Some History
The domain was registered while taking one of my patented Long Thanksgiving Breaks. That was ThanksGaming 2005, and I grabbed the domain one night while talking to that coder I always mention, Malaprop of Cambrian House. Malaprop kindly put the domain on his site, installed WordPress, and away I went. My first actual post (I believe) was on the 20th of 2005, but it was accidentally deleted, so the first surviving post is from the 21st.

Some Stats
Over the past year, I've had (what I consider seeing as its just another random blog in the Internet where a new one opens every second) to be some pretty nice stats.

• Over 20,000 page hits
• Over 10,000 "users" you can figure out how Stattraq defines a user
• Two search engines that have over 100% of my website indexed! (Again, you can go figure out how they have more pages indexed than I have pages).
• Two pages selected by spambots for spam! They think I'm populart (I guess) and spam half-year old posts to sell viagra! An annoyance I took care of by using Akismet

Of course, the above ignores such fun ones as 100 posts means roughly one post every 3-4 days.

Big posts
I believe I created the blog to talk about the Sony BMG Fiasco. This was my first serious post, and it got some decent reads by a variety of people. Unfortunately for the world, this has pretty much blown over in a year. Heck, it had blown over within 6 months. What a shame a company got away with this when non-malicious citizens are thrown into court for downloading one song to the tune of $2,000. Had Sony gotten such treatment, it would be out of business (I refer to the fact that Sony included source code that was licensed. In addition they took it from a man whom the music industry tried to have thrown in jail.)

The next significant thing I talk about was my beliefs with regards to software, and the fact that I buy into a communist view of software. I tied this in with one of my favorite pieces of code, Linux.

I had a run in with the law last Spring that was kind of interesting. I'll leave it up to you to decide what to make of the encounter. The three ways I tried to write it here just... made Law Enforcement seem incompetent, and I don't want to say that.

While I may the only one laughing about it, I think I came up with a good argument in favor of single geeks on Inyragvarf Day.

Then we saw a public official fly off the handle when presented with a problem he didn't know. Great lesson to be learned about politicians and technical stuff. I rather dislike politicians so won't be going downt hat road, however.

One of my favorite posts was how to legally and ethically hack your GPA. This might also be the one I'm most torn about, as I get tons of hits from search engines with kids looking to actually hack their GPA. Meaning, maliciously break into a grade server, and screw with stuff they don't own. My idea is a lot more elegant, and completely legal. Which is why I enjoy it.

Wrap Up
It occurs to me this post is rambling and self serving... Plus I'm running out of time for posting right at midnight. So, I will end it now. You can browse back through my posts and see if there's anything decent. I'd like to wrap up b y reiterating my purpose of this blog. That is, simply put, to generate thoughtful discussion (or just thought on your own) and get people to thank more about the world around them. View everything from a different perspective, because that's how you find holes in a system. It may be that some of what I post is controversial. I may accidentally post something that's considered "illegal" by some form of law. Anything up here is not meant maliciously, and is purely for the sake of expanding the minds of my generation.

It's been a fun year for me, hopefully I've kept you (whomever my readers are... [Ok, i can see IPs... so I know who you are]) interested, and made you think a little more about some subject, I don't care what. See you next year.

I just returned from 32 days in the lovely country of Tunisia. It was a great trip in a lot of respects, but especially because I was able to talk with old and new friends about some issues in many subjects that we were interested in. They involved politics (remember, I don't touch politics in terms of people/events, only systems and hypotheticals) and governments mainly, as I was the only computer lover in the group, but there was also a few conversations about computer security. On top of those, I had some other ideas that I wanted to post here, so hopefully I'll have a large number of posts coming out in the coming days. To that end, here's a table of contents about what I want to post on.

• Tunisia - Overview of my trip (Only whiney bloggy type of post I do, I promise).
• Tunisia - Their Law versus US Law (In terms of how much is required)
• Tunisia - Study of Transportation
• Tunisia - Study of
• Government - What is Ideal?
• Freedom - Freedom of Information
• Freedom - How the Middle East is More Free
• Security - Ensuring Secure Communications in a Police State

Now, as long as that list is, there's a few I'm forgetting because I'm still jet-lagged, and its 5 am. So to end, welcome our new member, you know who you are.