Many people have instant messaged or emailed me lately about my blog. It’s getting relatively well-known, and it’s advertised pretty much everywhere I have a presence – in web forums, social networking sites, and so on. I said in early April when I first made this blog that I would try my best to update on a daily basis. In the beginning, I was doing great; I had several blog posts already written and ready to be posted. I scheduled future posting dates so my blog would automatically post my blog entries for me. Then, I started to fall behind.

In only two weeks or so, I started running out of topics. I started posting utterly useless blog entries, like the riddle about the dead man. Someone specifically commented and asked if I was running out of topics to write about. Unfortunately, I had to resort to riddles again two weeks later because I was once again behind on my blogging.

This made me think about why I was blogging in the first place. Way back on April 5, 2009, I said that I was blogging to keep up with developing trends. People are centralizing their lives on social networking and other forms of internet-based socialization, and being an owner of a website, I wanted to keep up with the "popular thing" to keep my website modern and interesting. To put it simply, I started blogging because people have told me that they like reading what I write (especially Chronicles of a Roommate), and they wanted to read more.

As I was being pushed to pump out blog entries faster than I could handle, my writing became sloppy and boring. The topics I was writing about became meaningless and argumentless. My naturally debating nature went dormant, and I presented the topics I wrote about in a way that made the readers just not care.

Starting yesterday night and finishing this late afternoon, I changed hosts for web blogs. I originally had used Blogger, a blogging website now owned by Google. I now use a free, downloadable version of WordPress. I installed it into one of my databases on my main website, and I’m now maintaining every aspect of my blog. The good thing is that I have nearly full control of the features of my blog and now feel more comfortable using the interface. The bad thing is that I have free hosting from x10Hosting, and whenever the servers experience down time (which is quite frequently, seeing as I’m using a free service), my entire blog goes down with it. I guess that’s just something we have to deal with.

Making this change more or less a milestone, I’ve decided to change my viewpoints and opinions on blogging as well. Now, instead of throwing out a new blog post everyday, they’re going to be more spaced out; there could be anywhere between zero to two days between separate blog posts. However, now they’re going to be slightly longer and more meaningful, and hopefully, more entertaining to read. Starting from now, you might actually need the full five minutes to finish reading what I have to say.

On that note, I would like to successfully declare that I am done changing web hosts and am pretty much settled here. I had some frustrating times when my website went down earlier today while I was transferring blog posts and comments. To make it even worse, my website was up for a minute, then down the next, then up the next minute, and (guess what?) down the minute after that. (Just to let you guys know, all the old blog posts and all of your old comments are now on this blog.) Now that I’m done, I’ll concentrate more on producing good material and less on glaring at my monitor.

So it begins tomorrow – the very first, meaningful, and hopefully comical blog post. I have a pretty good idea of what it’s going to be about, but I’m not telling yet. I guess you’ll have to wait and find out.

Edit (May 20, 2009, 11:51 PM): I have gone back to old blog posts and deleted unnecessary posts or combined two relevant, shorter posts into one. You will notice the differences immediately.

Before I begin, I would like to give some words of advice to anybody that may be taking the computer science exam in the future. When you get to the free response section, write your responses in pencil, not pen.

Overall, the computer science test went very well. When my class did practice exams in class, I was averaging an 85% raw score on the tests, when a 60-65% is sufficient for a 5. Multiple choice section went smoothly, even though I was working and checking my answers up until the time limit. There was one question, however, that I omitted. The problem is, this was more of an English issue than a computer science issue – I literally couldn’t understand what the question was asking me.

Then came the free response section. My proctor specifically told us that we would need a black- or blue-inked pen for this section. What I didn’t catch was that we were only supposed to use pen to initial and date the front of our free response packets, not to complete the entire free response section. Within 50 minutes, less than half of the time permitted, I had finished all the problems and checked my answers. I was going through my responses and commenting my work to make the scoring process a little easier for my grader, when my proctor announces: "I noticed that some of you are using pen for your free response, but the test requests pencil." I looked up and stared at him blankly, then let him know that I finished the entire packet with pen. He quickly replied: "It’s okay, just switch to pencil now." I didn’t really see the point of switching to pencil when I was already done.

I talked to my computer science teacher after the test, and he said that he was pretty sure the graders receive the original copy to grade, or a copy that doesn’t require HB graphite. Hopefully that’s right, or else the grader might be receiving a blank page…

I think I pretty much said everything I need to say in the title. I’m sleeping early today; I have to do well tomorrow!

Edit (Saturday, May 02, 2009, 02:41 PM): I finished taking the SAT, and I have some words of advice for you. The TI-89 Titanium IS allowed on the SAT. I wasted about ten minutes digging through my storage box to find my old TI-84 Plus calculator because I thought that the TI-89 Titanium was not permitted. Apparently, it is – someone else in my testing room had it, and the proctor didn’t say anything. I did a little research after I got back home, and according to Wikipedia, it’s always been permitted on all College Board tests.

I’m surprised that it took me so long to hear about this, especially because I use BitTorrent quite often – the makers of The Pirate Bay were fined millions of dollars and sentenced to jail for "assisting in making copyright content available."

For those who don’t know, The Pirate Bay is a website that provides torrents for download. With these torrents, people worldwide can connect with others’ computers and transfer files directly from one computer to another. Even better, a user can connect to multiple other users at a time and download different portions of the same file simultaneously, allowing for much greater download speeds. Torrents were originally created to transfer documents and resources among students in universities and employees in office buildings. By making direct peer-to-peer connections, bandwidth costs for uploading to and downloading from a secondary host on the internet were eliminated.

There’s always a wrong way to use something – not long after, people started sharing copyrighted material over the torrenting network. Only one person had to purchase a product, and everyone else could get the software free by downloading it straight off of the original buyer’s computer. Programmers, musicians, and producers were losing massive amounts of money when their programs, music, and movies were being circulated without them ever receiving a penny.

Millions of people flocked to use torrents, and soon enough, websites solely dedicated to distributing torrent files were created. A pretty famous one I use often is Isohunt. The Pirate Bay, mentioned above, is also pretty popular, and was the unlucky one out of a handful of different torrent websites.

This wasn’t the first time The Pirate Bay was targeted by law enforcement. On May 31, 2006, Swedish police raided the Stockholm servers of The Pirate Bay. This resulted in the servers going down for three days. It is generally assumed that the raid was supported by the Motion Picture Association of America, better known as the MPAA. Overall, the raid was a failure, seeing as it caused a increase in the popularity and usage of The Pirate Bay by a factor of two.

So the final results of the case of April 17, 2009? Peter Sunde, Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm, and Carl Lundström will all be spending one year in jail, and must pay $905,000 in fines each. Appeals will be submitted, and further information will be provided at a later time.

About a week ago, my dad told me a story about a Korean man who killed his son. The man himself wasn’t seen as a killer; he was a former co-worker of my dad’s. He was apparently very cheerful and respectable, and worked his way up to being a supervisor at the Palatine P&DC, a post office headquarters in northern Illinois.

Then, earlier today, my dad told me that this whole thing could have been a misunderstanding. A friend of the victim who got killed heard the victim’s dad say "It’s all my fault" in Korean. This friend was of Korean descent but was born in America and learned Korean as a second language. He reported the victim’s father as the murderer, not knowing that he had mistakenly analyzed the Korean language due to his lack of understanding of Korean. The literal translation was "It’s all my fault," which could be taken as "It’s all my fault because I’m the one that killed him." What the victim’s father is arguing is that although the direct translation may be so, it actually meant that the father held some responsibility of his son’s death because he was not guarding him sufficiently. More or less, this is being presented as an issue of literal versus implied meaning.

Just something I found interesting.

About an hour ago, one of my friends instant messaged me through AIM. He told me that he made a slideshow of him and me, and that I should visit a TinyURL website to download it. After I downloaded the specified file, I realized that I just voluntarily downloaded a virus. McAfee SecurityCenter is currently doing a complete system scan to find whatever I just downloaded, and my desktop background is currently flashing, saying "Warning! Spyware Detected on Your Computer!" Tonight really isn’t the best time for me to be writing, so I’ll let you know what happens tomorrow.

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Edit (April 24, 2009, 09:55 PM):

Yesterday, I briefly described that I downloaded a virus. Actually, there’s a little bit more to it. When my friend sent me that link, I downloaded an .exe file to my desktop and double clicked it. I noticed that files were being extracted to C:\Windows\Tempie, but I didn’t really think too much of it. I waited for the progress bar to reach 100%, with the only thought in my head being wonder of why it was taking so long. Soon afterwards, it started installing. Then, I woke up.

There was no way I could close it; it ran in the background, and the only reason I knew something was happening was because McAfee SecurityCenter went insane blocking trojan installations and unwanted registry changes. As I watched, not knowing what to do, the dust settled and McAfee went silent. It had lost the battle. The damage was done. I was looking at a flashing background telling me that I had a virus. I started staring blankly at my screen again.

I realized that I was intelligent enough to download, extract, and install a virus, all voluntarily and manually, thanks to a friend who got his AIM account hacked. Below is the original conversation:

Pooncube (9:04:50 PM): Check this out
Pooncube (9:04:54 PM): I made a slide show of youu and me
adamparkzer (9:04:57 PM): uh
adamparkzer (9:04:57 PM): ok
Pooncube (9:04:58 PM): Link removed
adamparkzer (9:05:28 PM): … Why is it telling me to download a file

I still had homework I had to finish, and I didn’t feel like wasting time trying to remove a virus, so I let McAfee SecurityCenter do all the scanning and deleting. After about an hour and a half, it found two infected files – two files I use to hack Flash games by force-transferring packets and run external flash scripts. After my frustration got pretty severe, I went ahead and started digging around. I found the virus and removed it manually in eight minutes with no reboots required.

Moral of the story: Don’t download files from links that your friends send you, especially if someone hacked them.

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Edit (April 30, 2009, 09:58 PM):

Last week, I downloaded, extracted, and installed a virus onto my own computer. I ran a virus scan which took an hour and a half, but McAfee found all the wrong files, and I ended up having to manually remove the virus, which took a mere eight minutes. If you’re unfamiliar with this occurrence, click here to read the full blog post.

Yesterday and today, the same guy IMed me with more TinyURL links, possibly thinking I would fall for it again. The conversation went as follows:

Wednesday, April 29, 2009

Pooncube (6:07:34 PM): what’s up?
Pooncube (6:07:38 PM): I made this thing on myspace for U
Pooncube (6:07:42 PM): Link removed
adamparkzer (6:07:55 PM): Idiot
adamparkzer (6:07:59 PM): I’m not falling for that again

Thursday, April 30, 2009
Pooncube (4:10:20 PM): heyy
Pooncube (4:10:25 PM): this is our new picture cube LOL
Pooncube (4:10:29 PM): Link removed
Pooncube signed off at 4:10:34 PM

Seeing as I already owned myself by downloading a link he sent me, these additional lures aren’t really that significant, but I thought I would share them for the laugh. Obviously, the hacker doesn’t realize that most people don’t download files from someone who already tricked them into downloading a virus.