HTML Code Template For Commenting on Blogs

Repost from the old site.

Many people comment on blogs, either using Blogger‘s built-in commenter or the commenters on Movable Type or Typepad (two blogging platforms that compete with Blogger).

However, when most people make links in either of these commenting systems, they mess it up and end up making a huge hyperlink that scrolls across the page and is not clickable (Movable Type and Typepad‘s commenters may have ways to make a clickable hyperlink – I am not sure).

Another problem when using commenting systems is that many people do not seem to know how to differentiate quoted comments with your own comments. The best way is to put the quoted comments in italics and leave your own non-italicized. You can also bold either your comments or the other person’s comments.

When you don’t differentiate between quoted comments and your own comments, there is confusion about who wrote what.

So, as Lenin asked, “What is to be done?” Well, one thing you could do is what I do, and that is to set up a template for commenting on blogs. I will next show you some HTML code to put in your template.

Even better yet, you really don’t even need to know any HTML to make and use this template. Of course, although Blogger does not require any knowledge of HTML, any HTML knowledge you can acquire will always help you to use Blogger better. There are plenty of basic HTML books out there. I strongly recommend the HTML 4 For Dummies book as a great starter book for any beginner.

How to make your template:

First of all, to make your template, use a plain text file. I do not recommend using Word or any other mainstream word processor, nor should you use your email program or newsreader. On Windows platforms, Notepad automatically uses plain text for all of its files. There are other plain text editors out there, like Notepad++ (one of my favorite applications). The Mac has a correlate of Notepad called Text Edit.

On Windows, find Notepad by going to Search – Files and Folders and typing in Notepad. When you find it, right click and choose Make Shortcut. A message will come up saying, “Windows cannot make a shortcut here. Do you want one on the desktop instead?” Choose Yes. Now go to your desktop and note that you have a shortcut to Notepad there. Leave it there.

Now, double-click Notepad to create a new file. It will open a new blank file with the title “Untitled“. Now go to File – Save As and a Save As screen will come up probably asking you to save the file on your desktop, but it may ask you to save somewhere else, like My Documents. Wherever it asks you to save, make a note of where it is saving the file so you can find it again.

Under File Name it will say *.txt. Save as Type will be Text Documents (*.txt). Encoding will say ANSI. Leave Save as Type and Encoding as they are unless you really know what you are doing. Now, under File Name, go to the beginning of the *.txt string and delete the *, leaving the .txt. Now start typing a name for your file.

Let’s call it HTML for Blog Comments (but you can call it anything you want). Make sure to leave the .txt at the end of the file name. When you finish typing the file name, click Save. You can now go look on your desktop if you want and you should see a saved file sitting there called HTML for Blog Comments.

Now go back to the opened Notepad file that is open in your taskbar and click on it to open it up. Notice that the title has changed from Untitled to HTML for Blog Comments.

Now we are going to start typing. Type the following characters in your Notepad file:

<i> </i> <i> </i> <i> </i> <i> </i> <i> </i> <i> </i> <i> </i>

To make it easy for yourself, just type a few of them and then select those with your mouse, hit Control-C to copy them, and then hit Control-V to paste them next to the ones you have already typed. This way you can have as many or as few as you like. I have 22 pairs of <i>'s in my template. The i in brackets is an HTML italic tag. The <i> is the opening tag and the </i> is the closing tag.

Now, next time you are making some comments on someone’s blog and you want to quote the other person, go to this Comments Template and mouse select – Control-C copy the italic tags in your template:

<i> </i> <i> </i> <i> </i> <i> </i> <i> </i> <i> </i> <i> </i>

Go ahead and grab them all. Now go to the comments box and Control-V paste the italic tags into the comments box. Now put your mouse cursor before the tags and start typing. Hit enter a few times to give yourself some space to type. This way the italic tags will always be a couple of lines below your typing so you do not get confused.

When you want to quote another person’s text, go find the other person’s text you want to quote, select it with your mouse and Control-C to copy it. Now go to the comments and very carefully put the mouse cursor in between the <i> opening italic tag and the </i> closing italic tag. Hit Control-V to paste the text you want to quote in between the opening and closing tags.

There should now be an <i> in front of the quoted text and a </i> at the end of the quoted text. Now hit enter a couple of times to give yourself some space to respond to the quoted text. Repeat as many times as you want depending on how many snippets of text you want to quote and comment on.

Use the preview button on the commenting system to make sure the quoted text is in italics.

If you don’t like italics and would rather use bold, or want both italics and bold for some reason, then add some bold tags to your template. If you want to put some bold tags in your template, just type a few of these bold tags <b> </b>, then copy-paste them as described above until you have as many as you need. Your bold tags in your template would look something like this:

<b> </b> <b> </b> <b> </b> <b> </b> <b> </b> <b> </b> <b> </b> <b> </b> <b> </b> <b> </b> <b> </b> <b> </b>

If you want to mark some text in bold, just copy and paste the text in between the opening <b> and closing </b> bold tags. Once again, preview it in the commenting system to make sure the text actually got bolded.

Now that we have italics and bold tags in our template, it is time to move on to hyperlinks. Yes, links. If you look at comments on blogs, you will notice that comments with links are often not properly written, and tend instead to scroll across the page wildly. Furthermore, they are usually just text representations of the link addresses, something like:

http://www.answers.com/9/11%20conspiracy%20claims%20regarding%20Jews%20or%20Israel

As you can see, that is not clickable at all, although it is a hyperlink. If you copy it and paste it into your address bar of your browser, your browser will take you to the webpage. If you put it into many word processing programs or many email programs, those programs will automatically make a link out of it.

But Blogger will not do it, neither in its compose editor when making posts nor in its commenter. If you want it to show you up, you need to make it into a hyperlink. You will need to write this code in your template:

<a href=""></a>

Now save that line to your comment template. When you want to make a hyperlink in comments on a blog, cut and paste that line above:

<a href=""></a>

into the commenter. Now go and find your hyperlink. Select it with your mouse and copy it. Go back to the commenter and look closely at the code above. Carefully place your mouse button between the two quote marks: “” so your cursor has one quote mark on either side of it. Now paste the url in between the quote marks.

It doesn’t matter at all how long it is either. It won’t scroll. That code can handle huge url’s and it will not lengthen the resulting hyperlink at all. Now you need to call your link something. Look closely at the code now, with the url pasted into it. Look for this space where the two brackets are pointing at each other:

<a href=""></a>

Extracting the brackets from the code, I refer to these two:

><

Position your cursor in between the two brackets that point at each other and start typing something. You can call it my link, or link, or click here, or anything you want. This is what will show up clickable in blue on the web page. When that text is clicked, it will take the person to the web page:

<a href="Paste url here">Type Name for Link Here</a>

Now, if you are feeling really brave, you can try it on your own. Go to a blog somewhere and practice. In fact, you can even practice with this blog post here in the comments section. Use the preview section to look at how your HTML template code came out. That way you can try to correct any errors before you post your blog comments. One more thing: you are starting to learn a bit of the magic art of HTML!

Looking for a Windows XP Upgrade Disk

I am looking to upgrade from Windows 2000 to Windows XP. If any of my readers have a Windows XP upgrade disk they want to give to me or even sell to me, let me know. We can talk about via email, phone or however.

A Major Complaint Against Facebook Policies

I joined Facebook recently. I must say, this is one of the worst and most fascist and totalitarian sites I have ever joined. Apparently sensitive to complaints of harassment, they have unveiled ridiculously totalitarian policies.

At first I was adding a lot of friends. I tried to add people who had liked or commented positively on my articles, people who commented on the website, etc.

Soon I got multiple notices that I was “making multiple friend requests to people I didn’t know” and I was banned from adding friends for different lengths of time. I got so paranoid about adding friends that I almost completely stopped doing it, and now I just wait for folks to add me.

Then I joined a terrible site called dating site on Facebook called Are You Interested? that doesn’t even work in your browser half the time. What’s neat about it is you can meet a lot of women on there. AYI used to be a fantastic site when it was hooked with MySpace. It was free, and they left you completely alone and never bothered you about anything.

Now you pay to join, and it’s all hooked up with Facebook, and frankly, it’s been ruined. Now it’s pay, and it doesn’t even work half the time, and worse, it’s gone totally fascist.

I don’t know about other guys, but I get quite a few women clicking “Like” on my profile. Then you get a mail saying this woman “thinks you are hot.” So you go check her out to see if she if you like her. If you do, you click like back, send a message or a wink or whatever. There are also women who don’t click “like” but they send you messages all the time saying all sorts of sexy stuff like “I love you,” “you’re cute,” “you’re hot,” on and on. The messages are prefabricated by the application.

Well, if a woman I like clicks like on me and I do in return, I try to add her as a friend. And if she sends me a sexy email and I like her, I try to add her as a friend too. So I only try to add women who click like on me or women who send me sexy emails.

Well, after a while of this, I started getting stern messages from Facebook that I was “sending multiple friend requests to people I don’t know.” Then I would get banned for various lengths of time. I just got banned again, this time for 30 days. They told me that this is harassment and if it keeps up, I might get tossed off Facebook. This is totally ridiculous. Facebook is complete shit. What a stupid crap site.

I have written Facebook several times to complain about all these punitive measures they are taking against me, but they never send anything back. Now and then I get a message saying they can’t respond to all their emails, but they are reading them. I get the feeling that no one is reading them. There’s no way to call Facebook and complain, as there is no customer service of course. With the Internet came to the total death of customer service as an institution of business. Thank you, ecommerce!

What am I supposed to do? How do I not get thrown off Facebook?

Hardware Problem Solved

Apparently.

Well, I replaced the CPU fan. Then I brought the machine back, and the overheating alarm kept going off! I took the machine back to replace the tower fan. Then I went home to settle back to some glasses of wine. As I was sitting there drinking wine, the overheating alarm in the computer went off again. Except there was no computer, so there was no overheating alarm to go off!

I looked around. My APC Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) was sounding the alarm. When your UPS starts to die, it makes a beep beep beep beep sound that sounds like the overheating alarm in the computer. We now think that the problem was the UPS going off all along and that the CPU fan didn’t even need replacing.

I will disconnect the computer from the UPS soon and see if the problem goes away. In the meantime, I have moved the fan away from the computer and I am no longer blowing cool air into the computer.

On the upside, I have a new CPU fan (which I more or less needed anyway as the old one was badly grunged out), and I am going to get a new 1 GB memory stick. I am running off a mere 512 MB right now, but Windows 2000 runs quite smoothly on that, believe me. Much better than Windows XP, which I think is a much inferior OS. When I get the new stick, I will have 1.5 GB RAM, which should be very cool! Things were getting a bit constricted on 1 GB.

Thanks for all your help!

Hardware Problem: Please Diagnose

For a couple of weeks now, my CPU alarm has been going off. I dealt with it by closing programs and putting a big fan against the back of the tower, blowing air into it. When the alarm went off, I closed programs and turned up the fan to high. A couple weeks of that, and I decided to take the tower in to the shop. He replaced the CPU fan on the guess that that was what was causing the problem, but then when he tried to reboot, he got a memory error (checking memory). This went on for 20 minutes or so and the only way to get out of it was to swap out one of the memory sticks, which he assumed had gone bad. So now I am running on only 512 MB of memory, which kind of sucks, but I use Windows 2000, and that uses memory very well and requires very little.

Anyway, with the “bad memory” swapped out and the new CPU fan in, I took it home and started it up. It immediately started checking memory again, and started looping around on that. I hit escape to get out of that mouse wheel. Then it booted up. But after a bit, the CPU alarm went off again! So replacing the CPU fan did not end any of the problems associated with overheating.

What’s going on? Why is the motherboard overheating. How come changing the CPU fan did not stop the problem? Why did the memory stick suddenly die, if it even did? Why is the computer still running endless memory checks with seemingly good memory in the box?

I am not understanding so many things here.

Child Pornography on the Internet: An Investigative Report by Internet Man

A few years ago, I met a fellow who I will call Internet Man. Three years ago, he was about 40 years old. I didn’t take notes of our conversation, so I will reconstruct it from scratch. Obviously, he will sound like me. This is what happens when you don’t take notes or record. All interviewees sound like you.

He was involved in the early Internet scene from 1998-2001 or so, and he delved into the Internet pedo and child porn scene, if only out of curiosity. He’s a straight male with an attraction to mature females, but he’s also somewhat attracted to females aged 13-15 and very much less attracted to females age 7-12. In other words, I figure he is just a normal guy.

One thing I will say about him is that he is a trysexual. He’s a total sex maniac who has screwed more women than I can count, plus maybe a guy or two. He is into most every perversion and kink on Earth, so it figures he would dabble in the pedo thing for a bit.

My dx is that he is not a pedophile in any way, shape or form, though obviously, many may differ. He’s simply one of the biggest sex freaks I’ve ever met, and he’s a guy who think about, fantasize about but not necessarily always do just about anything sexual.

During the interview, some strong pot was smoked by both parties, and we were drinking quite a bit of wine.

RL: Hi there, how are you?

Internetman: Fine,and you?

RL: So tell me about the Internet pedo/child porn scene. How did it all start for you?

Internetman: Well, I was into Yahoo chat rooms. I also went to all sorts of other perverted Internet chatrooms. I used to have cybersex with women there all the time, and also I made a lot of female friends and used to talk to them online about sexual matters and other stuff. I was also spending a lot of time in chatrooms chasing women of all sorts, trying to find new women.

So I was online talking to women, playing sex with women, or talking about sex with women a good part of the time. I was also dating sporadically. And of course I was jacking all the time, because I am Fapmaster Flash, the greatest fapmaster that ever lived.

RL: Not bigger than I was? I nearly broke my dick off there for a while!

Internetman: Well, close. A dick’s best friend is it’s hand.

RL: Anyway…

Internetman: Well, on Yahoo there used to be chatrooms that were turned over to Adults Only. There were also Romance Chat rooms, but those were bullshit, because I only want sex. Screw love. Sex first, then love later, maybe, if the woman wants to take it that way. There were also other weird Internet sex chatrooms set up all over the net, some devoted to particular fetishes. There were also swinger chatrooms, for sex swingers. I used to go to all those chatrooms to talk to chicks, play with them, whatever.

RL: How many women did you meet that way, in a sexual sense?

Internetman: Scores, hundreds, no idea.

RL: Were there cams around, or voice?

Internetman: This was before the cam era. The cams were just coming online around 2001. Voice was not common, but I voiced with a few chicks towards the end, around 2003. Also some called me up on the phone, and we sort of did phone sex. Most cybersex was just typing. Many people of both sexes and all ages were in on this. The number of women in the 20′s, 30′s and even 40′s into this stuff would seriously blow you away. Sure, there were tons of guys, but there were many, many women. And some were married women, looking for men.

RL: Did you meet any of them?

Internetman: No comment, but typically, or rather sadly, many lived too far away. I had women constantly inviting me to come see them, and saying that sex was going to be on the agenda. But I would have had to fly there, so I never went.

RL: What is the scene like now?

Internetman: Dead as Hell. It has all been taken over by scammers, spammers and camwhores. The rooms are full of women on cam, but they are all camwhores. All other women are bots advertising camwhores or porn sites. The chatrooms have all been destroyed by capitalism. There are no more female humans of any kind in there. It’s sad.

Also, around 2004, the rooms got invaded by Internet romance scammers out of the Philippines, Russia and Eastern Europe and Nigeria and West Africa. You would strike up a relationship in there, and then the women would start asking for money while professing love. They ask for money for airline tickets to come see you, etc. A lot of times, it is a man pretending to be a woman, so you fall in love with a man. LOL. Many guys have been taken for a lot of money via this scam.

I also developed many close relationships with women overseas. Some fell in love with me. This was nice, but we never got together. Sometimes we talked on the phone. It seems ridiculous, but it’s always nice to be in love, even if it’s a continent away. If I had a choice between overseas Internet love and no love, I would choose the former. A life without love is painful to me. I’m a man who likes to be in love with a woman and especially vice versa.

RL: What were the adult rooms like?

Internetman: Yahoo set up many rooms around all these different adult themes. Then there were user rooms set up for different themes, and this is where there was some really perverted stuff going on. I mean seriously perverted! LOL!

RL: Did you keep doing this into the cam and voice era?

Internetman: Yes I did. After cams got big, a lot of guys had cams. But few women did. I would meet women online, and as soon as they figured out I had a cam, they would be like, “Get on that cam right now, dammit!” Then when I got on the cam, they would be like, “Take it off, baby!” You know how women are, a lot of them are just whores deep down inside. And I seem to bring it right out of them.

RL: Me too. Thank God for sluts!

Internetman: Yes, on the seventh day, God made sluts! Anyway, in 2004-2008, I had some relationships, mostly overseas, that were fun. Twice the women got on cam. One time this chick who lived a few hundred miles away was banging herself with a candle for like 1-2 hours. I had my cam on too, and I jacked and came, but she was a freight train. You know how woman are. They’re like a machine that once you turn it on, you can’t figure out how to shut it off!

Another time this woman from the Netherlands masturbated for about an hour or so with me. She was hot! Those were the only two times. One time a woman from Egypt got me on cam and I put on show while she cheered. Then she got on voice and masturbated on voice for a really long time. “Uggh, Ohhhh, Owwwwww….” It went on like that for 30 minutes or so. It was hot man! You could hear the Cairo traffic below LOL. All three of those women were about 42-45, an age at which a lot of women are incredibly horny.

I had others who were always getting me on cam. Then they would start demanding I get naked. Then they want a show! So I gave them one. I used to jack for women all time on cam. It was a blast! They would watch, urge me on, cheer me on, etc. Sometimes I would take pics with my cam and mail them to the chicks, and the chicks would collect pics of me naked, jacking, whatever.

I also got some pics from women, like pics of their pussies, their tits, them wearing little to nothing, them naked, them fucking or sucking guys, etc. I had a whole collection of naked women pics. They were sending me this stuff all the time.

RL: I have a bunch of those too. Women were always sending me that stuff for a while. What is your opinion of cybersex?

Internetman: Good times! I even cybered with some relatively famous women. I talked to a bunch of porn stars, mostly amateur, but some not. One from Japan and one from Germany. And one famous one from the US who I will not name. Straight cyber is a blast, but audio is better, and camming is the best. Best of all is audio or camming with the woman getting off and you can see or hear her, but it’s not that common. It’s mostly chicks getting you on cam and the chicks not having a cam.

RL: Did you ever worry it was a guy on the other end?

Internetman: A few times it was! One time I think it was a whole Internet chat cafe in Nigeria, with Black guys who must have been all laughing at me.

RL: Is there ever action right in the room?

Internetman: Sometimes there was action right in the room. In user created rooms, they would set up themes. Some of them were really wild. Some had torture or enslavement themes. There were women in there who wanted to be submissive or enslaved or whatever.

I remember one time this 33 year old married woman came in the room and she goes, “I’m going to piss all over these Goddamn bitches!” LOL. Good times!

Sometimes there were sex scenes right in the rooms. I would go at it right in the rooms with chicks and these other women would start cheering us on. “I’m watching Internetman! Oh Hell yeah.” I think they were masturbating watching me play with the chicks. It was fun!

There were rooms set up for kinks like golden showers. I went in this one room and there was this chick in the room and she was like, “Piss on me!” all the guys were walking up to her and pissing all over head. LOL! It was great!

RL: Were any of the females underage?

Internetman: You see,that’s the thing. Back in those days, there were so many females in rooms and on the Net. Females of all kinds were coming to chat on ICQ mostly, and some were underage. And there were some underage girls in the rooms too. And there were user created rooms like Older Men for Younger Women and Younger Women for Older Men. They were extremely popular! Mostly teenage girls in there, age 15-up to young adulthood. You would go to talk to them, and they would be like, “I love older men!” Guys would be like 20′s to 40′s or so.

RL: Did you ever mess around with the underage girls?

Internetman: Yes I did! LOL, what does that make me? A pedo? A pervert? Fuck it. I did it and it was fun. Girls were 15-17 for the most part. One was 14 from the Netherlands. She was in this room and she writes, “I want to suck a cok!.” She misspelled it LOL. I’m like cool, so I message her and we do it, tons of fun, and she was really perverted. After she asks me my age, and she was freaked out at how old I was and disappointed. I didn’t care, screw it!

One time I met this chick in there, 15 year old girl. She was seriously perverted, and we had a lot of fun. Then she sent me some nude pics, one when she was 14 and one when she was 15. The conversation ended because her mother’s boyfriend who was like 35 years old came in the room and wanted sex. She said she was going to go fuck him. I said, “Whoa! Don’t do it!” She said, “I can’t turn him down. I’m addicted.” Then she went offline.

RL: How were the pics?

Internetman: They were hot! A naked girl that age just looks like a woman, a little young, and the breasts are not quite as full, but they have full pussy hair and all. More or less a woman’s body by that age. Looked just as good as a naked woman, no better, no worse.

RL: Where are the pics?

Internetman: Deleted. Back in those days, it was no worries. But now things are extremely insane, and no way am I going to have any nude pics of teenage girls on my drive. I like women just fine anyway. I don’t have a teen fetish, and I think it’s weird if you do.

Another time this woman was in a chatroom. She was 18, but she had been molested all through her youth since age 8 by her family. Or that was her story. She told me this story, and how she had two sisters, 9 and 12 or so, and they were in on the scene too, the pedophilia scene. Pennsylvania, family affair. The girls were having sex from an early age with all the males of the family, father, uncles, cousins.

I guess a lot of guys must find that story exciting, because she said she had told it to like 90 young guys in that room, and they were all getting off on it. She thought most of them were just regular guys. I think they were just normal guys, but they liked the forbidden nature of it.

I realize now that it was a story of molestation, but the kids were getting off on it, so it seemed less bad. Though just the same, I guess it’s not right. Anyway, I would not do it. Doubt if I would turn them in either though. The girls were supposedly having fun for what it’s worth.

RL: Ever do any cam or voice cybering with underage girls?

Internet Man: Well, sort of. One time I was in this room. It was full of people, mostly teenagers, but there were a bunch of adults in there too, and even several adult women! The people in the room said a girl was naked on cam, so a lot of us went to look at her. She looked really young, but she was seriously hot too. She was naked, and she was masturbating like wild! It was cool, man!

I was like WTF. Then the people in the room said she’s only 13 years old. One guy said, “I know her! She goes to my school!” Well, she could well have been 13. But she had very full and large breasts, though they had that funny look about them? You know how girls’ breasts about 14-16 look, even if they are good sized? Sort of funny or weird in some strange way. Not quite a woman’s breasts for some reason.

She had full hair on her pussy. She was just like a woman in so many ways. But she had a very young little girl kind of face, and when she shut off the cam, she acted like a little girl in some way I can’t describe.

But to tell the truth, the show was seriously hot! LOL.

RL: Was it illegal?

Internet Man: LOL, I guess so, but there were a bunch of adults in the room too, including grown women, so what the Hell, eh? She was putting on a show for everyone of her own free will. What are they going to do? Arrest the whole room? Crazy.

But this was in a freer era. I’m very paranoid now. I don’t know what I would do if I ran across that now. I hope I don’t. Things are so weird now.

RL:  Anything else?

Internet Man: Well, I used to talk to this young girl, 14 years old, on ICQ. She was rich and lived in Venice Beach, California. Her Dad was a notorious playboy, and she lived with him. Never-ending parade of women coming in and out. She thought it was funny. She used to talk to me about her body and how it was developing. We had some interesting conversations!

She kept bugging me to send her porn to look at, so finally I sent her some. It was really hardcore stuff, way dirty, but I won’t say what it was. She thought it was sort of shocking. Cool chick, lot of fun to talk to, but we never did anything sexual.

RL:  Is any of that illegal?

Internet Man: You see, this was another era. You could send a teenage girl porn online. You could cyber with teenage girls. But now, adults are actually going down for talking dirty to teenage girls via texting and whatnot! There have been some cases. And clearly they can bust you for sending porn to a teenage girl.

And I think some guys on To Catch a Predator were even busted for talking dirty in chat to teenage girls. So anymore: You can’t talk dirty, cyber with or send porn to teenage girls online. It’s apparently all illegal now. No way am I ever doing this again, or at least I hope not.

RL: Ever see any real child porn (CP)?

Internetman: Well, you see, those rooms, they are perverted. Nothing but perverts in there of both sexes. And one thing is porn pic trading. People do pic trading all the time in there. Well, one time I was talking to this guy who was in there with his young wife. They were both perverts. The guy sends me this pic without asking, and I accept it. It’s like an older man nailing some little girl, screwing her! I look and it, and I’m like, “Whoa!” and deleted it right away.

RL: How did it look?

Internetman: Not erotic. More sick and disturbing. Like wrong. Hard to describe. It seemed like a bomb was heading right in my face from the computer ready to blow up in my face when I saw that pic. I couldn’t delete it fast enough.

Another time I met this guy in the rooms, and he was a major pervert. Young guy from San Diego, 23 years old, had a hot live-in gf, and they had sex all the time. But he also had a thing for girls around puberty age. I was getting curious, so I started talking to him.

He started sending me pics from Russia. I forget what they were exactly. Seemed to be girls about age 12 or 13. That doesn’t do much for me, but there is a “forbidden” factor about it that can be exciting. I didn’t really understand the guy’s fetish. He spent a lot of time dredging this illegal stuff up because it’s hard to find.

Guys would come to me on ICQ and say, “Pic trade?” I usually said yes because I’m a perv. One guy from Netherlands sent me CP without asking. I was mad and deleted it instantly like it was poison.

Later I got a bit curious because I came across the CP fiction stories.

RL: What are those?

Internetman: Well, they are legal! I got into that for a while because it was forbidden, so it was kind of hot. I actually jacked to some of those stories because they were exciting in some forbidden, ought to be illegal kind of way. So it just became another of my zillion perversions and kinks. Later I felt guilty about jacking to those stories and I decided I didn’t want to explore that area of sexuality.

RL: So are you a pedophile?

Internetman: Don’t think so. I’m not into that stuff, don’t want to explore it anymore, don’t want to read about, and anyway, I get off just fine on like a million other things. There’s a million other kinks, etc. I would rather explore. If you dx me pedo, you have to dx me with every other thousand kink and fetish in and out of the DSM.

RL: I don’t think you’re a pedo. Keep in mind that 28% of males react pretty strongly to pedo stimuli in the lab. Are 28% of all men pedos? I don’t think so. Most of them can take it or leave it. Pedophilia is a very strong and persistent interest, one of their main interests.

Internetman: Well, anyway, I started exploring further, and I got interested in CP. I wanted to see it, to see what all the fuss was about. So I spent like 2-3 weeks pounding away at the Net trying to find it. It is that hard to find. Finally I found a lot of it, but it was in Yahoo Groups! Back then Yahoo Groups were almost unpoliced, and there were lots of Yahoo CP Groups springing up all the time. They would pop up like mushrooms, immediately get like 8-14,000 members, then vanish into thin air. That was the MO.

RL: What guys were in the groups?

Internetman: Well, back then, you could talk to people in the groups, but Yahoo got rid of that feature. I talked to some of the guys. They seemed like regular, normal guys, just really curious. This stuff is illegal, and I honestly think the vast majority who look at it are just “curiosity seekers” . Not pedos in any way, shape or form.

One time I talked to the owner of a group.

RL: Who was he? Was he a pedo?

Internetman: A Bulgarian. I don’t think he was a pedo even 1%. What was he then? The guy was simply a criminal. He was Organized Crime. He was just doing this as a lucrative criminal venture. He said, “Here in Bulgaria, nothing is legal, nothing is illegal. Everything is legal, everything is illegal.” He was laughing the whole time.

RL: You saw the pics? How did you react?

Internetman: Yes I did. Grown men having sex with very young girls for the most part. Well, some of it was a bit hot, because it’s like a beautiful young girl sucking a cock, say, and it seems the same as if it was a woman.

But a lot was downright disturbing and even upsetting, and I think the very idea of adults have sex with kids is dubious and ought to be illegal. A lot of kids are hurt by this. Yes, some like it, but so what? It should be illegal just because it’s weird if for no other reason. Guys who do it need to go down. And CP unfortunately probably needs to be illegal too. I won’t have any on my drive, I won’t mess around with any kids, and pedo stuff is not part of my fantasy life. There is some stuff kids should not be exposed to, and one of those things is sex.

I remember one pic in particular was very upsetting. I think that guy in San Diego sent me the url. It was a guy about 40 screwing this girl who was like 8.

Something was just so wrong, sick and messed up about that. The man was way too big and too old, the girl was way too young and too small. I would not say it was “sick,” but it was just very weird, disturbing and upsetting. Sort of like those sicko gore and shock videos online. It was almost traumatizing to look at it. You look at it, and the main thing you think is, “WRONG. That is so wrong.”

You can’t even put your finger on why it’s wrong, it’s just wrong in some hard to describe way. It’s fucked up, and it’s so fucked up, it should not even be legal. It almost seems to scream crime too. But was it “sick?” Not really. Some behavior is just fucked up, wrong, not ok, messed up. So messed up that it ought to be outright banned, and if you do it, the cops should e able to haul you off. It’s something society should not tolerate for the simple reason that it is too fucked up to exist in a decent society. Ok?

RL: More or less my feelings too, though I have seen little of this stuff.

Internetman: You have seen CP?

RL: Only a few times. I used to prowl around on dirty Yahoo profiles all the time. And I found a few profiles that had CP on them as profile pics. Mostly it was young kids screwing each other, like a 9-10 year old boy and a girl the same age, but that also looks very weird and disturbing in some bizarro kind of way. Should it be illegal to do it? No idea. But pics like that should not be allowed.

I also saw some weird profile pics that were like mothers and daughters. Not sure if it was CP, but it seemed messed up. And a couple of times pic trading morons sent me pics of that crap. Like you, I was freaked out and deleted it immediately. I have seen maybe several photos of it – a few on Yahoo profiles, couple others idiots sent me.

Internetman: Oh well, I completed my investigation!

RL: You sure did. Should CP and adult-child sex be illegal?

Internetman: Oh Hell yeah. That stuff is so hard to find, and that’s because it is illegal. Once you make it legal, it will be everywhere, and that will be a catastrophe. And it’s a lie that it’s everywhere on the Net, simple for anyone to find. It is nearly impossible for the average surfer to accidentally run across such things.

Adult child sex needs to be illegal, especially age 12 and below. I don’t care what excuses they have. It’s hurts a lot of the kids, and anyway it ought be illegal, #1, just for being weird if for no other reason.

Google Hammers Content Farms

Overview here for those who are confused by the headline.

I always wondered what was up with these content farms. Why would anyone make one? But apparently this non-blogs are just a way to make money for their creators. If you want them to link you, you pay. They’re actually able to sell links.

I get linked by these idiots all the time, and they really annoy me. I’m glad Google is finally cracking down.

It’s interesting that Google updates it’s search algorithm 350 times a year. That’s about once a day. By now, that must indeed be one of the fanciest mathematical equations in common use.

A Rather Subjective Analysis of European Minority Languages

One way to see how well European minority languages is if you run a popular website that gets a lot of hits from all over Europe. I run one here on my old site, which is in the top 1200 blogs on the Internet (This blog is also in the top 1200).

If you have a good weblog (a weblog allows a webmaster to monitor all of the visitors from your site), and I do, you can see what languages people are using on their browsers. When browsers come to the site, they are marked with language tracking. I am not sure if that is a language preference for webpages or if it is the language that the browser itself is written in.

Minority lanugages are languages that are not the main spoken language of the country or languages that only have a small speaker base. In this piece, we will be dealing with Irish, Welsh, Catalan, Basque, Galician and Luxemburgish. Those I am quite sure are offered as language versions of the major browsers.

Luxemburgish: Luxemburgish is the official language of Luxemburg, however, there are worries about it due to the small speaker base of only around 500,000. Further, there is a problem in that not enough new and technological words are coming into the language. Most browsers from Luxemburg are using the Luxemburgish language, so the language seems to be in pretty good shape.

Catalan: Catalan is the most popular of the remaining five. However, considering how many readers I get from the Catalan region, very few Catalans are using Catalan browsers. Most are using Spanish language browsers. So the situation of Catalan does not look so good.

Irish: I am amazed that there are any Irish browsers at all, but now and then, we do get one from Ireland. Needless to say, nearly all browsers from Ireland are using English. Still, everyone knows that Irish is in bad shape. Considering there are Irish browsers at all, I think Irish is in better shape than we think it is.

Galician: I was quite shocked to find a few Galician browsers out there coming out of Galicia in the far northwest of Spain. This language is probably in better shape than people think it is. Most Galician browsers use Spanish.

Welsh: Considering that most reports indicate that Welsh is doing pretty well, I was surprised that one almost never sees a Welsh browser. Almost all browsers coming out of Wales use English. I wonder if Welsh is in as good a shape as people say it is considering the dearth of Welsh browsers.

Basque: I have yet to see a Basque browser! If browsers are indeed offered in Basque (uncertain) this is very bad news. I get quite a bit of traffic out of the Basque country, and 100% of the time, Basque users are using Spanish as their browser language. Things don’t look good for the Basque language.

I can’t speak of other small languages in Europe because in general, browsers are not offered in those languages.

This was an interesting little experiment though.

Thoughts on “File Sharing” and the Tangled Issue of Copyright and Patent

AJ asks: What’s your opinion on the morality of sites like The Pirate Bay, and the various torrent sites, torrent clients, and file sharing and P2P in general? Do you consider downloading an mp3 for free the same as stealing? Metallica does. Do you agree with Metallica when they took on Napster?

Yes, it stealing. The phrase “sharing” is outrageous. How bout I come break into your house and share some of your property, eh?

My brother is a musician, and he hates this crap.

But it’s the industry’s fault. They have so overpriced CD’s and movie tickets that no one wants to go to the movies or buy a CD. Forget concerts. Plus the scum keep phasing out tech and introducing it again.

I owned 8-tracks, cassettes, albums and now CD’s. Theoretically, one could have bought the same work 4 different times as each old tech was phased out. It’s all a joke to get us to pay up to four times for the same work of art!

Keep in mind that every time the bastards upgraded the media, the upgraded the devices to play the media. The jerks made me shell out for an 8-track player, a cassette player, a record player and now a CD player. No doubt they have further upgrades in mind down the road!

However, there is a sell it or give it away problem here. Are the various TV shows for sale? What about shows that will never run again and yet are not being offered for sale. Ok, look, we ought to have a right to “steal” that stuff.

There is a principle in copyright law that says, “Sell it or give it away.” You simply may not produce a work of art or any patented invention and then put it in your drawer and not let the public use it. For copyright, you may not release something and then pull distribution. People have a right to your art. If you don’t want to sell your art, then give it away.

The same applies or ought to apply to software. Sell it or give it away. The very notion that abandonware exists is outrageous. I can’t tell you how many IT scum have defended the notion of abandonware to me.

Capitalists in general are loathsome ratfucks anyway, but I must say that some of the filthiest, most evil capitalists I have ever met worked in the software industry. We can thank these maggots for totally unenforceable “software licenses” (Ever read one of those outrageous things?), software that miraculously comes out without an install disk, the total failure of the notion of customer service, forced upgrades, refusal to work with competitor’s products, and a pile of stinking horseshit as high as the stratosphere.

It is because of the antics of the likes of Bill Gates et al that software went free and open source – consumers were so outraged by the industry’s crap that they killed the industry by producing their own free product. Some day the software industry will be a tiny shadow of its former self, and that will be a great day indeed. Bill Gates needs to have a stake driven through his heart in cemetery at midnight, but hold your cross in front of you to blind him so he doesn’t fight back.

You also may not patent an invention and then refuse to release it to the public. If you don’t sell it, you must give it away. No hoarding of the public commons.

The music industry is about as maggoty as the software scum, but musicians themselves are good people who surely deserve the fruits of their labors.

E-Commerce is a World of Shit

Repost from the old site.

I really feel that e-commerce has shot itself in the foot. I would much rather buy about any product at a brick and mortar store any day of the week. My experiences with e-commerce have typically been horrible.

I just got a spyware infection from a site that sells fake spyware apps to consumers. Why are these sites even legal?

First they try to load Trojans (in this case, one called Zlob) on your site, then they install malware on your computer without even asking for it, then it runs and “finds” all this fake spyware on your system that doesn’t even exist, then tries to make you buy the program to fix the nonexistent spyware problems.

Then they make it impossible to remove it from your system, and I’m a computer expert. Now I have a pop-up all the time in my tray and no way to get rid of it.

The program was uninstalled via Add Remove Programs and I deleted some Registry entries and went through and found more crap afterwards, and deleted it from Registry and Programs. Despite all my deleting, I still have rogue processes going that I can’t even find or kill or anything.

It also outrageously installs a fake program giving you a fake Windows Kernel Fault screen that requires a computer reboot. Someone tell why this shit is not illegal?

The program is called AntiSpyCheck and you get it from AntiSpyCheck.com. I did not download this program on purpose. Instead, I clicked on a video codec and it installed installed itself without even asking. AntiSpyCheck is a rogue antispy program. These programs run on your computer and tell you that you have all sorts of spyware infections that you do not even have.

Then they try to get you to buy the rogue antispyware program. If you do buy it, then you just wasted money on a fake program. In addition, many of these sites are phishing sites that are designed to steal your credit card information. As if that were not bad enough, the fake antispyware itself is often a criminal program that installs a Trojan and tries to steal any valuable data on your computer.

All of these Zlob programs seem to be originating from Russian Organized Crime, in this case, often in the Ukraine. Even if you don’t buy the evil program, they often have an annoying pop-up that never ends until you buy the program. One is tempted to purchase the evil program just to make the pop-up go away. In no case should you purchase such a program!

Overview.

Then I shelled out for some complete garbage spyware software called Spy Hunter. Spy Hunter charges your credit card after six months to renew your subscription, but it sends you an email warning you first and lets you opt out. Why is that even legal? There was no choice about whether or not to allow them to slam your credit card every 6 months.

Update: I fixed the AntiSpyCheck infection via this site. You run MalwareBytes’ Anti-Malware program and it gets rid of it perfectly. The trial run is free, but if you want realtime protection, you need to shell out. The product is excellent and I may just buy it.

Typically, these Internet shit e-commerce joints have no humans at the other end. There’s a tech support email, but who knows if they answer it. The general rule in e-commerce is no customer service whatsoever. There’s typically no phone # to call and no human to talk to. Often you can resolve things with emails, but not always. It’s still a pain in the butt.

The fuck customer service thing is the latest wonderful trend in US capitalism. It’s all about cutting costs. It’s even spreading to credit cards.

Credit cards used to have decent customer service, but my last card was with “Juniper” which it turns out is actually owned by the British Barclays Bank.

There’s no brick and mortar joint to pay your card,as the bank is in the UK! They deviously (Why is this legal?) allowed me to run my card over the limit and then started pounding me with monthly overlimit fees. I could not afford to pay down the over-limit draft.

Banks will now outrageously allow you to overdraw on your account at the ATM with very few warnings. Instead of a loan, which it is, you are immediately hammered with an overlimit fee as you overdraft. Why is this shit even legal? Then you have to put it all back in before the beginning of the month or they will close your account! Now you will have a big black mark on your credit rating.

Now, just tonight I tried to buy SpyHunter. Of course there’s no humans on the other end, and they don’t even have a physical presence. First of all, it did not let me look over the purchase before I bought it, so my autofill program filled in my name and last name with my address and I was not able to change that.

The thing would not even let me download the program. It kept asking me for a username and password. It gave me two different ones in the email and I tried both of them. Both failed over and over.

Earlier, I purchased a product called Stuffit for $30 so I could unzip files. I had a previous version on there, so this new one never would install because it said I had to remove the old one first. Although I uninstalled through the traditional way, it still claimed the old program was still there! I searched the whole computer for anything related to the old program and never could get all of it off. So my $30 program never got installed.

I could call the company, but customer service with even huge software companies is so horrible I have not even bothered.

I have a cam with a software program that requires a code to make it work. The code has been lost, so I can’t install my cam software. I guess I could call Intel, but I bet their support is garbage too. Another problem is that a lot of these programs get abandoned (abandonware), so they might not even be able to give you a code even if they wanted to.

There is a product I like to purchase called Tamer. It kills the acid in coffee. None of the phone numbers ever work. You buy the product online and the first thing it tells you is that there has been a database error. So you assume that the sale did not go through. But that really means you bought it!

I’ve had them mail the product to me a few times, and every time, it seems like something screws up. It gets shipped back to them, but they don’t notify me that the product came back. They only tell me that when I email them and bitch (No way to talk to the company on the phone, remember?).

Software is probably the only product in the world like this. It’s the only product that refuses to work with competing products. It’s the only product that installs itself and makes it so you can’t get rid of it. It’s the only product whereby you could have a perfect working copy of it sitting around but you can’t make it work because you can’t punch in some “make it work code”.

It’s the only product that tries to force you to buy their product. With most everything else, you still have a choice. You can buy product A, B, C or D. Name one other product you are more or less forced to buy like Windows or Word. Name one other product where the old product doesn’t work anymore and you have to keep on shelling out for new versions all the time.

Software has been all about fuck the consumer from day one, unless you are a big corporate customer, in which case I guess you get some service. As a natural monopoly like water, power, phone or cable, software probably needs to be regulated by the state like any other natural monopoly.

It is the disgust and rage of computer users with the world of shit that software and its evil twin, e-commerce, have wrought, that has brought about open source and free products like Firefox, Open Office, Linux, etc. With these products, the model has no reason to fuck the consumer at all, so it just doesn’t happen.

It’s sad that America idolizes a punk like Bill Gates. He’s been fucking over consumers from his first day on the job. He’s violated every contract he’s ever signed, and he’s stolen just about every bit of competing code he could find. He’s a liar, a thief, a traitor and a snake. In the real world, when people act like that, they are called sociopaths. They get their asses kicked, they get killed or they go to jail or prison, or all of the above.

In Corporate World, you act the same way that gets your ass kicked or gets you tossed in prison in the real world and you turn into the Businessman Hero of the World.

The point is that this shit Internet industry is to blame for all of this. They are the ones that have been screaming loud and clear from day one about “no regulation of the Internet” and “no taxing of the Internet”.

So the Internet is the Wild West with no sheriffs or posses that do anything. There’s rustlers, crooks and robbers everywhere, and you go the sheriff or the posse and they shrug their shoulders and say so what. They wanted an unregulated Internet and that’s what they got. Internet e-commerce – the most consumer-hostile industry around.

I like the brick and mortar world. In general, the workers help you and show you where things are. There’s usually someone to talk to. If something doesn’t work, you can always bring it back. The clerks and aisle help go out of their way to be as nice and friendly as possible.

It’s the mirror opposite of E-Commerce World.

There’s actually a lot more to this story about the Internet being a haven for every criminal, thief, liar, scammer, and fraudulent dog on Earth, but I’ll save it for another post.