Well, I just posted my first ever photo on Flickr. It’s a picture of my desktop with my 3 new LCDs. I’m not sure that it does it justice (they look better than that), but it’s pretty cool nonetheless. :)

I like my brain, it works pretty well. But one thing I have yet to get over is my inability to be opportunistic with domain names. For instance, yesterday, Nintendo Wii was announced. I did not think, not once, about getting a Wii domain name. I’m a Nintendo fan, we’ll probably get one. But, my mind just doesn’t work like that. I’ve noticed this before, but I have yet to train myself differently. I didn’t think about it today until I saw a sale thread at SitePoint for Wii domains. Too late. I need to work on that.

So, I’m sure you’ve seen news reports on MySpace and how it is dangerous or how it’s… fertile ground for predators. I see people looking at MySpace like it is some new concept. Like MySpace came around and, uh oh, we better watch the kids! Like it created danger or something. There was a post at KarateForums.com where someone asked if anyone had a MySpace and someone posted no – they didn’t want to get that personal. There are some previews at Fox.com for an upcoming episode of America’s Most Wanted that focuses on online predators. And one of the cops mentioned that he (whichever sicko it was) was on MySpace, so he’s hoping he’ll show up. (Funnily enough, I just remembered that Fox owns MySpace).

What is MySpace, really? It’s one really, really big online community. MySpace is just another internet community, at heart. Whether it be MySpace or one of my own communities, you are sharing yourself online. How much information should you disclose about yourself? That is up to you. You disclose what you want in line with what you desire to accomplish. Don’t come to one of my sites expecting to be immune from sickos. I’m not God. If I see any suspicious behavior, I’ll deal with it. Thankfully, I never have. But, that doesn’t mean it hasn’t or can’t happen.

I’ve been online for many years. Since I was… er… I’m guessing… 11 or so. I’ve went through the various stages. Hanging out in chat rooms for hours, shorthand, no caps, no periods, talking about things I might not talk about with someone face to face, whatever whatever. But, it never occurred to me to ever give out my home address to anyone because that’s not how my parents raised me. Even in business, I have a P.O. Box and that gets the widespread use. I always tell people “well, if someone wants to kill you, most likely they can get a chance.” (I’m so nice). But, there is no need for me to help anyone do it.

The internet is an enabler for these people. The greatest enabler ever. But, it’s about common sense and it’s about common sense parenting. It’s not about MySpace or KarateForums.com or phpBBHacks.com or SitePoint or anything else. You can’t expect people to protect you or your children. That’s not their job, nor should it be – it’s yours.

You can get a Dell UltraSharp 1907FP for about $219. You can take off a few bucks with FatWallet (before tax and there isn’t tax in all areas) and a few more bucks off with a Dell Preferred Account, if you have one. Thought I’d mention it.

I bought 3. :-D

Ok, so I’m looking for a little input. I’ve never really had to deal with “spoilers” before. No Harry Potter fansite, just yet. But, that has changed with DGH. I now have spoilers to worry about for both the blog and the forums. So, what do I do, if anything? On one hand, I’m thinking “well, if you don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t visit sites with info on the show.” But, is that fair? I chatted with my buddy Jeremy a bit since B5 has a number of blogs that deal with spoilers, such as House is Right.

They don’t really have any set policies, either. So, we talked a bit. Here are some general thoughts put across:

Blog:

– Since the blog is a controlled environment and there are no comments, it’s easy to add a word in front of the actual title and to make the title vague. i.e. “Spoiler: Episode 78” or “Preview: Episode 64”, etc. Not going to do anything for the blog entry though.
– I could try to get some plugin made for Nucleus that would create a spoiler area that people had to expand to read. But, is that worth it? How would it affect the feeds and search engine results?

Forums:

– I run a House site. What am I gonna say? Don’t post info about HOUSE on my HOUSE forums dedicated to HOUSE? That’s a moderation nightmare.
– Spoiler tags in posts. Ok, that can be OK, but again… getting people to use them. This can be a moderation nightmare, as well.
– Even if we did that, what about subjects? We could create a spoilers forum and make it so that threads automatically have [SPOILER] in their subject (not sure how we’d do that – some hack). But, even then, what if it is “[SPOILER] House dies in Episode 78”? We could make it (again, some hack, no idea how – but this is getting awfully complex) so that threads in that forum don’t show up in ANY searches, except for staff members, I suppose… otherwise, trying to moderate thread titles is kind of a moderation nightmare (I need to stop saying that).

So, if anyone has any input, perhaps something I’m missing, that’d be great. Thanks.

So, I’m sitting here eating a chocolate marshmallow egg and I can’t help but think… I kinda like working on holidays. I mean, yeah, I spend time with my family, etc. But, there is downtime and a lot of it on most holidays and I like working on these days. Why? Well, it may sound funny, but the internet is “quiet” on holidays. There are less messages, less posts, less everything. So, I can get through my routine and get more done.

Then again, most days are like any other day to me. I was homeschooled and I did school on the days that I wanted to, not just Monday through Friday. I commonly worked on weekends and took weekdays off. And so on and so forth. So, I tend to look at every day as just another day for the most part.