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Possibly offensive acts and what certain religions think, all distilled down into a single table. Now you can see easily why the only religion I have ever followed was Buddhism. (Link found in the comments section of Fark to a story about an offensive ad. The ad shows a Catholic man in the line for communion holding a bowl of onion dip. Sweet. Check out the comments for a scan of the ad.)

Sick of spending most of my days just trying to find something to keep myself busy, I have decided to get some certification. The first one will be A+, which most people think is a joke. I figure I can get this certification with no training. It covers basic hardware skills and DOS/Windows skills. The hardware portion is as basic as “Is this a power supply or a video card?”, but gets a bit more difficult with “Is this RAM chip ECC or not?”. What they call the Operating Systems Technology is just an overview of DOS/NT/Win9x/Win2K. The OS exam covers basic Windows installation, troubleshooting and networking. If I can’t pass these tests, my legacy as a failure will go down in history. If (once) I pass these exams, I will try my hand at something actually difficult. Too bad there isn’t a generic sysadmin exam. There are exams for linux sysadmin, Redhat sysadmin, Solaris sysadmin, and AIX sysadmin. If there was a BSD sysadmin cert, I would be all over it.

I really shouldn’t make this public already, but I created an online scrapbook. More specifically, this is a scrapbook for my high school class, created in PHP using MySQL. Let’s hope this is actually used.

‘Don’t you just hate it when you’re using Instant Messenger and you go to type “yeah” and what really comes out is “yeha,” like you’re a big cowboy or something? I hate that. ‘ – Adam Kempa

I’ve never been called a racist in my life, nor do I believe that I ever will. When most people (especially men) are accused of being racist, they vehemently exclaim “But some of my friends are black!”. This may very well be true, but well assured that these ‘black’ friends act more ‘stereotypically white’ than the average. I could almost say that I fall into this category. Two friends of mine are just these sort of friends. They have normal midwestern accents, wear t-shirts and average clothes you can find at the mall, etc etc. Lastly, they have extreme public courtesy. The public editor of the Chicago Tribune comments on the lack of public courtesy that some blacks have. By the way, the editor is also black. Does agreeing make me racist? No, I equally discriminate against anyone that pisses me off.

Update to the previous post (OpenBSD): OpenBSD 2.9 has been released. My server at home and all the servers at work are now using it. So far, I haven’t noticed much of a change. I guess they were all working so well with 2.8 that they can’t get much better! Most people say that the greatest change is the use of soft updates in the FFS filesystem. Nothing is terribly IO intensive on these servers, so no changes have been noticed…

Update to the previous post (Java): In the past 6 months I have flirted with PHP, perl, and now Java. Michigandaily.com is completely dependent on PHP, not only for displaying the pages but for creating the pages. Using a cheap iMac, perl, and a bunch of OpenBSD tricks, I created a backup server. Good thing too, our web server died just two days ago! As for Java, these skills are mostly for future consideration…