I received and email on the 22nd…two days ago, that the .com version of a domain which I own the .org and .net of was going to be up for sale soon and they were curious if I was interested in buying it. Cool! I thought…so I clicked the link and filled out their form to be notified when it went up for sale. Got a response; they wanted $997 USD for it. Almost fell out of my chair from laughing so hard.

Next email, yesterday, the 23rd, the domain is going up for sale tomorrow…at $997, so I am still watching but not really interested in buying, that is just too much money. Today I got an email saying that it was for sale for a lower price… $427 minimum offer. Well, that still sucks, so I put down $20 and hit submit anyways.

Few hours later another email…yay! I must be famous. They would sell me the domain, with one year registration for $50 USD. Done, bought, sold, MINE! >< After I bought it I went and looked at the whois information, just out of curiosity and guess what I found. They had bought the domain yesterday, the 23rd.

How can a company offer to sell something that they do not legally own yet? Is there some kind of a law against this? Does not really matter now, the domain is mine mine mine; for 20% of the original cost they wanted. Sometime in the next week or so I will have to finish up the theme, get the majority of the code done in the next few months and see if I can have it done before the next NFL Football season starts in the fall of 2009.

I was looking through the logs on my Linux box last night as I do once in a while just to see what or who has been on my computer and noticed something really interesting.

131.162.130.179 – - [01/Feb/2009:01:39:20 -0500] “GET / HTTP/1.0″ 200 999 “-” “AcadiaUniversityWebCensusClient”

A web census client, what the hell is that? So I went and looked it up this morning after checking last night to make sure it was not anything serious. Looks like the Jodrey School of Computer Science at Acadia University is doing a census of all the public IP addresses in the world to see if there is a public web server available and if there is they download the homepage, minus the images. Seems like a really neat idea, wonder how long it will take them to visit all 3.7 billion IP addresses they have in the list; have to make sure and check out their website once in a while and see what progress they’ve made.

Occasionally I exhibit a bit of OCD, or at least I would call it OCD. There is one website which I have been trying to create and finish now for just around two months. How much do I have done? I plan on remaking the theme again during this next week; for probably the 6th or 7th time. First it was going to be a nice theme made in Photoshop CS3; then I realized I didn’t know enough Photoshop to make it the way I wanted so I restarted it. After the second or third iteration of Photoshop themes, I decided to just make a basic, pretty all text and colours theme; no images besides the logo (which took about 15 tries to get perfect). On the first div based theme it looked almost exactly like the Photoshop theme until I realized that I could not do drop down menus the way I wanted. Yes, I would have run into this problem anyways but that is not the point. So the menu moved to the left, then the menu was a cool CSS menu that you could click headings and view sub-pages within the sections, then there was a cookie to save the way the menu was laid out. Now the whole thing is going to be rewritten again using JQuery; a Javascript library that has some cool effects and is cross browser compliant.

This will be the last iteration of the theme until the site is completed. The next theme will be completely done in Photoshop, totally image based and will still use JQuery but it will look much better. That is of course if I can decide on a colour scheme that I like and stick with it. If anyone notices me redoing the theme over and over with different colours please smack me and link me back to this post. This is one website that needs to get done and done well quickly. Hopefully in a year or two I can pull some income from this and give back to the people who have inspired, promoted and put up with my web designing and of course paid for my Mountain Dew drinking habits.

For the last year…maybe five, I have been using SmartFTP, however…this program is no longer free. Apparently they’re too good for us poor folk. So, I have moved on to another FTP client called FileZilla; while it may not have the same interface (which was one of the main reasons I loved SmartFTP), It is free and seems pretty well built and fast.

Another 12 week quarter is almost over, and with my GPA sitting right around a 2.8 before final grades for this quarter come out…I’m hoping for the best. Last time I checked they weren’t too bad…2 A’s, 1 B, and one unknown, but I think it’s an A. If my GPA gets up to a 3.0 the program chair will continue to allow me to take four classes next quarter; allowing me to finish my AA in Information Technology: Computer Network Systems 12 weeks early and at the end of March 2009. While she may deny it, I largely attribute my grades to Briana. She has really helped me to do well and believed in me when I didn’t, for that I say: Thank You love.

On another note, I finally finished the site on Leadership…I think. lol. Currently there are no CSS hacks and the site looks just about the same in IE7 and Firefox2. If anyone has any suggestions, comments, complaints, etc. leave a comment or drop me an email. I’m really hoping that at least one person out there finds this site helpful / useful.

Think that’s about all for now, I really should be studying for my final in “Microsoft Network Operating Systems I” (Windows Server 2003)

Not many people know I was in Boy Scouts, and while there I took a very interesting course in how to be a leader. Being the odd person that I am, I saved all of the papers that they handed out for future reference if I ever needed them. It’s now coming up on close to 10 years since I took these courses and strangely enough while cleaning out my closet I still have all of the handouts. For lack of something better to do during my school time and the occasional train ride home, these handouts are now a simple web page. Nothing fancy yet, and it still needs a lot of work. While you may not be or have ever been in the Boy Scouts, I believe these guidelines can still be helpful; with a bit of research or further explanation into the structure of the Scouting system. Feel free to have a look and leave comments as to things you feel I could improve on or if you liked my work. http://jim.killanet.net/leadership/