All my content has moved to a self-hosted WordPress blog:

http://www.jerhoyet.com

Yesterday morning I got a text message from my older sister, Kayla, who is a student at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana. The message said that I should give her a call when I got a chance, so while I was getting some breakfast I decided to give her a ring. The ensuing phone conversation was quite weird:

Me: Hey sis!
Kayla: Hey!
Me: What did you need?
Kayla: *whispers* I’m an OZ. . . .
Me: What? An OG? You’re an “Original Gangsta”?
Kayla: No, no, no! An OZ, “Original Zombie”!

This is when I found out that my sister enjoys live action roll playing zombie games, along with over 150 other BSU students.

Humans Vs. Zombies - Ball State 

Are you using Twitter? I am. I can’t say that I’m completely addicted, but it’s nice to see what people are up to at any given time in the day. There is a problem with Twitter, not many people understand it or know about it (in respects to everyday folks). That’s why this video rocks:

So last night I was decided to turn on “Device Updates” in my Twitter account preferences. Boy, was this a bad idea.

I was supposed to be getting an early morning call from my girlfriend before she went to a doctor’s appointment, so naturally I had a speed-metal ringtone with my ringer volume turned on all the way;  the cell phone sitting right next to my face as I slept like a drunk baby.

3am rolls around and my cell phone starts going nuts. I’m jolted awake by some hardcore music 3 times in a matter of minutes. Finally I open my phone to see who the hell was calling/texting me at this hour of the night and to my utter surprise. . . . someone is watching television at 3am in the morning. . . . .

Sorry for the absence from blogging the past week. I had a break from school and took the oppritunity to make the trip to Virginia to see my girlfriend. It was quite fun spending time with her and getting out of this little mountain town for the week. I got home yesterday afternoon and took some time to relax after driving for 4 hours.

I should be back into full swing by mid-week. Right now I’m just catching up on some school work and reading what went on last week in the world of tech while I was away :]

Best Buy has officially launched a couple new services, one of which is a new online trade-in center for your old PCs, Game Consoles, and more. When I first read about the service, I thought to myself “This is a great idea, maybe I won’t have to worry about reselling my old hardware on Ebay anymore!”. Boy, was I ever wrong.

Here’s what my setup includes:

• EVGA 680i Chipset motherboard
• Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 @ 3.6ghz
• XFX GeForce 8800GT
• 500GG+ of Hard Drive Space
• A Very Freaking Expensive Watercooling Setup
• 2GB of OCZ DDR2 800

That’s just a quick run-down of what I have in my PC, here’s what the configuration on the Best Buy Trade-In center website looked like (click for full size):

Yeah, for all that hardware, they wanted to give me $400.96. Not even enough to cover the resale value of my video card, motherboard, and memory; much less the entire PC. . . .

Click for full size.

Recently I discussed my dismay with the way in which the Twitter RSS feed displayed on WordPress.com. I had attempted using a few free services to fix the issues I was having, and had little luck.

After a user commented that post, I decided to write a follow up. I admit, I wrote the previous post in haste and did not fully explore one of the free services that I had written about. That service was Dapper.net, which provides a very nice GUI, point-and-click interface to build mashups from existing feeds and any page on the web. I had, at first, thought feeds that I built using Dapper did not update as frequent as I would have liked, although they did update faster than Feed43. After some tweaking and playing around, I soon realized that my Dapper feeds were indeed updating about once every 15-20 minutes. I was even able to include the time and location from which I made my Tweet.

Dapper still has it’s issues though; for instance, I’m unsure of how you would go about building a “Dapp” that would capture multiple Tweets instead of just displaying your most recent Tweet. I’m also not sure how to get my Dapp feed to link to my Twitter account, instead the links just link to the page the feed is displayed on (in this case, my blog).

In all Dapper fulfilled my needs, so if you’re unhappy with the appearance of your Twitter feed on WordPress.com, I suggest giving Dapper.net a try.

Side Note: I’ll most likely be writing a guide on using Dapper to display your Twitter feed properly in the near future, so stay tuned.

Today I’ve read two very interesting articles that detail a government attempting to put a leash on technology.

The first was an article I found on Propeller earlier this afternoon by Michael Santo, or more commonly known to Propeller folks as TechnologyExpert. Santo wrote on his personal blog about a bill being proposed in Kentucky that would make it illegal to post anonymously on the Internet. Furthermore, if a website were to not comply with the law (if passed) they would be subject to some pretty hefty fines.

Santo writes:

Kentucky lawmaker Tim Couch has proposed a bill that would make anonymous Internet posting illegal. House Bill 775 would require anyone who wants to post a comment or other content on a Web site to register their real name, address, and e-mail address with the Web site.

The onus is placed on the website operators, however. According to the bill, website operators (or interactive service providers as the bill calls them) could face stiff fines.

The second article was brought to my attention via my RSS reader, and is located on the popular gadget blog Engadget:

Uh-oh, Indian Blackberry users — better get ready for some major disconnection anxiety. Apparently the Indian government is demanding that RIM either allow it to snoop on its encrypted email service (or worse, drop down to 40-bit encryption), or shut down the entire Indian Blackberry network at the end of the month. That’ll cut off an estimated 400,000 subscribers, so the carriers, RIM, and government officials are due to meet and try and hammer out a solution on the 14th, but the issue probably won’t be easy to solve…

I think the idea of governments trying to take some control over the modern wild west that is the Internet is laughable at best. Sure, China filters content like Nazi-Germany in the 1940’s, but the idea behind the Internet and mobile devices is to allow for greater freedom. I’m not sure all this was invented to allow our governments to keep tabs on who dislikes Johnny Tootoos on MySpace.