Yay, it’s my birthday!

But in addition to me turning 17, this is also a special day for something else - my blog turns 3! I started this blog back on my 14th birthday in 2004, right before my first day of high school. 1095 days, over 200 posts, several dozen emotional breakdowns, 10 or so websites, 3 unnatural hairstyles, four-dozen culture shocks, five cell-phones, my first concert, my entire Dance Dance Revolution career (so far), 1 futon, ~20,000 tracks, a few wasps, 1 pissed off editor-in-chief of Penguin Books, my first relationship, my first breakup, a screenplay, and 1 time coming out of the closet, I stand before you today (electronically, at least). This blog may have dropped off the radar a few times, but it’s never stopped being a blast.

As I sit here, typing in this very modern interface WordPress has, I think about how blogging used to be over at Blogger: a bland, orange-and-blue background with duller-than-gray text boxes; no tags, no slugs, no categories, no image-uploading features… The technology of blogging has come almost as far as I have in life (almost). But regardless of how much the software or user-interfaces have changed, blogging has always been there as a release for me, a way to get the thoughts out of my head and into a form which might help other people understand me a little bit better (how cliche, I know…). And it’s so much better to know that there are people out there that do read this thing, that do understand me a bit better than my average friend. And I want to thank you for that.

So now I have a challenge for you all (since most of you blog): write a post about why you blog, and how you’ve developed as a person since you started blogging. Take a look at how you’re different, why you’re different, and think about how the realizations you made while writing post #327 may just have changed your outlook on life.

Here’s to the upcoming years of blogging, and all the changes it has in store for our lives…

I’ve been having a lot of server problems, as of late. I’m working on about three different site designs at the moment, and starting to play around with Joomla for the more advanced ones - but I’m running into some problems with Dreamhost’s PHP installation. I guess they think setting certain options to Yes by default and not allowing customers to change them, even though the majority of the web development community agrees that it’s a bad idea, is a good idea. So I install a local version of PHP on my server, worried the entire time that I was going to screw up my websites.

Everything seemed to work out fine - then I wake up this morning as see that my domain names are coming up with 404s and database errors, and I’m like, “Oh shit. I’ve killed WordPress.”

I keep freaking out until I see that dreamhost.com is down. Then I check their blog, and see that they’ve got a High-severity network problem and everyone on their server’s is screwed for a while. Normally, that would be a bad thing. But in this case, it means that I didn’t do anything, and my websites are safe (albeit, a bit slow - see image below).

Anyway, keep a lookout for a few new websites in the coming weeks/months. In the meantime, have fun watching my slow server-response time get worse!

Logo held the Visible Vote 08 Presidential Forum last night - the major Democratic presidential candidates all came to discuss issues that apply to the LGBT crowd (none of the Republicans accepted the invitation… surprise surprise…). Here, I’ll respond to all the candidate’s interviews.

Obama: The first to go (order was based on who accepted their invitations first), Obama seemed a bit hesitant. All of the questions were very personal to the panelists and everyone watching, so Obama and others had to be very careful in what they said - a slip up in semantics could prove disastrous. He handled it well, though, relying heavily on the comparison between discrimination against African Americans and that against homosexuals.

Edwards: His answers weren’t as hesitant, but they all seemed very prepared, and at times unrelated to the questions. Also unlike Obama, he was very partisan. Where Obama was about cooperation between the parties with LGBT issues, Edwards time after time attacked the GOP. I may agree with his accusations, but he spent more time dissing them than saying how he was going to work across the party lines.

Kucinich: Everyone there loved Kucinich. He supports full same-sex marraige, sex education… Unfortunately, that pretty much makes him unelectable - but we still need someone like him to push the boundaries. Honestly, I believe that most of the other candidates agree with him on those issues, they just aren’t willing to sacrifice their electability to go that far publicly. But I think one of the reasons he seemed so much more conversational and comfortable up there than Obama and Edwards was that he didn’t have to hide anything. He said what he believed (so refreshing for liberal politicians).

Gravel: The only other major candidate that supports same-sex marriage, Gravel spoke very openly. Most of what he talked about centered around drugs (Melissa Etheridge, on of the panelists, was interested in his stance of medical marijuana). He wants to legalize marijuana and decriminalize hard drugs. Wow. I never thought I’d hear a [well, I suppose] major candidate say those words. Because it’s true: so many of the problems we associate with drugs (shootings, tainted batches, gangs) are a result of the war on drugs, not drugs themselves. Doesn’t mean I’d take them, but decriminalizing would do a lot more good than most politicians would like to admit.

Richardson: Seemed very mild coming after Kucinich and Gravel. Honestly, he didn’t seem that rounded on GLBT issues - seemed he was there more for straight-up publicity than getting the word out. Unfortunately for him, he was asked the dreaded question: “Is it a choice?” “Yes.” And with that, he lost any bit of the support the crowd still had for him. To bad…

Clinton: Oh, Hillary. Most of her time was spent dissing Bill. She was a lot more honestly than the others in some ways. For instance, she admitted that she supported Don’t Ask Don’t Tell when it first came out (the others all said they hated it from the beginning). But honestly, guys - it was a step in the right direction at the time. She wants to get rid of it now, as does everyone else. She seemed to be all about accomplishing what she thinks is possible at the time (actually fairly in line with my own philosophies). Her word choice on repercussions for people “committing same-sex relationships” was slightly rotten, however.

All in all, I thought the forum was well done. It was refreshing to see us gays have so much support from [some] politicians. Some of what a few of them said made me cringe a bit, but the fact that they were all there says a lot. I respect them for that.

I spent the last two days in Massachusetts, helping my sister move out of her summer dorm (she does research at her college during the summer), and found it appalling how there was no air conditioning in said dorm. Now that I think about it, I believe some halls at UVA are afflicted with this same ailment. Those affected by this tragedy, I call The Uncooled. Back at the University of Richmond, we were lucky - students had long since petitioned to cure their campus of The Uncooled. Mount Holyoke and the University of Virginia haven’t been so lucky.

So, students of college campuses everywhere, it is your duty to fight this disease. The battle may be long and trying - you may very well not see the end of it during your four short years there. But don’t do it for yourself: do it for the poor souls that will come after you, for no student deserves to be Uncooled.

Fight for Health. Fight for Life. Fight The Uncooled. (Seriously, just get some air conditioning)

Other than my discomfort temperature-wise, there was only one other thing that disturbed me. At the Charlotte airport on my way back, there was this little girl (must have been about eight). She was listening to a Carrie Underwood song (on repeat for about fifteen minutes) on her iPod far too loudly. She’s eight, she’s got a $300 MP3 player, and she’s listening to Carrie Underwood - specifically a song about a woman vandalizing a guy’s car with a baseball bat. What isn’t wrong with that picture?

Being a convention geek, I found this incredibly funny: Michelle Madigan, Associate Producer of NBC Dateline, went to hacking convention DEFCON 2007 posing as a regular attendant. In reality, she was there to catch someone planning to commit a felony by hacking. The staff found out about it, announced to the crowd that there was an undercover reporter in their midst, and commenced a jolly round of the “Spot the Undercover Reporter Game” (complete with a mugshot of Madigan so the crowd would recognize her). Madigan proceeded to leave the convention (quite calmly and collected, given the circumstances), followed by what’s reported to be about 150 DEFCON attendees.

Watch the video for a good laugh (the videographers and photographers were pretty rude to her, but I can’t say that I wouldn’t have followed her with a camera myself).

via ZDNet