I drove about 370 miles of the trip. That is by far the most I have ever driven in a day. In fact, it probably even beats the most miles I have ever driven in a single week.

He is doing very well developmental wise. In fact, I sometimes think he may be advanced for his age, but I’m not fully sure of the developmental stages of babies either. Kaleb is really the first baby I have watched grow up, and even spent time and played with. So we are learning this whole growing up/developmental thing together.

Unfortunately since my sister and her husband Keith moved out we only get to really see Kaleb on the weekends, but we really enjoy the time we do get. The one cool thing about really only seeing him every weekend is to notice the changes he makes in just a week.

He literally has a new “trick” for us every week. The past couple of weeks he has discovered his voice (big time). He loves to scream, and make any noise he finds himself capable of. In fact, the other day he started to make a choking type noise that scared me half to death when I was watching him. Turns out, that is just one of his new “voices”.

He can now pretty much hold his own bottle and has even started eating solid baby food occasionally. He also loves to take sips of water out of my dad’s (his Grandpa) water cup.

I also think he is really close to learning to be mobile. He is capable of rolling over and has even pulled himself short distances across the floor for us a few times. Of course, by short distances I’m only talking like a foot, but that’s good enough for me! I am really looking forward to when he can crawl around. Hopefully that will be within the next few months.

He has also grown a huge interest in his surroundings. He actually watches our dogs move around now and reaches out for them sometimes. He watches TV, and absolutely loves to watch cars, especially semis, go down the road in front of our house.

His eye-hand coordination is excellent. He plays with toys, reaches for and grabs them himself, and has a good ole time entertaining himself with his toys. Of course, his best skill in this area is getting those things that his hands find into his mouth.

Laughing is the other big improvement over the last few weeks. He now will laugh at almost any silly thing we do. My mom (Grandma) loves to make faces and noises at him and Kaleb will just laugh away. Its very cute to watch.

I’ll wrap this up with a couple new pictures of Kaleb. These both were taken by my sister-in-law Kelly (Aunt Kelly to Kaleb) while he was at their house. They are lucky enough to have him almost daily for baby-sitting duties.

As for graduation, I guess that isn’t until June 12th. So I guess I have three weeks between my final class and my graduation date. Not as bad as my high school one though, which was like 6-months between my last class and the graduation due to me finishing high school early.

For the past few months my mouse has not been registering left clicks correctly. This made it very hard to use my computer. I really love my mouse though and didn’t really have the money to replace it. Well, today I decided to open her up to see if I could find the problem myself.

I actually was able to discover the problem. The plastic on the bottom of the button that presses the internal button to register the click, was partially warn down. There was basically a small gap in the plastic from where too much pressing had worn the plastic that normally pressed the button away.

To fix it I determined I had to fill in this gap with something. My first thought was super glue, but ours was all dried up. I searched the house for anything that might work. After looking through my mom’s desk, I discovered finger nail polish and thought that might work.

I applied a small dab of polish to the small gap on the mouse’s button and waited for it to dry (with the help of blowing some compress air on it).

To my surprise, at least to this point, my mouse now works perfect!!! I have given it a good 2-3 hours of use so far and it is still holding up. I kind of expect it wear away after a while, in which I might have to reapply some more polish to fix it again. Of course, eventually I will probably just invest in a new mouse.

Who would have thought finger nail polish would serve useful for fixing computer hardware?

There might still be a few bugs throughout the site I have to work out, if there is, I’ll be fixing them quickly.

I have this move setup in such a way though that most viewers will never see any downtime at all.  My hope is that no one even notices any changes, besides the faster loading speeds of my site.

I will post again once this process is complete.

This pastebin is open to all to post to, however if anyone submits anything that is vulgar, rude, any way offensive, or spamming, I will delete it.

In the mean time, here is an excellent song that I think suits all Cubs fan extremely well. Go Cubbies!!!

Waiting for a Miracle

“Waiting For a Miracle” by Mark Erelli; Written by Bruce Cockburn.

I watched the new movie The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas last night.  This was a very emotional movie with an almost unbelievable ending.  If you are unaware of the ending of this movie, it will be one that you would have never expected.  Unfortunately it shows the reality of the holocaust.

I encourage everyone to take time to watch this movie.  This is probably one of the best movies that could be shown in school on the issue also.  Unlike other movies, this movie has the ability to personalize it to you, make you feel guilty (even though you aren’t), and bring the reality of the issue into your life.

How could humanity be so cruel?  That is what I was asking myself.

In the end of the movie I was left with many mixed emotions.  I had a feeling of of sadness, guilt, a little joy for a little bit of revenge, but sadness for that revenge at the same time, and most of all I felt sickened.  Sickened by the fact that most of what the movie showed actually took place.  Although the main plot may have not been real, it easily could have happened (and we really have no way of knowing it didn’t).  It shows us that our bad deeds can come back to haunt us, and even affect us in ways we never could imagine.

Again, I urge you to watch the movie.  After watching it, you should also encourage others to do so also.

Here is an updated picture of him.  This is, in my opinion, the cutest one we have thus far.  It is also, I think, the first one that shows him smiling.

Click here to see more pictures

This will not however affect the way people can contact me by email. This is a completely transparent switch that just works better for me.

Anyone else interested in having their email through Gmail with their own domain can check out http://gmail.com/a/

Apparently Kaleb has a respiratory infection that is sometimes making it hard for him to breathe. He is getting better, but probably wont be allowed to go home until tomorrow or Saturday at the earliest.

We suspect, although can’t confirm, that we got sick from food poisoning from eating Papa John’s pizza. One thing for sure, we probably wont be eating there again. Or at least not anytime soon.

Just kind of odd for us all to fall sick like that so quickly. Luckily, it didn’t seem to affect any of us for much more than a day. I have only been sick for about 12 hours now and already am starting to feel better. I threw up three times, which is probably more than I have thrown up in the last 5 years. I tend to get sick easily, but I almost never actually get to the point that I throw up.

The good news is, so far, Kaleb (my sisters new baby) has not got sick. Of course, he didn’t eat the Pizza either.

The mobile version also does not contain any graphical enhancements like the normal version. This means my site will now load faster on mobile devices which typically do not have very fast transfer speeds.

If you are viewing my site on a regular desktop or laptop you will not notice any changes to my site.

Windows 7 is the new Microsoft Operating System that will succeed Windows Vista. Currently Microsoft has released a beta version of Windows 7 for people to try and give them feedback on. Today I will give my review of Windows 7. Keep in mind that I have not given Windows 7 a whole lot of time so I am mostly just going on first thoughts.

Overall Windows 7 is a very good, attractive, and apparently stable operating system. They have introduced a new task bar that may take some getting use to for some people. For me, I love the new taskbar. Overall the desktop (including the taskbar) looks very much like the KDE desktop in Linux. Microsoft also packed in some very attractive desktop backgrounds that I believe many people will love.

Another good thing is they removed all those annoying security warnings that annoyed anyone who ever used Vista. No more having to give yourself permission to do whatever it is you want to do on your computer. Yes there is still some warnings that will popup now and then, but so far its pretty even with what you would expect from Windows XP.

One very bad thing about Vista was how slow it ran. This was mostly because it had so many graphical enhancements that you were using all that valuable CPU time and RAM to make your computer “pretty”. Windows 7 has returned that computing power to where it belongs, your applications. Windows 7 runs much faster that Vista and you will notice it right away if you upgrade from Vista to Windows 7 when it is released.

Microsoft also claims they improved the boot time for the operating system. This means when you turn on your computer, it should be ready for use quicker than in the past. From my testing, on a fresh install, this seems to be the case.

Microsoft has also introduced a new type of networking into Windows 7. They call it HomeGroups. This is sort of like a workgroup, except with added security. This should allow inexperienced computer users to share their pictures, music, and other files with other computers on their network in a secure environment. This is a great feature for those who do not understand networking, but for those who do it is probably not needed.

Overall Windows 7 appears very stable. An Intel employee actually thinks the beta is so stable that he has it running on his desktop and said he would install it on desktops throughout Intel if company policy did not have a rule against using beta software. This is a very high praise for Microsoft. I expect Windows 7 to be the most stable operating system ever released by Microsoft.

One thing is for sure, Microsoft seems to have picked it back up after the utter failure that was Vista. Vista was actually so much of a disaster that the future of Microsoft operating systems was unclear. Microsoft even had to “rename” Vista to just get people to try it “again”. Windows Vista was basically a repeat of Windows ME.

Now that Windows 7 is on the doorstep, Vista will die a quick and silent death in the computing world. Windows XP will probably also now start to slowly fade away and be replaced by Windows 7. Keep in mind that Windows 7 will eventually get a name and won’t be called “Windows 7”. My suggestion: “Windows Savior”.

I found out today that I actually have one more class to take at ITT-Tech before I can graduate.  Its call Capstone.  I’m not fully sure what the class is about.  Turns out I didn’t have it this quarter because they were not offering it.  I was originally scheduled to graduate in March but I guess I now wont.

Since I have to go to school for another 3 months for that 1 single class I will not graduate until June.  I am kind of disappointed but oh well.  Nothing I can do about it.

Click here to see more pictures

At first this sounds like great news.  No more worries about getting sued for downloading your favorite tunes.  However, I do not believe most people even worried about this as you would have a better chance of winning a multi-million dollar lottery than getting sued.

Nevertheless, after over 30,000 people were sued by the RIAA, the RIAA has determined that suing people was not advantageous.  Oh, and it was also costing them a lot of money in legal fees.  Another big factor was probably how the RIAA is now looked up on as sort of the devil of the internet.

The RIAA during their suing frenzy sued young children, single moms, Grandmas, individuals without a computer, dead people, and thousands of John Does among others.  These lawsuits were solely based on IP’s the RIAA determined has violated their copyright.  Due to many false positives, the RIAA sued many innocent people.

So how did they get false positives?  Well, this can happen from IP spoofing, bad comparison of what time the offense took place and the owner of that IP at that specific time, and something new many P2P networks do which is inserting fake IP’s in order to mess up people like the RIAA looking for offenders.  Another possibility is someone downloading the music through the person’s home WIFI connection or through a Trojan on the person’s computer allowing the offender to proxy their download through an unwilling participant.

As you can see, suing people was never a good idea.  I mean, who attacks their own consumers like that?  All the RIAA really accomplished through their suing campaign was winning them a bad reputation and giving file sharing networks such as BitTorrent publicity; which in turn made them even more popular.

So now the RIAA has a new tactic.  Instead of suing individuals, they will send threatening warning letters to ISPs of those who download their copyrighted material.  Their hope is the ISP will forward the letter to the client and either throttle their connection speed, disconnect them, or do one of those after a three-strike policy.

Will it work?  Well, that is to be seen.  In my opinion it will not work.  Let remember here for a second that about 20% of those who have internet connections use P2P networks and download illegally.  This means the bigger ISPs would receive hundreds, if not thousands, of letters from the RIAA everyday.  They would have to pay someone, actually many people, to sort through these letters, find out who owned that IP at that time, and then contact by email, phone, or mail the person who the RIAA claimed, key word, violated their copyright.  That right there is a lot of man power that will cost the ISP money.

If that is not enough, think about what happens if an ISP disconnects 20% of their customers.  If they don’t have your service you don’t get paid, and if you don’t get paid you lose money.  Then you have the legal funds that the ISPs would have to pay in order to fight the few individuals who take these ISPs to court for disconnecting their service.  Yes I know having an internet connection is not a right, but people will sue.

So, this method the RIAA has come up with will cost ISPs money.  That is a fact.  Will the RIAA reimburse the ISP for their monetary lose?  Somehow I think not.  Even if they do the RIAA could never afford to reimburse every ISP of every single cent they would lose for doing this.

So the question is, will ISPs cooperate with the RIAA and should they?  I think the answer is no and no.  ISPs can not afford to start attacking their customers due to complaints about the RIAA.  For one, it’s almost impossible for the ISP to confirm the accusations by the RIAA.  Plus, if ISPs start doing this for the RIAA they will be flooded with similar notices from many other copyright big-shots such as the evil MPAA and others.

What about due process?  The ISPs would almost have to give some form of due process to their customers in defending themselves against these claims.  Other wise both the ISP and the RIAA could be at risk for discriminatory civil suits against them by angry customers.  Since there is really no way for the ISP, or even the RIAA to confirm a violation of copyright the customer’s word pretty much wins.

Let’s not forget that it is not even the ISPs place to get involved in issues such as these.  Nor are the ISPs required by any law to partake in this new RIAA plan.  ISPs are fully protected by the US DMCA when copyright infringement takes place over their networks.  Therefore the ISPs really have no motivation or need to become “copyright cops” of the internet.

It’s going to be interesting though how this will play out.  Will some ISPs cooperate?  Maybe, but I think very few will.  Really though, it does not even matter if they do or not.  File sharing of copyrighted material is growing and will continue to grow.  There is no stopping it.  The quicker copyright giants like the RIAA figure this out the better for them.  It is time the RIAA stops trying to kill file-sharing and instead utilize it to maximize their profits.

Please feel free to post your comments on this.

These posts however will be about things not related to me, such as interesting news articles, technology subjects, sports, and more.  Basically anything I decide to write about that is not related to me in any way really.

It is my hope that I will get more traffic to my site from search engines on these topics that I write about and that people will participate in discussion with me about them through my site comments feature.

I should have the first few posts in this category up soon.

Because this is hosted on my home connection there will probably still be some future downtime.  Also, this will probably cause my site to load a little slow.  I hope to have this site back on my main (fast/dedicated) server within the next month.

Unfortunatly I misspelled “howl” and “Bailee” in the video. Bailee I mispelled numouros times. Just wanted to make sure you alll knew I was fully aware of this.

Jeremyjefferson.com however will remain fully functional and will redirect to jeremyj.com.  In fact, you will notice many links (especially for the page design) still refer to jeremyjefferson.com.

I don’t believe this should cause any issues, however please leave me a comment if you notice any part of my site acting weird, or not working at all because of this change.