Entries from August 2008 ↓

The whole topic of cyber-bullying is pretty big these days. Typically it is associated with teens and sites like myspace, facebook and what not. But in the wide world of the web, it can be pretty easy for adults to treat others rather poorly as well.

This has been a rather huge topic of discussion on Dragon’s Mark, the creative writing and role-play site I own. We have an area for players to talk about a variety of topics, and one of most active in quite awhile is titled No Swimming - Keep Out - and is primarily about how folks treat others, be it on blogs, in chat rooms, or in gossiping with others. And the discussion has spilled over on to at least a few other players blogs that I’m aware of… such as Obviously Pink and If you don’t like what you see here…*

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Ok, I’ve been playing with and cleaning up my widgets and plugins after I upgraded this WordPress install to 2.6. And without realizing it at first, I broke one of my pages when I removed the SimpleTag plugin. I figured, 2.6 has great tagging now, what do I need it for?

Well, my Tag Cloud page was using a call to that plugin to generate a list of all the tags I have used…  469 to date.

So rather than reinstall the plugin just to have that cloud, I did some playing around and here’s what I came up with.

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Ok, I don’t do posts like this very often. But it is Monday… so it seems like a good time to share this particular post I found on another site.

From over on Zen Habits comes 32 Ways to Make Someone Happy Today

The list includes items from the very simple “Smile” to the more existential “Be there when they’re in need.”, and I would probably agree with all of them except #26 - but that’s just me.

My own #33 - Hold open a door for someone coming in as you are leaving (or vice-versa).

So a little while back, a co-worker brings in his dads (Ted) computer for me to look at for him. Turns out it is riddled with viruses and spyware and other crud. The worst of these seemed to be some sort of Zlob-Media Codec infections which mess with the start menu (removing just about all the menu items), puts VIRUS ALERT by your system clock, and just plain messes with the registry.

He had an older version of AVG on there, so I tried to do a scan with that, then downloaded the newest version as well as SpyBot Search & Destroy. I was able to pick off a few of viruses through AVG, but at this point it wasn’t 100% updated because I was not about to plug this thing in to my network and let it online. The aggravating thing with that was that SpyBot didn’t seem to want to run until I let it to do an update. Long story short, some of the stuff got detected and dealt with, but now the computer won’t boot up at all. I get some sort of Virtual Device Driver DLL initialization from command.com and that’s about it.

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The micro-blogging site, Twitter, has been around for awhile.  And the concept is fairly simple…

Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?

To that end, you are able to post a short (140 character max) message that folks have come to refer to as “tweets”. These messages lets others know what you are doing at any given time. I get the whole concept, but I never really got in to it… just never found much of a use for it, though I have tried on a few occasions.

Maybe I just don’t have enough friends? Well, friends that also use Twitter. Or that are even in to the whole social networking concept. Which is actually rather odd since just about all the friends I have these days I can pretty much trace back to having gotten connected through some sort of online means. Most from back in my AOL days. But I suppose as I have slowly delved more and more in to the world of putting content on the web via various blogs, I was bound to drift towards the micro-blogging here and there.

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I own a site called Dragon’s Mark, which is run with the help of four friends. It’s a site, well a group of sites set up for free form role-playing. Basically, a form of creative writing, usually done on a collaborative scale. The forums are generally used to posting of story items written by our site members. These can range from short “play by post” set-ups where two or more players write out a scene together, to much more elaborate stories that make up scenes from the life of the various characters.

Recently we had an issue crop up where it was found that a number of story type postings were plagiarized. The original poster has said it was not intentional, that the stories were purchased from a ghost-writer. That’s really neither here nor there. The fact is, the items were plagiarized, taken from various fan-fiction sources. the OP took most of them down, well, took down pretty much everything they had ever posted. We (the admins of the site) took down some others. The whole thing has left a bit of an open sore sort of feeling with a number of folks.

I do not, by any means, claim to be an expert on this issue, but I have learned a number of things about plagiarism and fan-fiction over the last couple of weeks.

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