The upgrade went off without a hitch. The new features are pretty neat, although I’m trying to see how to get back my original template. Overall, the new features are a great improvement over the previous version of the software, but, as usual, there is some getting used to with the new features. Still, the folks at Word Press have really outdone themselves. Definitely check them out if you have the luxury of your own server and want to blog.

Well, they have released a new version of my blogging software. For the first time ever I will be upgrading a blog. In a way, it’s a very good thing because I’ve been putting off learning how to backup my databases for a few weeks and part of the upgrade process is to backup the database files. It will be interesting to see how things change. I know they have built in some stronger spam filters, but I haven’t had any trouble with that, yet. Of course, this is a relatively new blog, so most search engines probably don’t know about it yet. I will probably be upgrading today, so if the blog is inaccessible, I may be in the middle of an upgrade process.

The Numa Numa guy, who I wrote about in my first blog here, was on the news today on MSNBC. He was also on VH1’s best week ever. Whether he intended to have this video shown all over the internet, or whether it was accidentally put into his file sharing folder, he is now a huge celebrity on par with the Star Wars Kid.

It’s pretty interesting how these videos explode online. First of all, they are only being passed along by word of mouth - either emailing your friends about this crazy website or through IMs. Yet, soon everyone knows about it. I’m hard pressed to find any engineering students who don’t know what Numa Numa is. In fact, while waiting in line to see Mo Rocca, someone was singing along to Numa Numa. It was a cool conversation peice. Yet, it’s the Tv news who’s always slow to report on such things. Anyone who goes to see Numa Numa based on the the tv coverage is a late adopter. These are the people who didn’t buy DVD players until almost everyone had one.

Usually with a magazine, I feel a little sad reading it. In middle and high school I was subscribed to Electronic Gaming Monthly. Each month they would detail all of the new games coming out; their features and how to do certain tricks here and there. Since I was too young to purchase them and my parents believed in being frugal when it came to video games, all the magazine could do was make me lust over games I could never have. The same goes with most PC magazines. They talk about this or that software for Windows and it is often too expensive to get it.

I want to wish all of my readers a very happy Valentine’s Day. If you do not have a significant other this holiday, do not feel sad as you see all the couples about. If Valentine’s Day is about love, it need not be about love between lovers. Share your love with your parents, siblings, and friends. Let them know that you care about them (in whatever way is appropriate for the relationship q;o] ) and enjoy it.

I want to give a huge thanks to Katie Cheng who dropped what she was doing Friday night to give my car a jump. Even though I hadn’t left the lights on in the car or anything, the car refused to start, leaving me stranded at Best Buy. It was near 10p and Katie didn’t mind coming out in the freezing cold with her car to help me out.

Also, thanks to Benny. Even though I was able to get my car started to go to Sears to get a replacement battery, he was ready and willing to help me out too.

Yesterday I was doing looking for the website to Wikipedia and came across Wikibooks, which happens to be run by the same group, The Wiki Media Foundation. Since I knew what Wikipedia was, I decided to see what Wikibooks was. Well, the same way that Wikipedia attempts to be an encyclopedia which anyone can contribute to, Wikibooks is like a library written by everyone online. I’m not so sure if I will ever use Wikibooks in the near future, but Wikipedia is a pretty good resource to use.

I’m not sure how many people have visited this blog site yet or how many are coming here independently through other sites. I know of one person who has confirming coming here and subscriping to the RSS feed. Anyway, you may have noticed I made some cosmetic changes to the site. I’m not 100% sure if it’s going to stay this way. I generally like to leave things the way they are. Since, however, I don’t know how many people are coming here right now and I intend to relaunch the site in a few months anyway, I figure it’s still ok. I put the calender above the links because as the links list grew it would have pushed the calendar way too far down the page. I also moved the categories above the links. I’m not sure if I will emulate the original It’s A Binary World on my tripod page and put the links over on the left side or if I will keep it all as one column here. The center may end up a bit too squished if I go for that, but stay tuned.

I’ve recently begun to notice a disturbing trend: anything that’s good for you will cost you more. The most serious infraction comes from the food supply. When I go to buy ground beef, cheapest of the beef products, there are three tiers of product available for me to purchase. The cheapest product is ground beef with the default amount of fat. Since ground beef is already among the scrap left from a cow, this fat content can be pretty high. Since I eat ground beef fairly regularly, about once every two weeks or less, this is unacceptable. So I can choose 95% lean ground beef or 97% lean ground beef. However, these products are more expensive. In other words, economics would tell me to eat the meat that was worse for my body. However, I am a rational human being who is not a slave to any theorems of economics; I choose to buy the expensive 97% lean ground beef. Of course, if I really want to get a leaner beef product, I can go from ground beef (where $5 will feed me many times) to filet mignion (where $16 will feed me twice - max). Not only will it contain more vitamins and less fat, but the tenderness of the meat is also healthier for my digestive system, and, to a trivial degree, my teeth.

I am not a data point. I am a human being. I am not the customer who buys anime, computer hardware, and books on Linux. I am not the customer who sends flowers to my mother-in-law in Brooklyn. I am a human being. I am a college student, a writer, a poet, a photographer, a journalist, a hacker, a fiancee, a revolutionary; but I am not simply a set of bits describing what I buy and how often I do it. Give me back my identity. Who said you had the right to keep track of where I go and what I buy and who I talk to? Who said you had the right to piggy back on my software and force me to agree to your terms? Who said you had the right to put cookies in my browser all day long to track what I do? Am I a terrorist? Am I a criminal? What have I done to warrant this level of surveillance? I am not something to be analyzed so that you can figure out how to squeeze every last dollar out of me. I am a human being - GIVE ME BACK MY IDENTITY!