Jared’s Blog

This isn’t so much useful as it is cool.

I know it’s been quite a long time since I actually bothered to write anything down here. On one hand, I feel sort of guilty for not updating because I know there’s a bunch of people that read this to keep up with what I’m doing. I am grateful that anyone would bother reading my words.

But on the other hand, this is for me. If you go back to one of my first posts, I started this kind of as an online journal to keep track of what I do. My thinking being that later I could go back and read a lot of this stuff. And in that regard, I feel that my words here can be limited or bountiful. Besides words are so much better when they are not forced.

With that, what has my life been up to the last two weeks? I guess you could say I’ve been busy. Maybe not so much busy as there have just been a lot of major “things” happening recently.

The biggest news is probably my parents moving to Minneapolis. This whole idea started a few months back. I have to say I was shocked when my parents started looking at houses down this way. I figured they’d check a few out and that’d be the last of it for awhile. Well over the last couple of months, they came down 3-4 times and eventually put a bid in on a place in Maple Groove. Guess what? It got accepted. So with that the wheels are set in motion and they probably won’t stop until next fall. Dad can retire in July and there is talk of renting their current home in Virginia.

I have mixed feelings on this move. Most people would be overjoyed their family is moving closer to them, of course I can’t be like everyone else. I love my family and everything, but like anyone else, I get annoyed with them sometimes and the distance we have right now serves as sort of a buffer. The other thing that you need to understand about my family (moreso my parents) is they were very protective when I was younger, and as such they tend to be pretty prying now. As I said, I love my family, but I am old enough now where they don’t need to take care of every little thing for me. (To Mom and Grandma: I know you’ll read this. Please don’t take it the wrong way. I just need my independance.)

Let’s see what else. Aaron and I have been going strong with Decoy launching new features, redesigning some areas, thinking of new ideas. I’m really proud of Decoy. The last year or so was a success. Numbers have been steadily increasing. We started the year a little rough, but I think we’re on track now.

About 3 weeks ago we announced a merging with fellow zine BreakingCustom. So far, so good. I had worked with Chris, the owner of BC, before trying to update the site, but ended up having to back out. I’m glad we get to work together again and I think with the talents and resources from both our sites combined, we can really do some great things.

Of course with all this progress comes more work for me. Thankfully, Aaron realizes I’m only one person and that I can only do so much. It’s crazy, I could probably spend all my spare time on that site. Aaron is always wanting to change things or clean something up. On top of that, there’s some underlying changes I want to make to the site. Making things more object oriented and reusing code.

And I haven’t decided if that’s going to come before the upgrade to vBulletin version 3.5; another major update. I finally did get the upgrade to happen on my home server, but it broke a lot of things on the site. I’ve considered an almost full re-write, but again, I just don’t have the time.
Finally, (because this is getting long) I had some friends make some moves recently. John is now living in St. Paul. I made a trek over his way the day he moved in. He’s got a nice little 1 person apartment and it sounds like his first couple of weeks at his new job have been going well.

ChoCho (aka Nick) also recently job a new job down this way and should be moving with his wife soon. I applied for a job with the same company, but they seem to be ignoring me for some reason.

And last but not least, my roommates, Laura and Hank, just bought a house. Well, not quite yet. They put a bid on a place, got countered and accepted. So it’s pretty much just paperwork from here on out. Goodbye Fox Forest and good riddance!

Let’s play a fantasy game for a minute. Just follow along. Let’s say you, Average Jane/Joe, and your family live in a house on Average Street in middle class America.

Now let’s imagine a new law is implemented that allows anyone who pays an extra tax to legally go 20 miles over the speed limit. This tax is very expensive and usually is afforded only by the rich, which you have a few of on your street. Later on, the city decided that your street would only be accessible by those who pay this tax and that everyone else would have to take some other non-restricted street. It gets worse though. Auto makers hop on the bandwagon too and create a new technology that doesn’t even allow you on these streets if you wanted to turn down them. Your car simply refuses to turn. Would that make you mad?

Surprisingly, this fictional story has a very real counterpart and it’s called Net Neutrality. Instead of streets and houses, we’re talking about the Internet. That’s right, the high level ISP’s of the US are trying to push laws through the legal system that allow them to charge higher rates for access to sites that pay them the most. This could mean big problems for smaller businesses are lowly bloggers. Sure Microsoft.com and AOL.com may be able to pony up the big bucks to keep the traffic to their sites running nice and fast, but a blogger like myself wouldn’t be able to afford these fees.
As things are right now, you pay your ISP for the Internet service with no regard to what goes over that service, but if these laws get pushed through Congress, this could all change soon. ISP’s want to start sniffing your traffic and charge you based on what you are doing. Running a web server from home? Extra charge. Using a VOIP service like Skype or Vonage? Extra charge. Downloading using Bittorrent? Extra charge. Essentially, you are paying for your service twice!

Do what you can to get the word out about this. Stop greedy ISP’s from taking control of the Internet.