Ok, I’m a week or so late, but here’s a summary of what I posted about in August of 2008….

This. Just. Sucks.
I got sick coming back from a trip out to VA and DC. Was laid up for bout a week.

Christmas in August
This is a recipe for my all time favorite holiday cookie. They can be made any time, but my family traditionally has them for Christmas. Gonna have to work on a WLS friendly version for this year.

Fan-Fiction: Copyright Versus Plagiarism
A bit of a discussion on the copyright issues around fan-fiction.

I never did get Tweeting – not sure I get Denting either.
I’ve been on Twitter for quite awhile.. last year I actually started using Identi.ca – I’ve posted over 3000 tweets/dents in the last year. Guess I kinda get it now…?

Bringing Ubuntu to the World, One PC at a Time
A bit about setting up a friend’s retired dad with Ubuntu instead of Windows after failing to get all the virus and crud off the computer for him.

Make someone smile
A rare link to another site for me… still a good read.

Adding a Tag Cloud Page to WordPress
Last year I was pushing 500 tags in my tag cloud, now it’s just under 800. That may not be a good thing.

Where’s Your Line?
My own look at cyber-bullying.

On a personal note, this time last year I was pushing 380 pounds. Today I’m under 235. That’s 145 pounds gone forever. More than my sister weighs… she says it’s like I lost a whole person. Unfortunately it isn’t her I lost… (just kidding!)

That’s it for this months round-up, see ya in a few weeks!

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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