Apparently, my blog design’s creator decided to make a new version of the old program—the one I was using will stop working the next time WordPress gets updated—so I installed Version II and decided to play with some of the features. Sure, I could have been sleeping for the last two hours instead of choosing what color I should use for the background, but sleep is overrated. Way overrazzzzzzzzzz…
Why go on strike against #SOPA and #PIPA?
I found a video created by “Fight for the Future” that provides a brief explanation—less than five minutes—about SOPA, Protect IP and their potential consequences. (I can’t embed said video in a blog entry, so here’s a link instead.)
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Going on strike against #SOPA and #PIPA
I’m sure that some/most/all of you have heard about SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and Protect IP, bills that Congress will be voting on coming up on January 24th. I’ve posted some opinions about the subject on various websites that aren’t this one—no, I don’t know why I haven’t put them on here—but suffice it to say that I think the bills are bad. Very bad for many, many reasons.
I haven’t gathered a lot of in-depth information or done a whole lot of analysis about the subject and thus can’t share it with you, but tomorrow, the 18th, will be the perfect time for you to find out more. That’s because on the 18th, the Internet is going on strike, my blog included.
shawnbakken.net will send you to a SOPA STRIKE website (thus, your opportunity to learn more), but it’s only for a day and it’s a minor effort compared to other sites that will be shutting down as well: Google, Wikipedia, reddit, Twitpic, Minecraft, etc. (Consequently, if you need to look up something on the Internet tomorrow, you’re fucked.) Still, it’s my own little way of saying that the bills are bad. Very bad for many, many reasons.
After tomorrow, I’ll try to write a little more a little more often… writing a blog entry every day in November was only a temporary habit, it seems. Nevertheless, first things first—show Congress and the Senate that once again, they’re completely out of the loop and are listening to lobbyists more than the people they’re representing. (If we’re lucky, some of the bills’ supporters will try looking up something on the Internet tomorrow and be fucked, too.) Hope everyone has a pleasant January 18th and I’ll see you on the other side.
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Spammers, fear Akismet’s wrath!
Man, when I fall off the wagon, I fall off hard. There are a few blog entries I could have written, but opted not to… maybe some other time, maybe not. But the point is that after writing something every day in November, I looked on here, noticed that it was getting close to a week since my last post and it hurt me deep down in my soul. Thankfully, there are always spammers trying to post comments that keep things interesting. For me, anyway.
Akismet is a spam blocker here on WordPress and from 2007 to now, it’s blocked 14,609 spam at a 99.65% accuracy rate. I remember back in the old days of shawnbakken.com, there were no spam blockers (at least none that I knew of), so I had to surf through all the posts and get rid of all the bogus comments myself. I currently have over 650 posts and Akismet blocked eight spam since I logged in yesterday… Akismet has saved me a lot of time and frustration over the last few years.
Today, seven of the blocked comments were from “vimax” or had “vimax” as part of the spammer’s web address. I have no idea what Vimax is and I’m afraid to look it up on Google in case it’s something like a herpes medication—if I found out and told you, you might start to wonder why I knew…
But I thought it was interesting because some of the comments were along the lines of “My wife wouldn’t like it if she read this.” I’m sure I’ve written an offensive blog post or two or… well, there could be a lot, but this one? “Hey, fuck your wife, I like having a social life!” But since Akismet blocked that comment, I didn’t have to write that response—since I didn’t have to tell the spammer to go fuck his wife, one could consider Akismet a cock blocker with a 100% success rate, too.
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I should update the links on the site
I should, but I don’t. I’m sure it’s especially bad back in the Beauty and the Geek years—you could click on a link in a blog entry and it would take you to the WB’s (or the CW’s) website so you could read more about the show. Nowadays… I have no idea where those links go. They might go nowhere, they might lead to a random site that’s written entirely in Mandarin Chinese. The same potential goes for just about everything on here—after a bunch of years, I have no idea what the destination of any given link might be. Thus, if you click on one and it doesn’t direct you to wherever it’s supposed to go, my apologies. I doubt I’ll do anything about it, but my apologies nonetheless.
(Note of interest: I just searched for my old blog address, www.shawnbakken.com, and it’s been abandoned. Nothing there. The thought of repurchasing the site and using it again floated through my head for approximately two seconds—trying to move everything from here to there would be way too much of a hassle. Considering how long it took me to post about 14 months worth of entries in here that I neglected to put in the first time… yeah. But it was a nice two-second-long thought.)
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Updated “About Me” page
Just giving everyone a heads-up that the “About Me” page now has a lot more “about me”. People who read the older version weren’t getting much information beyond “Hey, I was on TV!” Well, it still says “Hey, I was on TV!”, but I added a bunch of stuff. It doesn’t look as lame now. It might provide more ammunition to accuse me of being lame, but the page itself looks better, so it’s all good.
(As a side note, I’m adding a link to Marie Porter’s blog on celebrationgeneration.com. She’s an excellent cook and “kind of a big deal” ever since one of her recipes was featured in Every Day with Rachel Ray magazine. Go check out her website, too.)
