Randomness Redefined

Hey everyone here is a much needed update that I have been meaning to get to for days now. But first today has been very busy on the news front. First up is a pretty big announcement from Google, Yahoo, and MSN. The Big 3 of searching have partnered up with Manilla, Six Apart, Wordpress, Flickr, Blogger, Livejournal, Buzznet, Blojsom, Blosxom to perhaps put a stop to the rampant comment spam bots that are crippling the blogging community. What these spam bot seek to do is place the URL of their site on as many blogs, guestbooks, etc so that when search engines go through all the links on the site they will see all of the spammed comments as being linked together which has the effect of pushing up the page rank of the spammer’s site. I have experienced a small portion of these bots as have some of my friends so I think this is a good think for everyone to go to. If you want to read more about you can read about it here

In other news apparently everyone who every thought that Microsoft’s Internet Explorer was bad now had proof, and it comes directly from Microsoft itself. According to this article Windows users recently received an antispyware program through windows Update that was supposed to remove viruses and whatnot identified IE as spyware and then removed it from the system! Also, according to this article many players of the popular online game World of Warcraft need to be brought to the lord.

And on the personal front I am settling in well after returning from Winter Break. We lost a suitemate this semester, Mike left to go live with his Frat brothers so Shawn is living on his own now (lucky SOB ) Bryan and I are doing well in our “swinging bachelor pad” and I think I am going to move in with my old suitemate Robbie for the summer and maybe more after that but I don’t know and on the SMSU front my semstar should be much lighter than the last one and the professors all seem to be pretty cool even though I’m stuck with Johnson again, grrrr! I’ll update you all more later on the personal and SMS stuff later, I just got back from hanging out with Robbie and some nice new Mac converts, wh00 we are spreading! Take care of yourselves and post some comments or something so I know your alive.

I have returned from my trip to Jefferson City and I had a blast! My family and I had the once in a life time experience to stay at the Governor’s mansion. Now you are probably wondering how in the world I was able to do this aren’t you. Well it sure isn’t because we gave a bunch of money to the campaign that is for sure. As my parents are both extremely conservative the odds that they would donate money to a governor who is extremely liberal are pretty unlikely as far as I am concerned. No, this has something to do with friendship actually. Let me explain, my father and the current Governor of Missouri, Bob Holden went to Southwest Missouri State University together and Governor Holden was my father’s Resident Assistant and they became good friends. The friendship continued well after they had both graduated and started their professional lives.
I grew up knowing Governor Holden and for years I only knew him as Uncle Bob because he pretty much became another one of my uncles. Governor Holden has been active in Missouri politics for over 12 years and the culmination of his service to the state was his election to Governor about 4 years ago.

Now jump ahead to about a week ago when the Governor’s office called my parents house and told us to be in Jefferson City on the 6th. of January so that we could have dinner with the Governor and First Lady and that we would be given the opportunity to spend the night at the Governor’s Mansion. We had joked with the Holdens durning the whole term about spending the night and jokes were made about the whole Lincoln Bedroom controversy of President Clinton’s campaign. Personally, I never expected anything to come of it as Bob’s duties would most likely occupy him for his entire term. I guess things changed when Governor Holden lost his reelection campaign to Matt Blunt (Now the Governor and both houses are controlled by the Republicans so that will be different.) and the Holdens probably felt that since our families had remained friends even though my parents had differing political views than they did that we could come spend the night with them on their last weekend in office.

So Thursday rolls around and I scramble through work to make the 2pm deadline that my father had set (he kinda tends to chomp at the bit as it were when leaving for trips) and luckily I made it thanks to some covering by my co workers who I probably didn’t get a chance to thank properly. We made it to Jefferson City with time to spare and we checked in with security and we were shown to our rooms. We had to chill up on the third floor for awhile toll the Governor and First Lady returned and we could have dinner.

I want to take some time to describe what things looked like in my own meager way and just in case I fail I guess you can see things for yourself by visiting the site for the mansion(this site is not great and doesn’t seem to like firefox that much so be warned). I had expected that most of the mansion would be modernly furnished and that the visitor’s area would contain most of the historic pieces from the home. Boy was I wrong! The whole place was on big museum as well as having portions that were modernly furnished. I was blown away by how beautiful everything looked and the sense of history was a physical force in the air.

Dinner was great and the food was outstanding! I like food so bear with me ok, anyways it was nice to have some quiet time to spend with the Holdens and hear how life had been for them with so much public attention focused on everything they did and also it was just nice to see friends after being absent for many years. After dinner my family and I helped the Governor move some boxes of their personal items over to their newly purchased home (this is probably the real reason we were invited ;)) and then my parents went off to talk to the Holdens while my brother and I talked with their oldest son Robert. He seems to be an extremely intelligent and nice kid and he is far better behaved than the 7 year old I remember that tried to pull out all of my hair at a fund raising party many years ago! Also, he is extremely interested in computers and was in the process of building his own so I offered to lend him a hand since I have built so many computers that I have lost track! I managed to help him get everything mostly up and running and all that he will need to do is get some of the bells and whistles on his case working and he should be good to go I think. We finished helping him about midnight and then my brother and I went upstairs and used his wifi network to read articles and surf the net till we fell asleep.

This morning we woke up and headed over to the State Capital Building and got to see the Governor’s Office and send a few moments with my ‘uncle’ and to say our goodbyes and exchange contact information. Then my family headed over to the State Supreme Court building to see where my father served under the Attorney General when he graduated from law school and to see some of the sites, it was nice because I am rarely up in that part of the sate and I never have time to sight see (also it beat answering the phone all day. ;)). After that we drove home and that’s pretty much it I’m afraid. It was a once in a lifetime experience that I will treasure and as soon as possible I will put up our photos so you can see some better pics than what the website shows.

Happy New Year everyone. This is my first post for the New Year and mainly its just to update some items left off of the first post. The new CSS is now up and working as well as the registration system for commenting. In an effort to control those annoying comment spam bots I am forced to make registration for commeting mandatory. The registration process only take s a few seconds and all that it really wants is your userername and email address, the rest is optional. Please see if you can get a comment withour registering and otherwise help me test it out. On another note if you are into RSS feeds this site has two that you can subscribe to and be informed on when I put up any new content so feel free to try those. And If anyone feels like checking out the Google ads or sending a pay pal donation to help me offset my bandwith and hosting costs I would really appreciate it, and now onto something completley different. Also, I have finally gotten the forum back up under phpbb. I was going to try bbpress, which is the forum developed by the wordpress teams but it is stull in a very alpha state so I will wait a bit on that, so feel free to try and break and or test anything on the site or the forum.

Now ,onto what I did for New Year’s Eve. Not anything really exciting I’m afraid, I spent 4 1/2 hours at someones house getting their PC free of viruses and spyware then I met my family at The Outback for our once a year tradition of getting toether and having a really nice and expensive meal. Then we went to see National Treasure which I really enjoyed and I think I will be purchasing the DVD when it comes out. It was a little far fetched but it did discuss the Knights Templar and the Freemasons, two groups that have always been fascinating to me so I had fun watching the movie at least. After that we came home and watched the ball drop in Times Square, I was invited to a party by a firiend but declined as I was pretty exausted from working this week but I think maybe I should have gone, oh well.

As far as everything else in my life goes I guess that I am doing pretty well in this new year so far. I have a great job that I like to go to every day and I ahve managed to start salvaging my GPA. I’m still single and not dating but they pain and whatnot of my last relationship are fading well so I am hoping to start back into the swing of casual dating some time soon. Till next time be safe and happy in 2005 everyone!