I had a lot more to write, but I can’t write a ton using my G1 keyboard… when I get WP fixed, I will write more, I just haven’t had the time.

Anyway, an addendum to my “omgwtfh4x” list… now my Steam account got hijacked. This one happened because I clicked on a link (stupid me) sent to me by a friend on Steam. Turns out, his account was hijacked as well and it wasn’t him sending me the link.

I’m a PC and I got hacked… again.

You know, I wouldn’t mind it so much if they didn’t use viruses and stupid scripts to do it. I mean if someone actually spent hours physically sitting in front of their computer working on cracking into my internal network and grabbing files and stuff from my PC it would be a whole different story. I’d actually want to shake that person’s hand…… and then shoot them in the face. But right now, all I want to do is shoot them in face.

Back in the day (when I used to do this stuff) we didn’t have fancy little ‘viruses’ and ‘trojans’… we actually had to put effort into hacking into people’s stuff.

Grow a pair of figs and do it the way it should be done!

www.youtube.com/watch?v=XwMT6aoR7DQ

Anyway, there’s another pre-cursor to this story, but I am chosing not to talk about it. Bottom line was nobody got hurt or killed, and my front door is a mess. It seemed random, but you can never be so sure these days. For all I know these guys had been casing this place for a while and just picked a really bad time to drop by for a visit.

Here’s the aftermath:

So I signed into MSN Messenger today and found a headline that read “Oldest man in America dies at 112″. I thought that was pretty amazing that he lived so long, so I clicked on it. I was greeted with this wonderful story about how this man lived through “three centuries”, part of the 19th, all of the 20th, and part of the 21st. I continued reading this man’s story and was very impressed at his longevity.

Then it got into politics. This 112 year old man actually got out and voted; major kudos for having the drive to do so in the condition he was in–a wheelchair. He went on to say that he voted for Obama and when he found out he won the election he “felt like jumping up and down.” His words were “He is going to give black men a break in the world, and give them a better opportunity to live and make more money”. 

Here is my response to this 112 year old man, may he rest in peace: With all due respect, the races have been pretty damn equal for the last few decades. I’m not sure when he watched the news last, but as it turns out whites and blacks DO get along after all! It is comments like that which keep fueling racial tensions; in fact, it infuriates me when black people try to play the slavery card. It would be a completely different story if they themselves were enslaved and people of this current generation were the ones enslaving them. But this is not the case anymore. Yes race was in issue well into the 60′s and 70′s but it began to decline in the 80′s and (dare I say) is nearly gone in this day and age. There are still some white “extremists” yes, but even white people think they’re crazy. It isn’t a matter of race anymore, it is a matter being open minded and looking at people in the human sense, not the color sense. 

A black man gets a job because he has the skills to get the job done. He is denied a job because he does not have the skills to get the job done; same as white people. Now, this is not without exception, I understand that there are some smaller companies who fly just under the radar of needing to comply with equal opportunity and affirmative action laws. But seriously, have you seen the workforce lately? It’s a pretty darn good mix of folks.

Now, as far as this “break” and “making more money” goes. I don’t think this guy has heard of 50 cent, or his song “I Get Money”:
 

I mean c’mon. He’s just as rich as the next white pompous jackass so let’s stop bickering about “how the white man holds the black man down” and how Obama is going to save the black race. The fact of life is, public schools are available for everyone, and colleges are all over the place. Find a skill, get good at something, and kick the white man’s ass at his own game if you feel you have to, fair and square. Don’t pull out the slavery or Obama trump cards. They’re worthless. I never heard a white person say “Gee, I’m glad Bush was in office. He’s going to keep the white man richer than everyone else.” That is completely not the case. Obama is still a politician, the president at that. Presidents are largely controlled by their cabinets, and he still has to abide by the separation of powers that the US government has in place to keep the president from going nuts and ordering tax breaks for everybody to the point where the government can’t fund itself anymore.

Wake up people… this was just another election with a different face. As far as the race issues go, the president can’t fix that, even overnight. It took 143 years after slavery was “abolished” to get to the point where we’re at today. Do you think it will be truly abolished in the 8 maximum years Obama has in office? I doubt it. And I’m not being negative, I’m being realistic. Race will always be an issue so long as there are people around the US claiming the color of their skin is what cost them their job or why they can’t get into school. Again, I’m not saying this was NEVER the case, I’m just saying that now, in this day and age, that is getting increasingly harder to claim. White people aren’t perfect either, we complain just as much about things that “aren’t our fault”. It’s human nature to protect one’s self and one’s dignity. Sometimes people can’t face that they’ve simply made bad decisions which cost them their luxuries.  IE: The high school diploma that led to the college degree which led to the good paying job.

I spoke to a friend of mine yesterday about an old mutual friend of ours who recently dropped out of college because she got pregnant. I can expect that she’ll blame her lack of a college education on her kid. The reality of the situation is SHE dropped out of college, her kid didn’t make her. Yes, pregnancy is tough, I can understand that. But don’t drop out, seriously. Take fewer classes, go part time, or even take a break to resume the education later. There are even government grants for single mothers to go school, there’s a ridiculous amount of help for stuff like that. Saying “My kid is the reason I didn’t go to college” is a terrible excuse. It is basically the same as saying “The color of my skin is what cost me my job or why I don’t make any money.” If you’re skilled at a task that I cannot do myself, I’ll hire you regardless of what color your skin is. Most white people don’t care anymore! Maybe the reason that a black person isn’t getting a job is because they never finished high school? Or how about not having the experience required? The same shit happens to white people to, but we call it what it is: lack of education or skill, not color of our skin. When a black man shoots a white man in the street for something, we call it a murder. When a white man shoots a black man in the street is all of the sudden becomes a “racially motivated crime”. Why is that? Do you think it is white people saying that specific crime is racially motivated? No. It would be a different story if the suspect was associated with the KKK or Neo-Nazi parties, then we just put two and two together and come to the same conclusion that black people did: race, because it is evident. 

Maybe I am naive, but I’m reflecting on my observations while living here in the US. I really don’t believe that whites are fueling any sort of race war anymore. Like I said, there are some extremists, but they represent such a tiny, minuscule portion of the white population. Thus their stance on race is not representative of the white population as a whole. And the same may be true for blacks, but because racial topics are fairly taboo in this country, I find it hard to have a true racial conversation with a black person without one of us feeling very uncomfortable. Perhaps the Jesse Jackson’s and Rodney King’s of the black population represents a small portion of how blacks really feel about race and should also be disregarded as it is a tiny portion of the black population.

Bottom line, if you want to stop the race war, stop pulling out the race card when it isn’t necessary and take responsibility for your own missed car payments, lost jobs, foreclosed homes, lack of money, etc. because it happens to everybody and not because of the color of their skin.

Again, I’ll close with the following disclaimer: I AM NOT RACIST!

I’m not allowing comments to this, because I can guarantee I will be called a racist even though people who actually know me know that I am not.

As I understand it, an LLC creates a legal entity in name of the business and could be subject to certain fees and licenses, etc. However it has its advantages because then if I ever do something really stupid and lose a bunch of money, or if someone sues me, it will be against the business’ assets, not my own. A DBA doesn’t offer that kind of protection.

Now… herein lies the delima: In the software business, there’s all sorts of bullshit about copyright infringement. I’ve seen it happen to a few business owners that I know first hand. If someone sued me over copyright infringement, I could lose, and I could owe a lot of money out of my own pocket. However, if that same scenario happened to me but I was under an LLC, I could owe everything that my business is worth…. NOTHING. Which is a lot better than paying buku bucks to some dude I pissed off.

I’m not sure what to do. Am I even ready to start a business? Its been on my mind for some time now, but I can’t make myself go through with it unless I’m absolutely ready. The stuff I want to do requires some serious startup capital, which I can’t raise myself. If I have to get investors involved, I’m going to want an LLC and not a DBA for the reason of protection. But if I start it small, using my own funds, I can just build the business as a DBA, then roll it into an LLC if I need to work up some major venture capital or something.

I’m still not sure what kind of paperwork DBA’s have to file in the way of taxes and stuff. Luckily, my girlfriend just got her BS in Business Management. Maybe I can make her my first employee, haha, and let her run the businessy-paperwork stuff.

So tonight I go to figure out why my posts went bye-bye and it turns out that a table in the WP database got corrupted. It was a simple matter of repairing the tables and everything was fine again. So here I am, posting away.

Ok, now down to business. I just wanted to at least post a quick update saying that through the help of some guys I work with at Blackened Interactive, my heap corruption is fixed. It was a very simple mistake that I made and I now have a better understanding of what happened so I won’t let it happen again in future coding.

It seems that every time a hurricane hits the south-central US, people panic, gas prices skyrocket, and thus there is a self-induced gas shortage in large metro areas. A few weeks back, gas prices were in the $5.00/gal. range in some places; followed promptly by a complete outage of gas supply. Granted the prices have come back down (still not quite near normal), there is still a fundamental problem: gas shortage.

My girlfriend and I drove around for an HOUR last night looking for gas stations that still had ANY gas left. We drove around in a 10 mile radius near our house only to discover one single gas station had gas, and it was about to run out. I lost count of how many gas stations we passed which had their signs taken down, bags on the pumps, and nobody in the parking lots–lights on, nobody home. This particular gas station we stopped at had gone through 3,000 gallons of gas in 2 hours. Bare in mind this is at around 2:00am, thats practically a mid-day rush twice over at 2:00 in the morning. It is 10 times worse during the day time.

Ok, enough about the problem description, how about the cause? If you recall in my above paragraph I stated “self-induced gas shortage”. The reason I say self-induced is because I’ve lived here long enough to notice a pattern, and certain officials agree, that the gas shortage is caused in part, and probably mostly, by a run on the pumps. It is the simple law of supply and demand. If the demand goes up but supply stays the same, prices go up to protect the remaining supply. Stop topping off tanks and filling up gas jugs when you don’t need it. Stop doing it and the problem will go away!

I made my first home purchase at age 22, two years ago (October, 2006). I received a 100% financing on the house because I had recently gone through a divorce and was broke so I didn’t have the down-payment money for a house. This particular loan was structured so that the first 10 years of payments were interest only. I got a decent rate of 6.5% which is fixed for those first 10 years, then it will adjust. At the time of the purchase, I was feeling as if I was increasing my net worth by owning a home. I figured that in Atlanta, the housing market was going to go nowhere but up. I couldn’t have been more wrong.

In two years, my home has lost roughly $8,000 in value and I haven’t paid a dime towards principal yet. I have no equity in it and the home is worth less than it was when I bought it. In my quest to find a bank that would refinance me at a 30-year fixed loan which wasn’t interest-only I discovered that banks no longer did 100% loans for homes. I can understand why, but now I’m really screwed. The banks that I looked at required at least 10% equity in the home. I have -6% equity in the house if you include calculating the market conditions.

Friends have told me to rent it out if I wanted to buy a new house. Once I explain my situation, they quickly hush up. If I were to rent out the house, I’d have to charge $1,000 per month to pay the mortgage (and make a very small profit of less than $100). Comparable homes can sell for cheaper payments per month, plus homes of this size and condition go for a little over $800 per month in rent. There’s too much competition for me to even bother trying.

So, I guess I’m stuck here for a while. Unless someone out there has any suggestions.

I don’t care if you read it or not, its more of a public journal anyway.

-Cale