great way to announce stuff. Using any of the other networks just seems like I am either talking to a wall (in Jaiku's case) or not getting the word out enough (plurk is great, but its still limited in who sees it).

And then of course the things I don't miss:

1. Integration. Twitter is terrible at integrating pictures and videos. Having moved over to plurk its awesome to look at my time line and see a thumbnail of a picture or video someone shares. I can then click on the thumbnail to get the full sized picture or video, all without leaving my time line. With twitter I see a link and I need to click on it and leave the site to see it.

2.The noise. following a conversion in twitter is terrible, no threads, just a pile of incoming replies, with all the other networks comments and replies are neatly organized in threads making it easy to look and know what conversion people are replying to.

(I'm not going to rag on twitter for its downtime, its been up 99% of the time as of late, or about it's failings with IM and track because plurk's IM is also down.)

What I plan to do about "Micro-Blogging"

2008-06-20T10:39:00.000-07:00

As we all know Twitter has had a ton of problems with their service, causing many users to complain and threaten to move to other services. Some have, but most have realized nothing can really top twitter when it works like it should. Thats the God honest truth, if twitter never had these problems with an errant XMPP project, plurk would never be where it is today, jaiku wouldn't be the hottest beta invite in town, and well friendfeed would be without a lot of twitter hate blog posts. I probably have been one of the biggest critics of twitter's performance, and as of this I have lost several followers, and probably pissed off quite a few people. While I don't regret ragging on twitter, I do wish I had toned it down a little and kept most of it confined to my blog as opposed to flooding my twitter followers with twitter hate (I do not regret any comments I made on blog posts calling twitter a pack of monkeys who can't figure out how to run servers). So to all my twitter followers I am sorry for flooding you.

Now on to the real point of this blog what I plan to do for micro-blogging now and in the future. As I said before twitter can't be beaten when it is up and working 100%. The combination of simple UI, and complex abilities via track and alerts, make twitter an incredibly effective tool. As you can see from this picture:

twitter IM and track are down. totally. They've been that way basically since the database crash a month ago (this after they were only suppose to be shutting it off for one night). mousing over IM says its offline because more capacity is being added, while track has the far more concerning status of "needs reworking". Not good at all. Twitter is suppose to be about the phone, the devices page says so itself "Twitter really shines when you're away from your computer." Well it did shine, trust me there is no fun sending tweets into nothingness like it is now.
So of course I figured it was time to find a new way to interact with people while I was sans internet. So of course I signed up for all of the micro-blogging platforms (jaiku, pownce, plurk) and looked into ways to communicate with the services. Jaiku is still in private beta, but also the only one with a functioning IM client (and it also sends updates to your phone, though not as configurable as twitter). Pownce solely has an AIR app to use off site, and plurk does have an IM client that is off air at the moment going through its own rework. Sadly the one thing all three of these sites lack is people, going by alexa.com's stats for the three plus twitter and friendfeed we see:

Twitter's people are its greatest asset, if twitter was able to overcome its problems there is no way I would ever be thinking about leaving it, but I am. So here is what I am thinking:

Status updates: Plurk

Shared things: Friendfeed

Mobile status updates: Jaiku

I may very well change this, but I want to end my dependence on twitter as a whole, because the less I use it, the less I will be disappointed in it when it fails

Ads on Ustream; My feelings

2008-06-20T08:10:00.000-07:00

Yesterday Mashable posted a story on how ustream would be rolling out ads on live streams on the site. For one we all should have known it was coming for a long time, you can't expect a site to host all this traffic and people and not use ads to make money. I have no problem with these ads on a few conditions:

1. Ads most be geared toward my sites audience. I stream something and the last thing I was is for my stream to be used as a way to sell something for Home and Garden TV as was Nuke1's stream back in April (here and here). Something like giving the user an option to pick which ads run on the stream would be a good step for ustream to both put ads out there and also make the community feel like they aren't being left out.

2. Revenue sharing of some kind is more than likely going to be needed. Ustream has long allowed streamers to run ads on their streams if they cared to (Chris Pirillo being a major one), but placing ads will more than likely upset a few streamers, and many will clamor for revenue sharing on the ads. I don't blame them one bit, while ustream has a right to do what they want with the service and chose how they want ads to appear on the site, it should consider live streams not as their property, but as the intellectual property of the streamer themselves. Many of these streamers use ustream to do live airings of podcasts or tapings of youtube videos, and just like youtube doesn't own the content of your videos, neither does ustream.

3. Less obtusive the ads, the better the ads will be. When I caught a sneak at the ads back in April, the ad was bright red, and stuck out like a sore thumb on the stream I was watching. Less the stick out, the less people will complain.

4. Ustream better be totally forthcoming in how the ads will be done. While I doubt it would leave the site itself, ustream better make sure that it they do, it is known. I have the ustream widget embedded here on my blog, and trust me I do NOT support third party ads on any widget on my site. This blog IS my property, and if ads are going to start appearing on embedded widgets I'm gone from ustream.

Ustream best of luck getting ads up and running, I'll be watching for status reports

Why friendfeed sucks for the little guy

2008-06-20T07:38:00.001-07:00

I think the pics say enough by themselves

Site up

2008-06-19T00:12:00.001-07:00

site is up and fully working minor tweaks still to come but generally finished. may move back to intense debate now that it supports friendfeed will check out what disqus will offer up

Great News

2008-06-17T18:22:00.000-07:00

Today I received an invite to the private beta of redlasso, the video sharing site that allows users to record video from tons of stations and use the embedded videos on their blogs. This service should provide invaluable in fathering this blog.

IRC Etiquette

2008-06-15T19:47:00.000-07:00

As the blog name implies I am a person who still hangs out on IRC, I was never into the whole IRC thing back in the 1990s when it was massively popular, but over the last few months I have started idling in channels one a few different servers. During this time I have noticed some things that people really seem to not understand and would be wise to learn. So without furth ado here are some helpful tips to keep in mind as you chat:

Chatting

No matter how cool you think you are for flooding, you aren't
Don't piss off IRCops, simple and you should know why
Don't give out personal crap (again a duh)
Don't ask for op, or other statuses in the channel. stick around and you will earn it.
Try to keep the joins/parts you do to a minimum, do it too much and it is the same as flooding

URLS

keep them to a minimum
Don't post extremely long ones it floods
ask before you do it, some chats don't allow them
tinyurls can be your friend and your enemy. While tinyurls shorten really long urls they can mask shock sites, and other crap no one wants to see. So if you want to post a tinyurl ask if it is ok, some channels mark tinyurl as an akick and you could be banned.
Personal links to your blog, website, myspace/facebook profile etc. IS spam, and may get you booted

Bots

No matter how cool you think your bot is, it isn't it is more annoying than anything
8ball, drink, and other scripts of this nature are more annoying than anything, try to only use useful scripts
If you want to add commands keep it low in number. If you can't remember all the commands who thinks the users will?
Do NOT make your bot a flood bot. RSS bots can be cool and useful but it you set it to a site that posts a lot, it just ends up flooding the chat. Also auto greets are annoying for the people in the chat, while it welcomes new people it floods the user already in there
If you want or think the bot will be helpful to another chat, ask BEFORE you bring it in, just bringing it in will make the ops quite mad at you

Scripts

Scripts can be your best friend or your worse enemy, use them with care
Keep them to a minimum, try to only use scripts that will actually be helpful to you
Make sure you know what a script does before you use it, don't simply run a script that some person said was cool
If you use an Away System, turn if to NOT display in channel, being on multiple channels and sending them all a message that you are on the phone annoying rather than helpful. Also watch out for public triggers hidden in your script
Do the testing in a private room or a place meant for bot/script testing

Own Server

Do your homework before you start your own IRC server, read the documentation, facts on starting one, what you will need etc.
Understand that servers are a lot of work and you need to have the time to devote to one
Understand that inevitably you will be attacked by spammers,
Understand the legal things related to file sharing and other topics, be aware you can be held responsible for hosting mp3 share rooms
If you need help read the help documents first, don't go around asking other network admins for help, too many questions will get annoying

Storage Container Compressed

2008-06-15T19:42:00.000-07:00

Heres a cool video of a storage container compressing due to the extreme inbalance of pressure on the outside compared to the inside of the tank.

She did not just say that

2008-06-15T19:40:00.000-07:00

Type rest of the post here

ah yes she did

Messed up Japanese Urinal

2008-06-15T19:37:00.000-07:00

Ackward Japanese urinal, and a kid having way too much fun peeing into the thing

TU OU Game Pics

2008-06-15T19:34:00.001-07:00

Here are some pictures from last night's 62-21 beating of Tulsa by OU.

Sam Bradford Warming up

Kelly and Iglesias leading Warm-ups

A Friendly Chat among coaches

Crazy jet-pack dude

Stoops calling plays during the game

Hand Shakes

And here is a quick video of Sam Bradford handing off to Chris Brown in the fourth quarter:

After all of this we had a little problem in the stands involving a small (but drunk) group of OU Students. These students some how managed to get into the students section, and spent the game being general idiots (throwing stuff, swearing, etc.) They were removed at the end of the game by Tulsa P.D., and that is when all all hell broke loose. One of them took a swing at a cop and promptly got thrown to the ground and arrested!

Idiots in our section

Arrested!

More Arrested!

A Golden Nugget from Mt. Whitney

2008-06-15T19:31:00.000-07:00

A women displays her nuggets from Mt. Whitney

Here is another headline that made me do a double-take this morning:\

No More Privies, So Hikers Add a Carry-Along

So I decided to read it and low and behold, the highest outhouse in the world has been removed and hikers now have to bag their poop and net them to the outside of their packs. To quote the Times: "Yes you can take it with you, actually you must. So now when you hike you have to throw your poop out in a dumpster at the trail head (God only knows how nasty that will smell.):

So far this year, more than 4,500 pounds of waste in Wagbags has been deposited in receptacles at the Whitney Portal trail head, all of it headed for landfills, where the bags are designed to biodegrade over six to nine months.

And many people have been missing their outhouse, which was behind a rock and open on three sides (no peeking.):

“I do miss it,” Mr. Nelson said. “It was a great place to get out of the wind. It was really a luxury to have it up here.”

Oh, yes outhouse are great places to go and smell the fresh air. This is another reason not to want to go hiking, because I sure a hell don't what to carry my poop around.

A&P Rap Lands Teens in Trouble

2008-06-15T19:27:00.000-07:00

I saw on CNN about two brothers who created a rap while they were working at an A/P supermarket. After one complaint, the store fired them and is suing them for a million (!?) dollars. I decided to check out the whole video, and embedded at the bottom of this post.

So, if you watched the video, would you agree that it isn't too bad right? Here is the CNN interview in which they defend themselves (and do a damn good job of it too. And here is some great comments from youtube that prove some great points:

Their suing you guys? Lol. A lawyer could have a field day with this. You guys never mentioned A&P and never shown a sign of A/P. The only reason that could point the fact that that's A&P is your shirts. Buy similar shirts video tape you guys going into Pathmark, ShopRite and other stores with it on. Case closed..A/P will look like dumbasses.

i used to work at winn dixie... you don't want to know what went on in the dairy, produce, and frozen food freezers. believe me people much worse things happen than what was in the video. lighten up.

So I decided to talk with A/P and fired off an email to them to get their take:

A/P management's position on this matter should be self explanatory. Producing a video that intentionally and unjustly depicts our company in a negative light, and utilizing company facilities without management knowledge of the specific content involved, is obviously a blatant violation of our policy.

Accordingly, the company has dismissed both employees, and is exploring legal avenues for the recovery of damages, and the removal of any and all videos about the Company from the website where it has been posted by the individuals.

We will continue to work through our store management, labor union and legal process to bring this unfortunate series of events to an appropriate conclusion, and will have no further public comment while that process continues.

Richard De Santa,
Senior Director, Corporate Affairs

Really think you'll get it down? It isn't simply on Youtube, it all over even here so have fun getting people to take it down, because I think their is something called Free Speech in this country. Oh and if you didn't see the CNN vid, their dad is the produce manager and supports them, so management probably knew about it!

Rick Derringer, Edgar Winter Pics

2008-06-15T19:21:00.000-07:00

Here are the pictures from the Edgar Winter/ Rick Derringer Concert last night on the Enfield Town Green. The concert was great although it rained and there were a few technical problems.

Rick Derringer Rocking Out

Edgar Winter

Edgar on the sax

Edgar and the lead guitarist

Come on and take a free ride!

Missing Connecticut Boy

2008-06-15T19:16:00.000-07:00

Regrettably I have to report that the fire department has pulled the body of Stephanos from The Connecticut river, ending hope for his safe return.

Hypocrisy of Safety Laws

2008-06-15T19:13:00.000-07:00

One thing over the past few weeks have simply set me off more than any thing else in the world: the constant airing of those "Click or Ticket It" commercials. Over and over I am reminded to buckle up or I will have to pay a fine, all in the name of safety, safety, safety. Each day I sit in my car, seat belt on, and watch as motorcyclists zip by on they bikes will no helmet, nothing at all. So I ask why can the government tell me to buckle up for safety, but doesn't tell bikers to wear helmets?

A quick search on google uncovers hundreds in not thousands of sites that are both for and against the passive of national helmet laws. both have there own stats and figures, and both claim that they are right. The one stat that I saw on most of the stats (excluding Biker Rights Online) was that helmets are 37% effective in saving lives. That at first seems really bad, but when you see the thousands of accidents involving bikes, over 300 lives are saved due to helmets.
Aside from the stats, figures, charts, the main problem I have is the personal invasion that the government poises on you set of people but not on another. Most of the time the reason no universal ban is in effective is that riders are so small a percentage of all motorists, and only ride in the summer, spring and, some of the fall. While I understand there are bigger fish to fry, I feel discriminated against.

weather

2008-04-01T18:21:00.000-07:00

Current Weather at Home

Weather Forecast | Weather Maps | Weather Radar | Hurricane Center

Current Weather at College

Weather Forecast | Weather Maps | Weather Radar | Hurricane Center

About

2007-07-03T18:44:00.000-07:00

I've gotten a few questions as of late wondering, exactly who I am and what I'm doing poking around the internet rambling about things. I had been meaning to do this page for a while now, and finally have the time to sit down and write about the hardest thing, myself

Well going by my name, I'm currently attending the university of Tulsa (at the time of this writing I'm a junior majoring in History, minor in Computer Science). I'm orginally from Enfield, CT, a moderately big town (~50,000 people). Grew up liking swimming, and reading. Our family was generally behind on the times, we didn't get cable till I was 5ish, and didn't get our first PC till I was in the fifth grade. While not may not sound all that bad, consider the fact that we still had dial-up internet till 2 years ago. Thanks to this I knew little about computers before I went to college.
When I got to college I had more free time to fool around, and instead of messing with drugs or alcohol I threw it into computers, and tech. I started looking around for things to listen to or study to learn more, and that was when I found Chris Pirillo on iTunes. I subscribed, and started listening, and at first thought it was rather pointless, but later got addicted. I wasn't able to join the live community for close to 3 weeks because of problems with the school blocking ports. After I did (September 27th per nickserv info), it was just the start of my IRC experiences. I slowly branched out from there, moving at first to other chatrooms on wyldryde, then to servers like ustream, or freenode. I spent time looking over help files, and FAQs hoping to learn stuff, and it seems to have paid out, as I was offered and IRCOp position on the iPocalypse network back in June.

To address some other questions:

Q.) Where did the name for the blog come from?
A.) Basically someone called me an IRC Freak one day because I knew all the commands and was always banning people, so when I had the chance to register a domain to remove the .blogspot.com from my url, ircfreak, just kinda stuck out so I used it.

Q.) Why are you so negative?
A.) Basically it just kind of comes out. I find I write better when I care about something. Basically I write and when its finished its negative, sorry if I offend anyone but thats just how it happens.

Q.)Are you related to NUKE?
A.) Nope. I just started talking to him when I was in #chris, and then started watching him stream. After talking in #chris for a while a group of us started chatting in the ustream chat associated with the stream. After time we switched to our current home #nuke on wyldryde. Since nuke doesn't really have the time to effectively manage a chat, I told him I would run it for him.

Q.) Do you have a chat?
A.) I was never into the whole have your own chat deal. I would just talk to people in theirs. But I finally broke down and set up one, #bklounge on irc.ipocalypse.net. Any other one is not mine and kindly tell me about it (check contact page for how to find me)

Q.) Do you Script?
A.) Not really, I've messed around with some mIRC scripts, but mostly I use other scripts and tweak them to my needs. I've tried scripting but have really only the very basic things down. I did pick up a coding python book and hopefully, I'll learn some more with my computer science minor.

Q.) What do you plan to do for a nick once you're out of college?
A.) Simple, I'll use Jared as I have it registered on the major networks I am on (Wyldryde and iPocalypse). Outside of that I'll either use BCK, or stick with Boredcollegekid if need be (as I'll probably need to do on ustream)

Q.) Where did your nick come from?
A.) I was in the local community college taking a class on video and photo editing, and the final project involved uploading a video to youtube. I didn't have an account at the time, so when I was signing up I didn't want to use the handle I use to use, so I just picked boredcollegekid. It was taken, so I added 89 for my birth year. When I joined Wyldryde, I had just watched chris on youtube so I just used my handle dropping 89 to save length.

Q.) Do you really have "bored" on highlight?
A.) Yes I do. Some people shortened boredcollegekid to BCK, but others shortened it to just bored. To make sure I wouldn't miss anything I added it to the list. Note, this was BEFORE, #chris added the what is bored command, so I generally didn't get many highlights.

Q.) Shouldn't you not use boredcollegekid if #chris doesn't allow bored conversion?
A.) Again I'm in many more channels than #chris, and I had the nick registered long before the chat created the command.

Q.) Why are you not a halfop in #chris?
A.) I've applied twice, once back in December, and once in February, rejected both times because of my age. I have since, decided being a halfop is not what I want to do with my time on IRC, and recent events will more than likely ensure that.

Q.) Are you like always online? I see you on all the time.
A.) Like most geeks I am online a lot, but just because I'm in chat doesn't mean I'm in front of the PC. If my connection is good, I idle in chat 24/7. If you need me /whois me and check my idle time, if its longer than ~15 minutes I'm away.

Q.) Why did you choose college in Oklahoma? You live in Connecticut, besides what is there to do there.
A.) Well my family on my grandfather's side is mostly from Oklahoma and I still have a lot of them living in the area. I had also always wanted to go to the university of Oklahoma, but when I toured the college it was too big for me, so I choose University of Tulsa (3000ish students to OU's 26,000). And yes there is things to do in Tulsa, it has a great music scene (not all country), and of course has numerous shops and restaurants.

Q.) History? What the hell?!
A.) Simple, I always loved it, and not being a major techie before college I didn't know as much, so the idea suited me well, not it seems odd to some.

Q.) What PCs do you have?
A.) I have a dell latitude D620 laptop (Intel Pentium III 2.0 ghz, 2.0 gb of RAM, 80gb Hard Drive running Windows XP Pro SP3). I also have an HP S3220N (AMD athlon 64 X2 5000+, 2.6ghz, 2.0gb of RAM, 400 gb Hard Drive, Nvidia 8400gs, running a dual boot of Windows Vista SP1 and Ubuntu 8.04).

Q.) Which IRC client do you like the best?
A.) Personally all the clients have their own good things and bad things. At the moment I am running mIRC because Xchat doesn't have support for a multi-row toolbar.

Q.) Are Pepper and you really engaged?
A.) No, its a running joke that we will be getting married in 2014 when she gets out of college. Sorry to disappoint anyone but its just a joke :D