Picture taken from here

Last night I we had our community band practice moved to a church for the night.  Ironically it was the church of the girl I lived with before I was with my wife (over a decade ago).  I wish I could tell you that we broke up over a mutual disagreement where we went our own separate ways but it didn’t work out like that.   Since at one point of time she was once a huge point of my life I thought I would document her, at that point the facts will be recorded and I’ll put the past behind me.

When I was a freshmen in high school I met Kim the night of the High School Homecoming dance (back in 1990 – cripes this memory is of legal age).  I had friends in marching band (this was the year before I started playing trumpet at all) and I was hanging out with them some girl was just wandering around a circle of people crying on the shoulders of those around her.  I was one of those people, this girl was Kim.   She had just been dumped by some guy and the marching band members were taking the pity circle approach.  She started crying on me and I didn’t know who the hell she was.   Eventually she moved on to the next person.  A few weeks later she started dating my best friend, fortunately I didn’t go out with them to do anything so I saw very little of her the rest of the school year.  She popped up occasionally but for the most part she was a non issue.

Picture of me and my best friend that brought Kim into my life – bastard.

The next summer I got conned into joining marching band (ironically I didn’t play an instrument at the time) and I was there around the time my friend dumped Kim (who graduated the previous year) so he could have a shot at chasing after another girl.   Kim hung around the marching band practices like graduated seniors with nothing better to do occasionally do.  One day it was raining and I asked her for a ride home – curse her.   This started to be a regular thing, she was still upset with my friend leaving her so she would talk to me about him, and other things.   After a couple months of becoming good friends we started dating.   On a cool fall day down the road from house at her friend’s house I had my first kiss sitting on the hood of her 1991 powder blue Topaz.

I started sneaking out a lot at night to see her, I think this was the start of my 4 hours a night sleeping routine.   I had sneaking out of my house down to the science.   Sometimes I wonder which was greater, the nights I did sneak out or the nights I didn’t.   My parents were not too ecstatic with their 15 year old son dating an 18 year old.   I’ll also be kind enough to leave out details and allow you to read between the lines when it comes to intimate details.

This was also the year I started writing.  I started with poetry and found I had a knack for it.  I did the silly love letters and so did she.   I think I still have a few of them.  Almost all of my poetry is already is already on this blog but I’m sure there are some journal pages (folks that was analog blogging) I’ve left out.   I’m sure reading them today would sound very Emo-ish.  If I can find them and read through my chicken scratch hand writing I’ll put them up.

The summer that followed we spent most of our time with one another, we went to movies, to Cedar Point, and other related activities.  One thing I can remember sticking out in my mind was when we left Cedar Point because the weather was picking up.  As we were driving back there was a Tornado siting in our town.  We watched the skies carefully and made it back to her parent’s house.   We found out later that a tornado did touch down about 2 miles from us.  It was very crazy and stupid to be driving out in that.

We dated for 9-10 months and the following year in marching band I took my friends lead and dumped her.  I started dating another girl Mari.   About 3 months later that relationship didn’t work out and I left Mari.   We’ll discuss more on Mari another day.   At this point Kim was going with Nate, some guy ahead of me in school.

Mari from back when I dated her.

Well Kim and I started talking again since we had always been good friends.  On December 31st, 1992 I was having a New Years Eve party at my house (with a fair amount of people as I recall) and I get a phone call from Kim.   She wasn’t going to stop by because some of the people there didn’t like her, which was fine.  She was at her friend’s house at another party just a couple streets over.  What ever was going through her mind, because though we had been talking again off an on, she wanted me to stop over and talk for a few minutes.   So like a good friend (fool) I wander over to talk to her.   What I don’t remember if she told me was that her boyfriend Nate was there.

We were talking (and sitting on that damn Topaz again) and someone started yelling inside the house.  Out of this house busts this big guy.  All he said was “Nate wanted me to mess you up.” and I got punched in the face.  Since I was on the edge of the car he caught me in a spin and knocked me down a few feet from where I was standing. This was the second time in my life I have been punched (in a true fight and haven’t been punched since).  I think he may have gotten in a couple more shots, it’s been so long ago it’s a blur.  This guy’s girlfriend and Kim dragged him off an pulled him back into the house, Kim apologized and I wandered back home.

When I got there I was fuming, I grabbed a baseball bat from my bedroom and started back towards the front door.  Luckily from a police record stand point I was talked down by the people at my party.   Granted half the guys wanted to go over there and start something, but the girls at the party and some of the other guys cooled down the situation.  I never went over.   Since that night was one of the few times I have been punched it’s etched into my brain.

Things calmed down and Kim and I continued talking.  A few months later things didn’t work out between her and Nate and they broke up.   We dated a little bit for a few weeks, but just kind of maintained a friendship point of view.  After that we went our separate ways for awhile.   In spring of 1994 my girlfriend at the time dumped me right before prom (today we have different takes on how this went down).  Shortly after that (somehow I don’t remember) Kim and I started talking again.   Talking lead to dating.    This was the road that it always was with Kim.   Being friends and trying to keep it platonic always lead to something more.

We dated through the summer and she even went to my Mother’s wedding.  My step-father and I never really saw eye to eye, he came into the house trying to be an alpha male.  It wasn’t happening though.  We never got along though for time periods we could fake it and even be civil to one another.   Why is this relevant?  Well right after the wedding took place ( I played trumpet so I was part of the service) I guess my step father made a lot of derogatory remarks to her about her and about me.  Then and there I didn’t know this.  She told me as we were driving back to my mother’s house for a wedding reception.

I was fuming.  I arrived to the house just a couple minutes before my mother and my new step father.  I happily started a screaming match on the front lawn.  Luckily Kim was house sitting at her sister’s place for a couple of weeks I went inside and grabbed a couple changes of clothes and left for a few weeks, never even calling.  Sometime during this time frame being an young fool I asked Kim to marry me and she said yes.  I was just a couple weeks past eighteen and I was engaged.

I came home and stayed for a couple weeks before I was to leave for college.   The big day arrived and I was supposed to use my mother’s mini van to haul all my stuff an hour south to school.  Originally my mother was going to drive me down to school and Kim and my friend Tim were supposed to come and help move stuff.  My mother said she would go but my step father also had to come.   I didn’t want him there and asked if we could just take the van and Kim would bring it back afterward.  Well this escalated into a screaming match that rivaled the wedding reception just a month or so earlier.

I hadn’t been on speaking terms really with my father at this point, and there was a lot of animosity between my mother and him.  My step-father helped fuel this by mocking me and saying my father should take me down (I literally had to be at the school the next day for college marching band camp).  Time was dragging on and the fighting escalated, I ended up kicking the mini van in the front passenger side fender and leaving a huge dent that stayed there for a few years until my step father pounded it out.   For a little FYI the mini van was already packed and filled with all my stuff.    Even if I had compromised and capitulated and had him go there literally was no room for a fifth person in that van.  My mother had enough at this point and handed us the keys.

I think I cried the whole way down to college this was the second time my mother chose my step father over her child in what was an important day in his life.   We made it to school and I settled in.  We were going to do the long distance relationship.  There was a phone on campus where i used to make collect calls to her (or I had a huge roll of quarters sometimes).   When I called collect I used a fake name so her parents wouldn’t know it was me and think it was a wrong number if she didn’t answer the phone.   She came down and visited once (which looking back for a 40 minute drive really is pathetic – that’s less then one way in my daily commute).   After three of four weeks I had enough and broke it off with her.  I started dating someone at college and I called it a day.

Christmas break rolled around and I was kind of in between girlfriends at the time (another post for another time) and Kim and I managed to get back together.   We spent most the month with each other and when it came time to go back to school, I took a side trip to see my grandfather who was in the hospital.   We drove down to the Dayton area about 4 hours away and stayed at my my grandfather’s house since no one else was there.   That night Kim went to bed and I stayed up and wrote a letter to my grandmother.  The next day we headed to the hospital but stopped at my grandmother’s grave and I left the note for her there.   We went and visited my grandfather who had suffered and stroke and lost 60% of his body mass.  She was there for me and I appreciated it.

School rolled around and I reconciled with my girlfriend from the previous semester.  Now for some reason this should have been a straight break up with Kim moment.   I held off for a couple days and Kim came down to visit.   The situation was not a surprise to my college girlfriend, she knew what was happening.    I took Kim to the local mall and we walked and talked, but my college girlfriend stalked us and was obvious about following us. After getting back to the car Kim asked what it all was about, I explained and broke up with her.  She dropped me off at my dorm room and I thought then that she left.   I went up and spent time with my college girlfriend, while this was happening Kim proceeded to make out with my roommate’s best friend.  That’s the kind of rebound girl she was.

At this point you would think that the Kim college years era was over, well not quite.   I get a phone that she is pregnant and needs to talk.   I arrange it that I come home that weekend to talk to her.  Problem was college girlfriend insisted on going and I had not told her about the pregnancy.  I manage to get up north and slip away for a little bit to talk to Kim.   This leads me back home and my college girlfriend is upset.  She tells me she is pregnant (I had not told her Kim was pregnant yet).  So I’m 18 years old and I find out in less then seven days that I have two girls pregnant.  To add to the top of the tower here, college girlfriend and I break up.

A few weeks later I’m dating someone else and I find out both college girlfriend and Kim have miscarriages within a week of each other.  I don’t tell anyone and did not tell either one of them, so it’s coincidence that they both told me, and today I think they were both lying to me over the incident.   Around this time period my grandfather died and I was dealing with that also.   College progressed mostly Kim until summer rolled around.  I was not going back to school the following year, so two weeks after moving back I moved out of my mothers house and moved in with Kim who had taken over her sisters apartment.

Kim managed to get me a job at the local Speedway, which at the time was about the size of two of the cubicles I have at work now.   I enjoyed working there, I enjoyed the night shift.   One day however I got in a disagreement with the manager and just up and quit.  After that my high school friend that originally dated Kim secured me a job at a local marina.   I did that for a year paying the bills until I secured my first computer job.   All through this Kim and I stayed together.   One day a girl saw us at a restaurant and told me (a year or so later) that she felt so bad for me she wished there was something she could do for me.   I used to go out and hang out with friends until early morning hours and around this time I finally got my drivers license (I was twenty).

One night Kim went out and didn’t come home, she stayed at a friends house – a single male friends house – after a night of drinking.  from all accounts nothing happened, I don’t happen to believe that.  The reason I didn’t believe it was that my high school friend kept saying she came on to him when I wasn’t around.  I believe him, not her.  Things were getting worse and worse over the next year, I would go out more and she would do her own thing.  She criticized my friends, or say they were too young. or into the wrong things.   Though we did manage to go camping twice while we lived together.

The first time we drove to somewhere in the backwoods of Pennsylvania with her parents.  Her parents treated me even worse then she did, so for the week we were there I hated it the whole time.   It’s hard to get me to go camping as it is now (ask Xie) let alone with people I don’t really like.   The second time we went camping I took a friend with me, in the middle of the trip Kim went storming off and said she was taking off and going home leaving use 300 miles away from home with no way back.  While she was so confident and storming off to her car I told her to “Screw off, ” I then laughed at her and told her I had her keys which she asked me to hold.   My friend and I left her at the camp and went off hiking.   Things reconciled and at this point we are at July 1997.

At this point I was hanging out in a different crowd with people with which I’m still friends with some of them until this day.  There was a girl who caught my eye and I was interested in.  My friend from the camping trip and were talking and I asked him if this girl would be interested in me if I was single.   He said she probably would be (he had no clue).  This is a Tuesday night.  I went over and talked to my mother and asked her if I could move my stuff back home.  I then showed up at the apartment with at least 10 people with 3-4 vehicles and I told Kim I was moving out and the group then paraded through the apartment and had me moved out in about 20 minutes.   I told Kim I would come back and we could talk about it after I got everything unloaded.

I went back and spent the night at the apartment (nothing happened) and we talked most the night.   She borrowed 100.00 from me so she could pay rent.   The next day I asked the girl I was interested in out on a date.   Kim called me on Thursday night to see if I wanted to do something on Friday.  I told her I had a date.   The next morning there was books and items strewn across my mothers lawn.   Things that I had forgotten to take with me.   The date went off without a hitch and the girl told me that a year or so earlier she had seen me at the restaurant broken and wished she could have helped me.   This girl was Xie and I married her.

You would think this is where it ends, but there is an addendum.   Xie had recently broken up with her boyfriend.  For some reason it was in her boyfriend’s head  and Kim’s head that we mutually dumped both of them to be together.  It was a matter of circumstance, but to them they felt the logical thing was to date each other.   Xie and I laughed and let them be on there way.  Kim degenerated more and more, she slept around a lot, somehow everyone thought I wanted to here and know about the stories so they filtered in.  After trying to make me jealous didn’t work she dated a couple people and then one day a couple years later I get a note on the windshield of my car outside the apartment Xie and I had.   It said she missed me and really jsut wanted to be friends.   Well we’ve seen how being friends worked out in the past, I never called her.

I did have to deal with her for a few years at the High School Alumni Band every year, but I guess while I was in Oregon she got in a big huff with someone and said she was never coming back.   Yay me!  That was a treat to hear when I came back.  Other news that passed through the grape vine while I was in Oregon was that she worked as a lunch lady for a little bit, my sisters told me they saw her working at the school.  She was married, but the marriage only lasted a few months.   Now it seems that I hear that she is single and can’t find anyone that wants to settle down with her (I don’t blame them).

The last year we were together she was working for my father, and still worked for him a little ways after the break up.   She borrowed 100.00 dollars from him and never paid it back.   So she owes him and I each 100.00 dollars, it’s definitely worth eating the loss to have to not deal with her again.

The last couple years she has been at the sidelines with Tim who helped me move to college all those years ago (as friends they always have been) during the Vermilion Woolybear Festival while the whole band is on the float.  She kept her head down, pulled a hood over her head and wore sunglasses, but it was her.   I think she was hiding from teh band in general then just me since Tim looked shocked my first year back from Oregon seeing me on the float so I’m sure she had no idea I was up there before hand.

I started this off by saying I had practice in her old church.  While on break I wandered around a little bit and saw a K Pearce in the member mail box area with a pamphlet in it.  I then found a board that had pictures of all the members and who they were.  There was her picture.  She looks a good 10 years old then she she should and who knows if the picture is recent.  I thought for a minute to put my initials in an art style she would recognize as knowing where they came from on the pamphlet in her mail box.   I thought about putting my email address, or just typing in “Google Creeva”.  I then realized I might find it funny or humorous at that moment, but it wasn’t worth it.   The humor did not out weigh the pain of maybe actually having to hear from her or deal with her in any way.

If you know her and see her, you can happily tell her about this.   I’m happily married and in January it will be my tenth wedding anniversary.   I’ve managed to sum up most the highlights in the relationship in a few paragraphs.  If she wants to meet in public and talk about them I’ll be happy to…….as long as she has the 200.00 she owes me and my father.  I’ll give her time to finish a coffee at the very least.   I’d even bring the coffee, all conditional on the back debt being paid.   Otherwise I just look at the life she has, where she has gone, and what she has brought upon herself.  Do you know what I do when I do that?  I laugh.

]]> http://creeva.com/2008/06/20/my-ex-girlfriend-looks-ancient/feed/ 7 http://creeva.com/2008/06/10/the-crossposting-god-series-part-7-where-can-you-post-by-e-mail/ http://creeva.com/2008/06/10/the-crossposting-god-series-part-7-where-can-you-post-by-e-mail/#comments Tue, 10 Jun 2008 21:48:07 +0000 Creeva http://creeva.com/?p=2831

Image from here

Where can you post by E-mail?  Well this is the easiest of crossposting methods (especially if you use Blogger).  There are lots of plugins for wordpress or movable type that can send out your full post as an e-mail to another address.   In most cases you would send this to your own e-mail address so you had it for reference.  What about sending it to another site entirely?  What if that site could send it to another site?  You can see how this chain can work.   If you are using Blogger then you can send out your post to ten e-mail addresses.   This means that your post can replicate like bunnies.   What are some of the sites that can receive e-mail posts?  Let’s get into that.

The original Creeva’s World was hosted on Blogger at creeva.blogspot.com.  This is where I started writing and I didn’t want to abandon it after migrating over to wordpress.  This was the very first site I crossposted to from my wordpress blog.  Crossposting allowed me to not abandon my site and any readers that may go to that address, but I could enhance my own experience while keeping theirs the same.

Lifelogger is the “cooler” blogging service, at least that’s what they say.   I’m not going to use any blogging platform again that I can’t customize to the fullest extent.  WordPress has spoiled me.   Though I do maintain a site there.

Unlike some major social networks (I’m looking at you Facebook and Myspace), Friendster does support e-mailing in your blog messages.

Blogr is just another blogging host that accepts e-mail.  Very blogger like, but crossposting friendly.

Evernote is unique unlock some of the rest of these sites, Evernote is a notebook service.   It allows you to e-mail in snippets (or use the desktop applications) to send in information that you can then share with your friends.  You can e-mail in text notes, audio, or video.

Busy Thumbs is a simple moblog site that accepts posts via e-mail.

Twine is similar to Evernote, but it’s about collections and community.   Think of it as sharing what you have with your friends.

Google Groups is a spot that I used to use as an online backup for my blog.   I have a private google group that only handles my own blog posts.   No you can’t join, not like you would want to.

I’ve just recently start crossposting to an old Yahoo Group that I used to moderate.   Mostly this is because I can share my thoughts with my friends that are still in that group, but that group is essentially dead.   So this is the only thing that it’s around for to keep me from pulling the complete axe on it.

Each Day is designed to handle your memories and save them so you can go back over your life.  It handles multiple media formats but all I’m concerned about is the e-mail option.

Multiply is a social network in the same vein as Friendster, Myspace, and Facebook.

Over at Vox I maintain a page to integrate with their community.  I’ve posted in the past how vox is a unique community and because of that I receive unique feedback.   They refer to their e-mail inbound service as moblogging.

I like to think of all of my blog posts as separate documents.   After working on this for awhile, I decided to start e-mailing all of my entries to my google docs account let’s me to search and repurpose documents a little easier then searching through the blog.   It’s my dump all account for documents.  I am annoyed that I can’t e-mail blog posts to Zoho Writer for redundancy, they only take documents as attachments.

When you are looking for a new site to crosspost to check and see if they have an option where you can post by e-mail.  Some sites may refer to this as moblogging.  Also remember to e-mail your post to yourself so you have a backup you can control.

Oh, I use the DJ E-Mail Publish plugin to push out posts from WordPress.

In the next part of our crossposting god series we are going to cover Blogger more in depth.

Previous Entries in The Crossposting God Series:

The Crossposting God Series Part 1 – The Introduction

The Crossposting God Series Part 2 – Vox

The Crossposting God Series Part 3 – Live Journal and Derivative Sites

The Crossposting God Series Part 4 – Entry, Distribution, and End Points

The Crossposting God Series Part 5 – Myspace

The Crossposting God Series Part 6 – RSS Feeds to Crosspost

I think I finally got to the point that statcounter is completely useless for me.   Now I’m rolling thruogh the max log size of page views faster then I can actually read them.  If I don’t read them they are lost forever.  I’m too much of a cheapskate to actually pay for their service (maybe if I actually made money at this I would consider it.

Checking stats mutiple times a day to actually get the data you want to read isn’t very efficient.   I will say compared to google analytics or wordpress.com‘s stat plugin that statcounter’s only really shining feature was the recent page load activity.   If either of the other services I used actually used that it would be alot easier to dump.   Regardless I think I’m leaving Statcounter by the end of the month.

I’ll miss you Statcounter, you just can’t grow with me.

I was randomly thinking about my past the other day and teenage mutant ninja turtles popped into my head while driving.   Out loud I said (quite loudly out loud) I can believe my mom is so freaking stupid.   My wife turns to me and asks what the hell I’m talking about.  (She won’t argue that my mother sometimes lacks common sense and because of this her intelligence is somehow in question).  I told her a story of something that happened 18-20 years ago.

My whole family was driving back from my Grandparents in Greenville, OH.   I enjoyed the TMNT cartoon, but my brother was the action figure collector of them.  (BTW shout out to my favorite turtle Donatello).   I being a normal pre-teen was trying to argue the possibilities of mutant ninja turtles existing (the way lots of pre-teens argue and defend things even when they don’t know the whole facts).   My father explained that it wouldnt work at couldn’t happen.   My mother trying to talk about sex gracefully in front of her 4 children (the oldest myself)  asked my father what if “a lonely guy and a turtle..” My father cut her off right there and gave her the “If you are truly that stupid how do you manage to breathe look”.

He then went into a basic biology 101 talk about how species had to be compatible to reproduce.   This unfortuantely I think shut me down and my mutant turtle theories.   That is until mutagen is truly dumped into the sewers, then we’ll see who is right on the ninja turtle arguement.

But, needless to say a woman who was in her 30′s or just about, thought the humans and turtles could not only be sexually compatible (wouldn’t the guy actually have to get busy over the turtle eggs?), but they would also have viable offspring similar to ninja turtles.    I must receive all my intelligence from my father, or my Mother must have got a skip year on her side’s intelligence gene.

This was the same woman who at one time was talking about getting money from her parents (they deny it) to pay off the house when she was going through marital troubles.  She had a grand plan living off of child support and possibly alimony.   Now for those that don’t know child support was non taxable and she had lived that way for a couple years when I was a teenager.    Her theory was if she got the money she would put it in the bank so she could deduct her mortgage payments and get a tax refund back.   I think that even after an hour of my explaining to her that she had to have taxable income and pay taxes to qualify for a refund at all, and if you haven’t paid any you weren’t going to get money back from the government just because you have a deduction.

If only my father was an idiot, I could say I was the milk man’s kid.    When it’s my mother, I have to hope I’m my father’s illegitimate child with a nuclear researcher that died in a radioactive experiment after I was born, and he met my mother and they adopted me.

Nuclear researcher….hmmm…I brought it full circle, I wonder if I have any turtle DNA in me.

One thing I’ve been working on for awhile is and Internet Deadman’s Switch.  With all of my crossposting and media re-usage activities in the grand scheme this should be fairly trivial.   I am sure however that some things will slip me up.   We’ll start in this section of identifying the goals I wish to acomplish and work through some of the stages in part two.

What do I mean by Deadman’s Switch?

A deadman’s switch is something that is triggered normally to keep you alive.   A quick example is the pressure plate on a riding lawn mower.   The pressure plate must have weight on it or the lawn more will not start and if the weight is removed the lawn mower will shut off.  So essentially one action cause another action to occur when certain variables are met.   My trigger would be my death.  If I didn’t verify if I was alive after a certain period of time to a program/website/etc.  the a serious of scripts and actions would trigger leaving behind all the information I wish to impart on those behind me.

Why do I want a Deadman’s Switch?

This idea started in my head about 7-8 years.   There used to be a website that had you check in once a month and if you didn’t log in it will send off emails to the ones you care about (or the ones you don’t).   This gives you the final word and allows you to send of those things that might be important.   I can leave my wife information about all my accounts and password, any relevant information that she may need and won’t be able to gather up, parting words to friends and families.   I would also thanks to my current setup be able to post to all my social networks and make an announcement of my death.   This I find intriguing and I’ll at least go through all the steps of implementing this (whether I actually use it and maintain it will remain to be seen).

What would I send?

I’ve broken down what I would want to send into four sections:

• My wife – I can deliver my final message, copies of important documents, access to all of my accounts and any other relevant information she needs
• My family – I would send each family member a personal message from the beyond – I also would send them a follow up to do with my wife in case something happened to her at the same time, that way there would still be someone i could trust that would have access to the information they may need to clean up my estate.
• Friends – I would send each of my “high level” friends an individual message – if somehow my whole family is taken out in one full attack – I don’t think I’m passing any of my personal information off to them.
• Public Internet at Large – this is broken into a few more sections, but essentially I’ll be leaving a video, audio postings, status updates to my social networks (“I’m dead thanks for all the fish”)), and a few final blog postings.

The trick to all of this is of course is reliant on a few things.   The first and foremost being that I can send email after I’m dead.   It also can not be reliant on my home PC (if a housefire hits or a tornado takes me out I don’t want my home to be the weakest link).   Finally whatever script I use must be able to pull from an FTP site (for the audio and video).    Once those can be accompished I’m fairly sure I can get everything else done.

When would I send it?

This is the other conundrum isn’t it?  How do you net tell everyone you have passed on while you are still alive (that could be embarrassing).    You need to pick a time period that seems suitable to you (every 12 hours is not suitable).  I’m thinking either every two weeks or every month I would have to login and verify that yes I am still alive and kicking.  The only problem this would really cause is if I’m kidnapped or held hostage.   The chances of those being so minimal that it is unlikely so I won’t really take those into account.   So to be safe I’ll set it for somewhere between 14 and 31 days.

Another thing I would like to do is configure it to be staggered.  That way I’ll be able to send a message to my wife warning her about the upcoming announcement of what is going to occur before it actually does.  Then to family, then to friends, and finally to the Internet as a whole.   This would keep it from being one big whirlwind hitting everyone at once like a ton of bricks.   I don’t want someone completely freaked out when they see a new youtube movie of my me uploaded.    So a staggered release would be the best scenario (if it’s possible).

How am I going to do this?

You’ll just have to wait for part 2.

I will first start off a couple disclaimers. I don’t do this at work, I don’t need to. I respect my corporate policies and completely recognize why they are there. This being a mental exercise that stemmed out of a misconception on how our local firewall works. I love the mental exercises on how I would do something and then drop it since I’ve essentially completed my goal and do not need to test it. If however you do feel the need to test this at your school or work I take no responsibilty for your actions. You are on your own and responsible for your own actions.

I’m also too lazy to give explicit step by step instructions on setting

Step 1.

You have two choices you need to decide on depending on your capabilities, either setting up your home computer to proxy for you while your at work or buying a cheap hosted website online. It all depends on if your ISP allows you to get to your home machine or if they block it. (Yes with a hosted it will cost you money but the link I gave you gives you your first domain for free). I would use a hosted solution personally.
Step 2.

At this point I hope you have decided on which solution you are going to go with. Essentially the steps are going to be the same either way, configuration is on your head though. You are going to setup your web server to allow you to connect to it via SSL. This allows your communication to what your network administrator to see as a random web host to be encrypted. This means they will not be able to look inside the packets. The steps depending on operating system and web server capabilities is different in each scenario, so please Google to find how to setup an HTTPS web server for your desired operating system/hosting capabilities. You may need to setup a dynamic dns solution to get back to your home PC if you choose that route.

Step 3.

At this point you should have nice web setup that you can login into via SSL. What to host on the site? You need a site that can go out and fetch pages for you acting as a proxy within the web browser. Their are multiple solutions for this, and this is really is another step I’m not going to walk you through. This is the point where you are committed and going to violate corporate or school policy. If someone wants to right directions for it in the comments I won’t censor them, I’m just not going to be the one that explicitly tells you.

Step 4.

If you can figure it out now what you have is a random SSL that you can use to browse anything your network administrator doesn’t want you to. Sure you could have just used Google’s Cache, but then filtering software still could get contextual information about what your surfing based upon the words in the HTML code. This allows you encrypted anonymity.

What if the network administrator blocks access to my SSL site?

Well this shouldn’t happen unless you share the site with people. If you want your own private surfing enjoyment I would suggest keeping it to yourself. If however you kept it to yourself and you still get blocked there are a couple options to check.

Can you still get anywhere or has your Internet Access been removed?

If your Internet access has been removed do not pass go, do not collect 200.00, within the scope of this article I can’t help you.

Is it blocked by DNS name?

If it’s blocked by DNS name meaning that it’s checking to see if your going to www.bobssecretsslsite.com then you will have to use a new domain name with your hosting provider or a new dynamic DNS name. Yes this might cost you 6.95 (look for coupons through GoDaddy or another cheap hosting registrar, but you really want the Internet your way unfiltered right? If not why are you still reading this, commitment and freedom are not free.

Is it blocked by IP Address?

Well if it is your almost screwed, you need to either get another hosting provider or hope your home computer (if you using that approach) has a random DHCP that will reset when you power cycle your modem.

What if you looks at my Internet Cache?

This is really how they will catch you. There are a few choices you can do. The first is set your browser to clear your Internet Cache every time you log out. This will leave behind file traces if they use undelete utilities on you, but these steps is for the overly paranoid. If you are worried the your network administrator is browsing your temporary Internet Files looking for porn.jpg or some such you have two solutions. The first is using a USB drive and firefox portable installed on that USB drive. This allows you to take your browser whenever you leave your desk.

If your company has a policy banned USB device and you don’t want to break a second policy on top of the one you have already broken, download truecrypt. Follow truecrypt’s step on setting up an encrypted partition. Install firefox portable into the encrypted partition. Now your whole browsing history is saved into an encrypted partition that only you have the password to decrypt.

For bonus points use a combination of truecrypt and the USB key. Encrypted data you can take with you that allows you access to your own web site that can allow you access past any web filtering software.

Warning

Your images are still theoretically stored in your computers memory so , if you computer generates a memory dump you could still get caught.  Also some companies track the flow of information across their networks, theoretically this type of software can also see what you have in memory.  These are the only real flaws I find in this scenario.

Bonus Round

For bonus points on annoying your network administrator who is overly happy about his web filtering solution. Create a new igoogle theme with a bit flesh you crop from a picture you have of someone’s arm and name it porn.job. Have this has the background in your igoogle theme. Double bonus points for making two more jpg’s, one for each corner of your igoogle them. A picture of Richard Nixon named d-ck.jpg and a picture of your cat name p-ssy.jpg. You’ll set of his filtering software everytime you go to google.

Have fun.

P.S.

If this sounds too geeky, too techinical, too complex, or pain in the butt……..then you don’t deserve this solution.

You don’t know how to go about it and you need to implement it now?

I have a solution for you and best of all it’s free. This solution however is not supported by me, there will be no bug fixes by me, and any damages you cause to your own servers is your own fault. That is my one sentence disclaimer to tell you that you truly are on your own.

For this solution or temporary fix (depending on your organization) you are going to need the following helper programs:

Info-zip – we’ll use this to compress down files and save space specifically we need the zip.exe file

MD5SUMS – this allows us to generate MD5 checksums to verify if any file tampering has taken place after the fact. Specifically we need the md5sums.exe file.

Dump Event Log (Dumpel.exe) – this is a tool offered by Microsoft to dump your event logs to a text file. Though this link is part of the Windows 2000 Resource Kit I have tested and it does work with the Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 log files.

We take these 3 programs and wrap them to work together via a batch file. All 3 of these programs MUST be in the same directory as the batch file for it to work as designed. Here is the batch file:

@echo off
REM Sets date variables for file name
for /F “tokens=1,2″ %%d in (‘date /T’) do set day=%%d & set date=%%e
set yyyy=%DATE:~6,4%
set dd=%DATE:~3,2%
set mm=%DATE:~0,2%
set startDate=%yyyy%-%mm%-%dd%
REM Adds Computer to prefix the date
set outputname=%computername%-%startdate%
REM Cleans out previous zip files from a bad run
del %outputname%.zip
REM Dumps each of the log files going back for 2 days
REM allowing for overlaps we may miss due to time changes
dumpel -f %outputname%.sec -l security -d 2
dumpel -f %outputname%.app -l application -d 2
dumpel -f %outputname%.sys -l system -d 2
REM creates an MD5 hash for verification checking
md5sums %outputname%.sec >%outputname%.md5
md5sums %outputname%.app >>%outputname%.md5
md5sums %outputname%.sys >>%outputname%.md5
REM Compresses the 4 files
zip %outputname%.zip %outputname%.*
REM Cleans up the unneeded files to save
del %outputname%.sec
del %outputname%.app
del %outputname%.sys
del %outputname%.md5

I’ve included my comments in the batch file – but let’s go through it a section at a time so you can fully understand it.

@echo off

If you don’t know @echo off supresses everything from your screen in a batch, I wouldn’t suggest modifying my script since this is batch file programming 101.

for /F “tokens=1,2″ %%d in (‘date /T’) do set day=%%d & set date=%%e
set yyyy=%DATE:~6,4%
set dd=%DATE:~3,2%
set mm=%DATE:~0,2%
set startDate=%yyyy%-%mm%-%dd%
REM Adds Computer to prefix the date
set outputname=%computername%-%startdate%

This section adds the prefix to the files we are going to be using on all of your files – these allows us to work with files that include the computer’s name you are running this on and the date on which it was run.

del %outputname%.zip

This verify actually cleans up the zip file if this script has already been run during the current day. Mine is modified to delete the zip file completely since at the end of my script I move my files to a remote location and don’t need archived logs filling up my hard drive quickly.

dumpel -f %outputname%.sec -l security -d 2
dumpel -f %outputname%.app -l application -d 2
dumpel -f %outputname%.sys -l system -d 2

This area does the physical dumping of the logfile. Dumpel is the command. The -f switch allows us to specify a file name. If you notice I used the %outputname% as the first part of the file with the file type of which log file it is as the suffix. The -l switch let’s us specify which logfile we are dumping from the event log (security, application, or system). the -d switch allows us to specify how many days we wish to save. I chose 2 days to allow some overlap on the log files which is good for security reasons since we shouldn’t miss any events if you change the time of the day the script is run. It also give us two more logfiles to verify the authenticity of the log data we are looking at.

When this section is done running you should have three files. If your computer’s name was BOB-SERVER and the date you ran this was one January 3, 2007 the file names would read like this; BOB-SERVER-2007-01-03.sec for your security log, BOB-SERVER-2007-01-03.app for your application log, and BOB-SERVER-2007-01-03.sys for your system log.

md5sums %outputname%.sec >%outputname%.md5
md5sums %outputname%.app >>%outputname%.md5
md5sums %outputname%.sys >>%outputname%.md5

This section generates an MD5 Hash of the logfile data allows you to see if the data was tampered from when it was originally generated. It is next to impossible to edit a file and maintain the same hash data. This allows you some security that your log files are authentic. For those wondering “well can’t I just rerun the md5 program and generate a new hash and save that after modification?” – I have your answer. I didn’t include how to store these files after they are generated and we will touch upon that question under “What do you do now?” at the bottom. The command outputs your three BOB-SERVER-2007-01-03 files and output it to a single BOB-SERVER-2007-01-03.md5 file that includes a section with each of the above files. I decided personally that I didn’t need an md5 file for each of them – feel free to modify this if your needs differ.

zip %outputname%.zip %outputname%.*

This compresses the dumped events logs down to a manageable size. I managed to get a 60 MB log file that I generated during varying testing phases down to just over 6 MB. I also manged to get 480 KB of log files down to 14kb. At this point you should have a BOB-SERVER-2007-01-03.zip file which includes your three event logs and you md5 file.

del %outputname%.sec
del %outputname%.app
del %outputname%.sys
del %outputname%.md5

This section cleans up the files outside of the zip. I manage t0 get these files down 90% in size I don’t need these to eat up extra space.

What do you do now?

From here I would add in a line at the end to move the logs to another server where you can store them for length your organization deems necessary. To help combat the MD5 re-engineering I mentioned above I would copy the compressed archived to two locations on your network. This will help make having an MD5 meaningful. Another option is adding a script that e-mails you the MD5 hash so you have it saved for reference. Having the MD5 and collecting 2 days of information from the logs and would mean an attacker may have to edit 2-4 archives and regenerate md5′s for them – double that if you store a second set of archives in another location.
While this may fulfill your needs for log file capturing and an easy way to store them, it does not address the fact of easy log file auditing and tracking down events. There are all in one solutions out there for you to use and I don’t say in any terms this a solution to those. You need to address your own needs and decide what works for you. This is to give you sometime until your decide what you are going to do.

Life Caching:

Life caching is setting up sites that you have complete control over to save data from sites that you only have varied levels of control. Getting all of your meta data in one place. Saving each detail of data in it’s place so it’s saved, used, and recyclable. Life caching is the next stage as the Data Portability Group moves forward. This is not the goal of the Data Portability Group – it is just what their goal enable you to do. The work however is burdened on to you and I can say there is no easy way to do this and some data leakage and loss will always slip through cracks, at least in this stage of the game.

Isn’t this what Life Streaming Accomplishes? How is Life Caching different?

Life Streaming is the step before life caching. While the concepts share alot of overlapping the simplest scenario is that a life stream is a picture in time that does not save your data. A life stream is ephemeral and actual current implementations are very fragile. I have a life stream here. RSS feeds expire so data is lost, companies go out of business so the links it points to is gone, or data just gets missed. But to truly get a better picture of life streaming here is what the life streaming blog says about it:

What is a Lifestream? In it’s simplest form it’s a chronological aggregated view of your life activities both online and offline. It is only limited by the content and sources that you use to define it. Mine is available here. Most people that create them choose a few sources based on sites that track our activities such as Del.icio.us (bookmarking), Last.fm (Music we listen to), Flickr (photos we take) etc…Then you can either find software to host your own, or find sites that provide a platform for you.

Many people have been writing about Lifestreams and the potential value they offer for ourselves and others. Some of those people are Jeff Croft, Jeremy Keith, and Emily Chang. It appears to be a concept that is gaining quite a bit of steam.

I was inspired to create a blog for the Lifestream concept after doing a little research which I wrote about on my blog. Most of the information I found was pretty scattered and there wasn’t a central repository of resources so I thought I should create one. I feel that beyond the self expression of allowing people to track their actions in a passive manner there will be many more exciting technologies that will surface from the backend data aggregation that can occur from people supplying this information.

The rub is that 99% of life streams only save the links of the RSS feeds and do not save the actual data. This is inefficient in design because like I said before data get’s lost for various reasons. Life caching however has the prime goal of saving that individual data for your use and your manipulation. This gives you freedom to do with what you want. Take your data anywhere and everywhere, do with it what you will.

How is this different from the Data Portability Group?

In some aspects, like the concepts of life streaming, life caching shares a few steps in common with the Data Portability Group. What the Data Portability Group means to give is methods and standards that give you tools to do with your data what you will. However, this doesn’t actually mean you will do anything with it or that there will be a standard out of the box configuration for you. The responsibility is on you to act and use these tools that will hopefully emerge.

The Data Portability Group is key for this going forward and allowing you to withdraw your data from the sites that were previously walled gardens. After the garden gates are finally thrown open you have the freedom to do with the data what you will. Please put this power to good use.

Why Do I care?

You should care because this is about you. It is who you are. It does not specifically define you in any ways and most people would understand that it’s a complete picture of you. There are however aspects of you that you may want to share at a later date. The stories your grandmother told you will get fuzzier over time. Hopefully the idea of life caching which is still in it’s infancy will lead to life story archives that the generations after us can learn from. Our grandkids will be able ot mine the data and read the stories you want to pass on.

Will those after you care that you listened to Fallout Boy on June 7th, 2008? Maybe not, but maybe your grandkids will discover similar music tastes with you. It will give them an understanding of who you are. It will also give them ways to identify with you in a way that you could never identify with the pilgrims that came across on the mayflower.

What do I save?

The ideal answer is everything. I would say between the RSS streams I save and the email I collect I am almost up to a 90% efficiency of collecting my personal data online.

To give you an example:

• I save everything I dig.
• I write places I go and stories about them in 43 places
• I write about things I’ve done at 43 things
• I save stories about people I’ve met at 43 people
• I save all the music I listen to that can be tracked with last.fm
• I track all boks I read and movies I watch with with allconsuming
• I save comments I make with cocomments
• I save when and what pictures I’ve uploaded to Flickr, Photobucket, and Picasa
• I save collections of data that I find meaning full with lists of best
• I save the bookmarks I make in del.icio.us
• I save the stories I’ve stumbled upon
• I save the things I’ve shared in google reader
• I save my newsvine articles
• I save my pownces and my tweets
• I save the stories I liked at reddit
• I save the videos I liked an/or uploaded to youtube

This may seem like a lot of data. It is, but it’s also what we deal with in a normal consuming internet fashion. I don’t use the tools that save which applications I’m running and I’m looking for something like last.fm for movies so it’s more automatic – but that will come in time.

Via e-mail I save my phone calls, my bills, banking history- all this can be stored offline and databased in the home. Your own personal Google for yourself should be the end goal of life caching.

Doesn’t this make it easier for companies to mine data about me?

Yes the google monster is omnipotent. Anything you share online can be snagged up and archived away by google. Is this a good thing? Maybe or maybe not. There is no reason you would need to make most of this data public. You could set up to store this data in email archives, private data sites, or personal home encrypted databases. Life caching is not about displaying your life. It’s about having control over it and saving it for a future date.

As the Data Portability Group expands they hope to implement permission controls for the data. This will help prevent against data mining to some extent. The only true answer is that if there are things that you don’t want anyone to know about do not place them anywhere that is publicly accessible or in the hands of any company or person other then yourself.

How do I store and backup the data?

There are many ways. I use WordPress with a variety of plugins to maintain all my data on the site. I also use quite a bit of feedburner kung-fu and gmail filters. The key thing is that I can extract this data into other formats from just those two methods. I could dump it into a personal database or wiki. The tools are only at the beginning of stages to make this useful for you. It is easier to back it up before you lose it then to want it after it is gone.

What Can’t I backup?

In an ideal world there is nothing that you can’t backup. We don’t however live in an ideal world. Mostly the limitations deal with which sites give you some form of access to your data. Some don’t allow you to take friend’s list with you. Other sites don’t allow you to get posts out unless you implement site scraping which could break the terms of service you agreed to.

The limitation is in the tools and the agreements and the Data Portability Group is helping lead the future in developments that will allow you greater access to your own data.

How do you share with your friends?

Beyond having a public blog which your friends may or may not visit there are multiple ways. I have two major RSS feeds coming out my website. The public RSS feed gives everyone a filtered feed of my posts. This way they don’t get spammed with every song I listen to on last.fm or every single story I digg when it happens. This RSS feed then goes and notifies my twitter friends that I’ve posted something new that I find relevant. It also goes out and feeds the stories to tumblr, jaiku, and facebook. It is also the feed that my RSS readers get.

The secondary feed goes to feedburner and gives me a post to email option. This allows me to save via an email archive all of my daily posts so they are searchable through gmail for myself. Users could subscribe to this feed if they asked me, it’s just the amount of data can sometimes be overwhelming and I’ve had a few complaints from a couple of twitter friends.

From my wordpress blog I post to other blog sites. For example when I finish and publish this post it will also be posted at my msn spaces accounts, my old blog at blogspot, vox, xanga, myspace, livejournal, and dandelife. So no matter where you have friended me you can get notifications that I’ve published and posted something.

Finally in some of the message boards I use my signature contains a java script that rotates my 5 newest stories so people can read the headlines and click if they find it interesting.

Do you truly think that this is the future?

Yes, your data is you and part of you is also your data. Hopefully the stories we wish to pass down can be archived, saved, and cached for all to read and consume for generations to come.

Final Notes:

I hope this explanation is relevant for you and that you have interesting in preserving your own data. Each of the links in this article will help you with different aspects of your design. If you have further questions or need some details expanded please leave a comment or contact me so we can hash out ideas and clarify them.

For those heavily interested I would recommend posting and devising ways that you can cache your online and offline life. Work with the Data Portability Group on tools to make this work. The most important thing is to only deal with companies that allow you to do with your data what you want and place it where you need it. Thank and support the companies that do.

During the import they show up as categories – which for some weird reason of my own bothers me – so the tags that existed before will show up again as tags after the migration.

As for the current site -

RSS feed will be redirected so RSS users will lose nothing in the migration (cross fingers)

The DNS is being updated so people manually going to the site won’t have any issues.

The current blog on blogger will revert to creeva.blogspot.com which it was originally so the site is not being deleted – but this will screw up most of my google search results. This is a price I should pay now instead of after another year of links being aggregated to this blog.

I’m hoping to implement some new features – one would be to pull in RSS links of what I do manually instead of the messy web wandering dumps I do now. So when I digg a story it will hit the blog as a post instead of being saved up throughout the day. The people that read the site via RSS already get these notifications. I’m just going to have the website flow the same way that the RSS feed does currently.

The one thing I’ve struggled with the most if the theme. It seems some of the features I have on blogger I lose – since there is no easy way to do categories on the top bar that I have found. I may implement them in the future when I figure out wordpress’s method of doing it. Until then however I’m going to take this chance to have a new theme and see how that works out for me.

Wish me luck – I’ll post more on this if I run into any issues other then themes as they come up.