I wasn’t initially sure that this case would come to court, so this news comes as a bit of a surprise. I am sure I blogged about Megan Meier, the 13 year old who committed suicide because the mother of one of her school friends pretended to be a 16 year old boy on MySpace, who ultimately rejected the girl, who had been previously diagnosed with clinical depression. The alleged offending mother was allegedly aware of the diagnosis at the time that this incident occurred.

If this is true, and the offending mother did drive this child to suicide, then I believe she should be held liable for her actions in a court of law, but currently cyberbullying is not a crime and I am not entirely certain that it should be a crime. However, I do think that it is important that she be tried for violating MySpace’s EULA because it may be possible to give these EULA’s tangible teeth when they are violated. So if Microsoft finally says, “Hey, if we catch you cursing Xbox Live, we will prosecute you for violation of our EULA.” it will actually mean something to the end user.

It’s a crazy thought, I know. It is hard to want to hold this mother accountable for what happened on MySpace in 2006 because doing so will take away some of the anonymity and freedom of the internet. But this woman and the two teenage girls that she was responsible for took unfair advantage of that freedom.

Sooner or later, cybercrimes will have to be prosecuted. Spammers will have to be caught. Internet bullies will have to be dealt with. Child pornography rings will have to be torn down. I think this case is a small, but much needed first step toward helping our country define how it will handle these events and how our legal system is prepared to adapt to compensate for these issues.

This is an important case for any of us who use the internet. How far can you hold people to EULA’s and to what extent are they liable for their violations?

I hope that the answer is that this mom will at least be fined for the violation and that she will have to do some community service. She should pay back the community that she has harmed by allowing something like this to take place under her nose.

And you don’t need to get the wife and kids to the storm cellar. Much like every other Blackberry, the reviews have come in and said the same things. I’m just going to give you the highlights and a link to the article I found that has a good round up of the reviews I’ve read today.

1. Clunky user interface
2. Sub-standard web browsing experience.
3. Clickable touch screen “seems like a failed experiment”.

The fact that Apple made a great user interface that even my technophobe aunt can use, made a web browser that works like firefox fit on a cell phone, and their gorgeous touch screen are all corner stones of why the iPhone is what it is. Until someone can make these three things come together in a phone again, and put out a device that has some advantage over the iPhone that I cannot currently see, then iPhone killers really are just an idea in the distant future.

Just for my readers who don’t know, I’m a white chick. I come from a long line of white people, and my long line of white people have mostly been poor farmers. They fought on both sides of the civil war. They fought in the American Revolution. They fought in Vietnam and in every war that America has engaged in since the dawn of this nation. My family has always been intensely proud of that heritage. My cousin has served in Iraq and we are all very proud of him for choosing the military life as an homage to my grandfather, who was an MP during World War II.

This is a rather lengthy bit of background to get to my point, but it is important because the point I have to make is about the changing of minds and attitudes between the generations. Admittedly, I did not vote for Obama, but I didn’t vote for him out of self-preservation reasons, more than anything else. Obama intends to make some changes that will hurt my family financially, not because I dislike the man, or think that he won’t necessarily make a good president. My grandfather, however, would have voted for his first Republican, ever.. this year and his reasons would have been much less personally motivated.

My grandfather would have voted for McCain because he’s white, and Obama is black.

My father voted for Obama. As a matter of fact, the entire rear window of his pick up truck screams support for the democrats, and my father and I had a conversation about this early in the election season. My father said it to me very simply: “You know your grandfather never would have voted for a black man. He is probably rolling in his grave because I am going to vote for Obama, but I really believe that Obama is a good man, and he’s the right man. I don’t care that he’s black. I never cared about skin color.”

That sentence right there really just sort of hit me. You see, my dad is right and his words represent something far greater than he intended them to. His words represent change in thinking, change in ideas and change in attitudes. That fundamental change that African Americans have sought for a hundred years has finally born fruit, but it didn’t happen when Obama was elected. Obama’s election is merely evidence, proof of the existence of more open minds and a better world where skin color does not tell anyone about the difference between a good man and a bad man. The American public spoke out on that when it elected Obama as its next President and I have to say that even though I didn’t vote for the man, I am very proud of what his election represents for this nation. I am very proud that we have come so far in such a short period of time.

My grandfather would be grousing up a storm, but my dad would be there, as if to say, “It’s not your world anymore. I don’t believe what you believed and you taught me to think for myself and make up my own mind.”

And even if my grandfather wouldn’t agree with his decision, I think he would be proud that my dad stood up to him and made it on his own. Very proud indeed.

I’m not sure how much stock to put into this article, that comes to you via /. But I will say this much, if this is true, then Toyota are a bunch of A-holes that are not worthy of the admiration of those thousands of folks who put up wallpapers of their Toyotas/Scions/Lexi.

I often have to wonder about the state of the world anymore, where people are constantly being forced to question weather they actually own a thing when they pay money for it, or weather they just own a license to use it. I would have a hard time spending the amount of money that it costs to buy a car, if I couldn’t take pictures of the thing and I couldn’t refer to it by its product name when telling others what I really think about it, and was only allowed to use it for as long as the company felt it was appropriate for me to use it. That would be precisely why I don’t buy songs on iTunes and why I still buy DVDs rather than downloading my video digitally via iTunes or some other service.

If I shell out money for a thing, I should be able to use it on whatever devices I choose, and fangirl about it in whatever way I find to be appropriate as long as that doesn’t violate the rights of the copyright holder. So if I take a picture of a debadged Toyota… okay, you know what, I can see Toyota pitching a beef, especially if I don’t identify the car as being a Toyota. But if I leave the badges in place and say, “This is my corolla!” Toyota needs to shut the hell up and call it free advertising.

If this is for real… the lawyers at Toyota really need to learn a hard lesson about alienating consumers and I’ll never buy Toyota again.

These sorts of things are disconcerting, especially since AVG is in one of my top free software picks for windows based machines. If this sort of behavior keeps up, I might have to start shuttling folks toward Anti-Vir. Which is annoying because it is ad-supported, but I see the capitalistic advantage in ad-supported utilities and am willing to do my bit for king and capitalism if AVG manages to work an epic fail.

Of course, since I don’t use XP currently, it will be sort of hard for them to get a failing grade from me, but there are XP machines in the house so we’ll have to see how far this goes.

This is something that had never occurred to me. The president of the United States cannot communicate via email. I’m sure that I knew that somewhere deep down, but I was sure exceptions were made for family. I was positive that it was always possible for George Bush to email pictures of his wife and pets to his parents as they enjoy their retirement, but the New York Times pointed out that Barack Obama is expecting to be told by the secret service to give up his blackberry.

People that know me in real life know that it is nearly impossible to separate me from my iPhone. I am practically attached to the thing, and when I broke my first gen iPhone earlier this week I was so upset that I wrote a scathing blog post about the 3g that I had replaced the phone with. Of course… now I don’t want to give the 3g up because it’s my NEW iPhone and is my NEW appendage… and it’s shiny too.

I am not sure that I would ever be able to bring myself to hand it over. Not even if I had been elected ruler of the free world.

President-elect Obama, I already admire you for being willing to hand over your crackberry to the secret service. If you manage to bring yourself to do it without saying, “Screw you! I’m not taking this tin pot job!” you, Sir… are a far better person than I.

I am participating in National Novel Writing Month.

If you are interested in details on NaNo, visit their website.

So far, it’s been going well. I am working with my web programmer husband to get a graphic on my sidebar that will show my loyal readers what word count I’m at, but for now, when I hit a benchmark, I post it on twitter, and any readers of my blog can see my tweets on the sidebar, also a new feature added by my husband.

I don’t have a lot to share about this, other than to apologize for my lack of posting lately. Life has been fairly hectic and as a way to sort of blow off some steam about it all, I decided to participate in NaNo. This has put me in touch with a rather close knit group of local writers that participate in the event every year and these gals are out of this world. Super supportive, nicer than you would believe.

As soon as the novel is finished, I’ll post a note and a brief synopsis on my blog.

Until then!

It was Monday.

Allow me to warn you, faithful reader, that no story that ever begins with the phrase, “It was Monday.” can possibly end well.

On Monday, the cable company sent a technician to our home to check out some problems we’d been having with our connectivity since Saturday night. The guy was here for a solid two hours checking over things before he finally concluded that it was our cable modem, and replaced it. But during this time, he needed to talk to my husband, so I called my husband on my precious 1st gen iPhone, that was less than a year old, and handed it to the cable guy. The cable guy gave it back to me when he was done, and thought it was in my grasp so he let go.

My baby, my iPhone, which is my entire life, hit the floor with a loud crack.

Come to find out, the cracking sound was the case that was on the phone. The screen was undamaged. The case was toast, but the screen was not broken, the aluminum back was unharmed, and it was not the first time I’d dropped the phone on ceramic tile before, so I thought everything would be fine. Then, I hit the home button.

Nothing happened. Nothing at all.

The home button is supposed to take you back to the home screen when you hit it. It’s how you close apps, access your apps during a call and it’s how you reboot the phone, without shutting it down completely.

I began to panic.

By the time all was said and done, I’d called Apple care and was told “We can either charge you 199$ to fix the iPhone you have. Charge you 199$ for a refurbished 1st gen iPhone, or you can go to your local Apple store and pay 199$ for a new iPhone 3g.” I almost told the tech on the phone that we didn’t have an Apple store, and in all reality, very few places that are not the top 20 major cities in this country actually do.

So I went to the AT&T store, the techs there looked at my phone and were amazed at the condition it was in. A guy in the store offered me to buy it off of me, even though I told him it was broken, because other than the home button not working, the phone was in pristine condition. He said he’d open it up and fix it somehow.

So in the end, I got an iPhone 3g and I have to say… I don’t see what all the fuss is about.

The previous iPhone was heavier, it felt like you’d spent a decent amount of money on this thing. There was something about that that was just, right. Especially when those of us that bought them, spent 300$ or more on these phones. The weight of the 3g makes it feel chintzy and cheap and not at all unique from any other cell phone that I’ve ever owned.

The plastic back is a fingerprint magnet. I’d wanted to get the white one, but to be honest, I don’t need 16 gig of storage, I only wanted the white one because it didn’t show fingerprints as badly. This has always been one of my beefs with Apple’s electronics too. So let me get this off my chest:

Apple, quit making color choices cost your customers a premium!

The white iPhone simply made more sense for someone like me who can’t stand smudges on her phone, but was not worth the additional price tag, and if I hadn’t had a first gen iPhone, I would have skipped this one based on that distinction alone. Black is boring, and I want to be able to choose what color I want without having to pay for the privilege.

The internet speeds are quick on 3g, but I never cared about that. People who want to tether their phones to their laptops may care, but I don’t see the need to pay an additional 10$ premium for 3g service, then a 5$ premium to add text messages (which were included as part of the old phone plan) and then spend an additional 30$ a month on TOP of those increases, to have the ability to tether my phone on the 3 or 4 occasions a year that I would actually use it. It’d be cheaper for me to pay a 30$ flat fee every time I used it.

Further complaints include the fact that I hate the cases that are currently available for the 3g. I do not blame the phone for this though, and that’s really something to write about in another article. It is larger than the first gen phone, noticeably. It feels bigger in your hand and in my hands, it feels less secure because I am not able to grip it as easily.

My biggest beef with the 3g though, is this:

It has the crappiest battery life of any cell phone I have ever owned.

I’m getting about 2 hours of talk time before the battery is drained to 20%, and then I can open a couple of apps once or twice before I have to charge the phone. Yesterday, my phone didn’t even make it to 6 pm before it complained about only having 20% battery life remaining.

After the joy of owning a first gen iPhone, this thing… to me, is really a huge disappointment.

The 3rd gen phone had better be nicer than this, because otherwise, I think I’ll skip it, get an iPod Touch and run of the mill Nokia phone. Then I will have everything I need, a great phone that gets decent battery life and the internet in my pocket at any WiFi hotspot.

Red Dragoon, a buddy I hang out with on a forum, issued a holiday… well… not a challenge, but an activity. We both wrote poems for Halloween and will be posting them on the forum in the off topic threads in the morning, but you… my constant readers, can read mine now.

It is a sestina. A sestina is a poem that is written in six stanzas of six lines each. Each line of each stanza ends in a word that is pre-determined, so you kind of write them like you are solving a word puzzle.

Happy Haunting!

Prayer for Dawn

I’m reposting this here from a post that I put up on North American Motoring this morning. It was in response to a thread where a guy was having issues explaining his love for his MINI to his girlfriend, who just could not wrap her head around it. You can find the thread here.

I’m not a huge fan of Subarus, but my mother is in love with her Subaru Legacy. My father bought her a brand new one for Valentine’s day in 2007 and while it wasn’t exactly what she wanted, (my dad added more options than she would have, etc), she quickly fell in love with this car. My mother called me squealing about how beautiful this car was when my dad brought it home for her, and how wonderful it was that he’d bought her a car for Valentine’s day.

Flash forward. 2 months later. My dad borrows my mother’s brand new baby for the first time to drive it to work because his car was in for its annual dent removal. 2 blocks up the road from their house, he rear ends a lady as he’s reaching for his coffee cup.

My mom had to go pick him up from the scene and when she saw her precious baby, she burst into tears on the spot. She still has not forgiven him for hurting her baby that day, even though he had it fixed and the damage was minor.

She will never let him live this down.

Flash forward a year, to me bringing Viola home. My husband was scared to test drive her, but I insisted. I refused to bring home a car that he would not drive. Within a month of me owning my car, my husband still hadn’t driven it and finally he got up the nerve when he wanted to surprise me when meeting me at the airport.

My husband was terrified of parking Viola at work, he was terrified that I would never forgive him if he hurt my car, so he refused to drive it for the longest time… and then I looked at him and said, “Dear, they’re called ‘accidents’. If you wrecked my car, I’d know you didn’t do it on purpose. That’s why they’re called ‘accidents’.”

Now, my husband drives Viola once a week, without fear.

It’s all about your attitude. Your spouse may not understand the MINI thing, but they will understand your love for your car. Your love for them should be enough to forgive them if they have an accident. Accidents do happen, and we should all be thankful when the ones we love walk away from them unscathed. That means our cars did their jobs in protecting the lives inside them.