Category: Miscellaneous

In case anyone reading this was wondering, yes I do have another blog. It’s a student rep blog for the Faculty of New Media. You can find it here.

The Faculty is accepting nominations for New Media Reps til Wednesday. I’m going to run again — we’ll see if anyone else does.

Anna has gone to Edmonton and leaves for Saskatchewan on Monday. She won’t be home until the end of November. I am babysitting the dog. We hate each other. She pretends to like me and I pretend to like her, but deep down we both know that neither of us will be happy until Anna is back.

I found a bug in IT’s security this morning. I’m no security expert bit I’m pretty sure it’s a fairly serious one. The school computers have screen savers that advertise things going on at the university. They create the screen shots in Macromedia flash and therein lies the problem. Anyone – whether they are a student or not could come up to the screen and right click the flash screen savers. A small popup menu appears. They could then click on the menu item called “About Macromedia Flash 6” and an Internet Explorer browser window pops up. From there they can access any web page or more importantly the hard drives of the computer they are working on. Now that I think about it, it’s likely not that big of an issue because probably there aren’t any melicious hackers at the University just waiting to strike but then again that’s if there’s anything to be learned from TV, it’s that there are hundreds of people just waiting to get a shot at “the man”.

I might tell told someone in IT.

Update: They said there were aware of the problem and it was going to be fixed soon.

Tom Coates has been discussing strategic methods in dealing with message board Trolls on his Everything in Moderation site. An anonymous poster, claiming to be a notorious Slashdot troll, made some intriguing comments about why moderating “trolls” in secret can sometimes be detrimental.

“in short i believe that the people who must be treated with the most public, forthright, and open methods of censure are those who offend us the most. i do not believe that trickery is ever as effective as open methods because trickery is, at its core, dishonest to both the person being tricked and the online community you have secretly enacted policy for.” -posted anonymously by 20721 (link)

It was a good article and some really thought provoking comments. Worthwhile read if you are remotely interested in web administration and / or censorship.

Now on a personal note: a comment or two that I made may have incited some anger. Specifically it may have angered my brother Gary but I want to make it clear that I have never consciously posted trying to be a troll. According to SlashNET.org, “A troll is someone who seeks to deliberately incite anger, arguments, and disorder. A simple example would be a person who goes into #linux and extols the superiority of Microsoft products.” Metaphorically speaking all I did was ask the #linux users what Linus Torvalds would have thought about the copied code inside the linux kernel. Something that could have made some people mad but a valid question and certainly not trolling.

That wasn’t how my brother saw it. Although I wasn’t banned from posting at our family’s blog altogether, it was made pretty clear that I wasn’t welcome there anymore – at least by one member.

It pretty much started with my posts about same-sex marriage. My opinion was that all people in society should be offered the same rights, ie. the right to marry the person you love (same-sex or not). Gary couldn’t debate his point gracefully and instead of conceding defeat or just backing down he instead began attacking me on a personal level calling me such things as a sophist, a homosexual, and even a heterophobe.

I’m trying to be politically correct, but I was really insulted that he would call me “g-a-y”. It’s probably my own homophobia that has caused me to be upset.

Recently I decided to stop posting completely after the response to an “offensive” post (which you can decide for yourself if it is offensive) that I made.

Specifically on Friday, October 17th, 2003 I posted the following:

Black Person + Ethnic DNA Test = ?

I picked this up from metafilter.com:

After watching a 60 Minutes segment on the subject last year, Wayne Joseph decided on a whim to take a new ethnic DNA test. Being of Creole stock, and therefore on the lighter end of the black colour spectrum, he had developed a casual curiosity about his exact percentage of black blood. What he discovered was astounding.

I wonder what early Mormons would have thought?

Not really that offensive – in my opinion. In fact I think it’s a logical question to ask if you have been a Mormon your whole life – hearing all about how Mormons used to keep blacks from having the “priesthood power” bestowed upon them.

About the next day I received an email from my brother asking me if I was taking a shot at the church. “What exactly do you mean by [what early Mormons would have thought]? I don’t think I understand.”

I proceeded to answer his email but in my anger (still kindling from the same-sex marriage argument) I wrote an email that was decidedly too harsh and instead of sending it thought better of myself and resolved to write a kinder gentler explanation the next day. That email was never written but here for your reading enjoyment is the email I had originally prepared to send (brace yourself):

“Gary, as Dr. Phil might say, “It’s time to get real”.

Let’s face it, in the past church has been racist toward blacks. Since you don’t seem to remember the situation with pre – 1978 manifesto Mormons and blacks let me give you a short refresher. (Isn’t this safe to assume given your apparent lack of comprehension as to what I’m talking about?)

Here’s a little background that Brother McConkie so plainly articulates for us in Mormon Doctrine, p. 527 – 528, of the 1966 edition. “The Negroes are not equal with other races where the receipt of certain spiritual blessings are concerned, …but this inequality is not of man’s origin. It is the Lord’s doing, is based on his eternal laws of justice, and grows out of the lack of spiritual valiance of those concerned in their First Estate [the pre-earth existence].”

The DNA article just made me wonder if the early Mormons ever made any mistakes excluding someone that didn’t happen to have Negro blood err I mean lack of spiritual valiance in the pre-earth existence. IMHO a reasonable question because as you know the early Mormons didn’t have DNA testing to verify if someone was less valiant. Does saying this mean I was being antagonistic? I suppose, with your ultra delicate sensibilities, assuming that mistakes could have been made by “The One True Church”(tm) must mean I was “taking a shot” at it. Sorry for any misunderstanding.

I realize this email seems a little aggressive. However, I have been irritated lately with the growing feeling, based on the fact that you didn’t want our conversation to go out on the blog, that you had something to hide in our conversation or that you are worried about censoring my beliefs from the blog. Frankly I find that disgusting. I feel the same way about the same-sex marriages debate. As I said before, “it’s time to get real”. If you can’t handle it then don’t bother emailing me “why I would write something”, instead if you can’t respond on the blog then just take those thoughts and file them in your “I can’t handle the truth” directory.

-Jeff

So I decided not to send the harsh email. The next day I found my admin rights gone. I was trying to add some links in the template as well use some of the code directly from the template in a project I was doing at school. When I couldn’t get in I decided (perhaps in the heat of the moment) not to post on the milnerblog anymore. My dad figures we both need to grow up, but then almost in the same breath he adds that I am not to discuss my thoughts about “the church” with my younger sister and her freshly baptized husband. I asked him what I was supposed to say to her when she brings it up? She always brings it up. He simply told me not to discuss it with her.

So I said to him, “Do you want me to tell her that you forbid me to talk about it with her?”

“No.”

“Then what do you want me to say?”

“Just don’t talk about it with her, you can think of something to say.”

So basically he’s asking me to censor my beliefs from her. Basically he’s going against all that stuff they teach you in church about how if you believe something to be true it’s your responsibility to share it with others. Remember now – I wasn’t actively bringing religion up with her, just answering questions about why I no longer believe the Mormon church to be the “one true church”.

So it’s kind of like I’ve been politely censored. First from the blog and now from my own family. Of course I have the “right” to speak my mind – but not without the harassing comments of Gary or the guilt of disobeying my dad’s wishes.

It’s finally come to this – I need a second fridge. Not just for space but for sanitation reasons as well. One of my roommates had one of those giant cans of tomato sauce in the fridge. You know the kind I mean, they must hold about 5 litres of sauce. Well instead of sealing it away in any kind of airtight container he just cut the lid half way off, folded it up to use it and then folded it back down to, you know, keep the mold out. Well needless to say he had a fine culture growing rapidly in a mostly full 5 litre can of tomato sauce. He seemed hesitant to throw it out.

He did eventually throw it out and we cleaned the fridge up pretty good. However, the situation still requires a second fridge for all of our food. Anna’s mother so kindly gave her a huge amount of groceries and we don’t want any of it to go bad so we need more fridge space. Luckily everything fit so far. We really do appreciate the groceries. So if anyone has a fridge for sale or for “giving away” please let us know.

I told Anna that I might advertise her skills as a make-up artist for this Halloween. She would have a blast doing it and whoever had their fancy custom made mask/make-up would really love it too. It’s a win/win situation. They could slap on some old age makeup or try out some elf ears. I’m sure Anna could come up with a lot of other cool ideas too. Maybe Mom or Dad would like her help to dress up this year. I’m guessing Mom really would like something fancy to show off for her Kindergarten. Hopefully she (Anna) is not off working someplace when Halloween rolls around.

Anna-Maria’s brother Josh works at Kelsey’s. Last night he phoned home to let his parents know that he was “very badly burned” and would like someone to bring him some ointment and second skin to put on the burn. Well he had us pretty worried. Lana and I went to check it out and bring him the first aid. He explained that while he was pouring some hot grease from one container to another and rubbed his arm up against the pot but it turned out that while it probably hurt quite a bit, his arm seemed to be ok – just a little red; no broken skin though; not even a blister.