So I'm back, again.  But I've been quite busy the past few weeks.

I have a job now (finally).  Actually, I have two jobs which is even better.

Every Monday through Friday, from 9 - 6 most of the time, I'm at NCOL which is a small, local, privately owned and operated ISP/computer repair/IP phone service company.  There are somewhere around a dozen-ish employees right now.  My days are spent removing viruses, replacing bad hardware, installing updates, and answering lots and lots of tech support phone calls.  I have learned a lot already, and I'm sure I will learn a ton more as time goes on.

When I'm not at NCOL, I might be writing a post for another website, APCMag.com.  They were looking for Linux bloggers a few weeks ago and I applied and got the job.  I've only written a few posts so far, but you can read them here as they are posted.  Here they are so far...

DirectX 10 coming to Linux through WINE and CrossOver

Ubuntu 9.10 to be named after an Australian sleepy marsupial

French police switch from Windows to Linux

HOW TO: choose the best version of Linux

As far as photos go, I haven't posted any in quite a while.  This is partially because I haven't taken as many photos recently, but also because I've been looking into a different method of posting them.  The method I use now is rather tedious and clumsy.  Anyway, I'll be posting lots more photos once I get a better system of posting them working.

So I ran across an interesting news post earlier this week.  The story goes something like this:

Basically, there was a girl named Teresa and she had an XBOX Live account.  In her profile (the area where you describe yourself, in case you don't know) she stated that she was a lesbian.  I don't know exactly what her profile said, but she mentioned her orientation somewhere in it.  She says:

"I was harassed by several players, 'chased' to different maps/games to get away from their harassment."

Not only that, but she goes on to say:

"They followed me into the games and told all the other players to turn me in because they didn't want to see that crap or their kids to see that crap."

Now as I said, I don't know exactly what her profile said, but anyway you figure it, other people should not have treated her like that.  Now you might say "There's no proof they actually did that."  Yes, there's no proof, but it's highly unlikely that someone would write a letter to The Consumerist if none of that actually happened.

Microsoft went on to suspend her XBOX Live account because other players found her profile "offensive."  This may or may not have been an automated response, I don't know for sure.  Either way, it's kinda crazy.  Microsoft has a specific policy against stating sexual orientation in XBOX Live profiles or using "offensive" words as a part of your name (in your profile) or gamer tag (the name that other players see in games).

But that's not all, similar things have been reported before.  Someone else reportedly had to change their gamer tag because it was found to be "offensive."  And a Mr. Gaywood (yes, that's his real name) could not use his actual name as his gamer tag or as his name in his profile.  Microsoft later confirmed that his name was found "offensive."  Yes, according to Microsoft, his NAME is "offensive."  Wow.

People need to grow up.  Who cares if another player in a video game has a different sexual orientation?  Nobody should.  What about religion or any other aspect?  I'm sure many people find other religions, beliefs, facts, and ideas "offensive," but does that mean that a company should try to provide an environment free of all these so called offensive things?  I don't think so.

Think about it.  I'm sure there are plenty of people around the world who find something about you offensive.  Whether it's your diet, history, job, sex, religion, or race, there is something about you that someone else finds offensive.  This doesn't mean everyone should be banned from every social interaction, it just means people are different.

End of story.  Just learn that and move on with life.  It's really easy.

P.S. I'm glad 1&1 won't ban me from using their servers because someone else found this post "offensive."

Earlier this week, id Software launched the open beta to their online game Quake Live.  It is essentially a web-based version of Quake III Arena with some relatively small changes.  Oh, and it's free.  Just download the game, log in, and enjoy.

I tried it earlier this for week for a little while in Windows.  They say that Linux and Mac support is on the way, but not available now.  I haven't tried it much in Linux yet, but I'm guessing it will run with some tweaking.

Some of the stages are based on Q3A stages and others are new.  No support for mods right now, but it's possible that a few user-made maps might be added in the future.

In case you don't know, I have this website hosted on a 1&1 shared hosting account.  It's not the best, but it's cheap and it works.

Anyway, one of the main problems people run into with Drupal on most shared hosting accounts is Clean URLs not working.  Why does this matter?  Without Clean URLs, there will be a ?q= in the URL for each page, which looks weird and is not quite as friendly with search engines.

Thankfully, there is usually a simple fix.  On 1&1 just two things need to change.

1 - Drupal needs to use PHP5, not PHP4.  You can rename all the PHP files, if you want, or you can just add this to you .htaccess file.

#Use PHP5. AddType x-mapp-php5 .php

You can add this on any new line in the file.

2 - Drupal needs to know how to handle URLs correctly, which means this:

# RewriteBase /

needs to be this:

RewriteBase /

Yes, so just delete the # character in front of RewriteBase /, that's all.  It is probably located towards the bottom of the file.

Like I said, a simple fix, but it stumps a lot of people.

Many things have occured since the last time I posted anything here.

First of all, I'm married now!  Katy and I had a beautiful marriage ceremony on December 22nd at Wake Forest Church of God.  Everything went just about as perfect as possible.  You can see some of the picture from the wedding and one of the showers on Matt's website.  I'll post some pictures and more info about everything soon.

Since we got married, we have moved into a nice little apartment on the West side of Oxford, NC.

Also, we got our first snow of the year, as you can see here.

I'm sure other things have happened, but I'll just post about them as I remember them.

ZoneAlarm, a Windows firewall and antivirus program, is celebrating its birthday today and you can get the professional version for free if you download it today.  It normally costs $40, so get it soon if you need a firewall/antivirus program.

Get ZoneAlarm Pro Free here.

I recently discovered the website Tips4Linux.com.  If you are a Linux user, or are considering using Linux, it is worth bookmarking.

One of the recent tips is how to create an image of any directory, which can be used to help in backing up your files.

"If you want to make a quick backup of a certain directory, ready to be burned on a CD or DVD, you can use

mkisofs -V LABEL -r directory | gzip > cdrom.iso.gz"

In this case replace "LABEL" with whatever you want the CD label to be (what shows up when you insert the disk or mount the image).  Also, replace "directory" with the location of the data you want to make the image from.  So if you wanted to make an image of the /home/user/documents folder and give it the label "Documents," the command is

mkisofs -V Documents -r /home/user/documents | gzip > cdrom.iso.gz

This will create the gzipped file cdrom.iso.gz in the /home/user directory.  Alternatively, you can create the .iso file without being gzipped by removing the section after the |, and adding "-o filename."  So to make an image of the folder /home/user/stuff named image.iso with the label "Stuff," the command is

mkisofs -V Stuff -r -o image.iso /home/user/stuff

You can read more about this command here.

I ran across this video the other day.  It's pretty funny.

I like the ending. "Ubuntu?"

In more display news, shoe company ASICS comissioned the world's largest Lite Brite to be build for a new shoe or something.  It measures 11x15 feet and has more than 300,000 pieces.  Kinda makes some of my Lite Brite creations as a kid seem a little less impressive.  But at least with my Lite Brite I made things cooler than a shoe.

via: Gizmodo

CineMassive is a company that specialises in huge, multi-monitor displays and software to utilize them.  One of their offerings, dubbed the OmegaPlex, consists of a dozen 24-inch LCDs, each with a resolution of 1920x1200.  With the monitors in 3 rows of 4, that makes for a total screen resolution of 7860x3600 and 27,648,000 total pixels.

It comes with software so you can actually utilize all the screen area, a 3-year warranty, a zero-dead-pixel guarantee, a multi-monitor wallpaper, VGA and DVI cables, and a lint-free microfiber cloth.  Considering the "New Low Price" is $12,995, that better be a very nice microfiber cloth!

When you consider that the price breaks down to just under $1100 per monitor, it is not too terrible of a price, well, as long as you have that much extra cash lying around.  Many large format displays and high-end projectors are similarly priced, and the OmegaPlex offers some functionatily that other types of displays do not.  Read all about it here.

via: Engadget