the official MLIA blog

SOPA? So What?

Mek — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 17:27:00 +0000

If you live in the United States – and especially if you do not – you should be interested in a piece of legislation that is currently making the rounds in the US Congress. The legislation is called SOPA or PIPA (no, not Middleton). This legislation is being fiercely contested with the movie and music industries backing the legislation while the tech industry fights the good fight against it. No points for guessing which side I’m on.

In a nut shell, SOPA will give the US Attorney General and plaintiffs (such as the RIAA and MPAA) new powers to fight foreign sites that engage, enable or facilitate copyright infringement. They will fight these sites using a four pronged approach:

1) Require search engines to delete the site from all search results.
2) Require ad networks to stop display ads on or for the site.
3) Require payment processors (eg Paypal) to prevent any transactions between US customers and the site.
4) Block US visitors from accessing the site.

Just over a year a go, the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) seized “dozens of domain names linked to illegal file sharing and counterfeit goods” (via cnet). If I understand correctly, SOPA is meant to target similar sites, but whose domain names cannot be seized because they are foreign domain names. Among the domain names seized by ICE was dajaz1.com, a popular hip hop blog. The evidence of copyright infringement? Songs sent by representatives of the copyright holder to dajaz1 to promote on their blog. Dajaz1.com was returned to its rightful owner but only after more than a year after it was wrongfully seized (via techdirt x2).

Do we really need a bill to expand powers that are already being abused?

If you live in the US and haven’t already contacted your Congressmen, please do. Google has a simple form here you can fill out and it takes less than a minute (unless you have a really really long name or type really slowly)

A Lot To Be Thankful For

Mek — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 10:26:40 +0000

Last Thursday was Thanksgiving in the US. For those that don’t know, Thanksgiving is traditionally enjoyed by millions who gather to eat turkey until overcome by a deep sleep – also know as a food coma – and awaking the next day to watch American football. However, it is also a time to reflect on the past year and to appreciate our friends, families and good fortunes. For the past two years, I’ve had the pleasure of running MyLifeIsAverage and MyLifeIsG, so I have a lot to be thankful for. You may find yourself asking, “What is MyLifeIsG?”, “Why have I never heard of MyLifeIsG?” or perhaps you’ve seen the sad “under construction” page that occupied its place for the last year. MLIG was the original site I co-founded with Guru Khalsa in the spring of 2009. It was a happy place where people could post short stories about the little victories in their lives. Since the site imploded over a year ago, I’ve intended to re-launch it – and Thanksgiving seems like a very fitting time do it. So, while millions of bleary eyed food coma patients flooded the Black Friday sales at un-natural hours of the early morning, I made the final preparations to bring MLIG back online. Drum roll please… MyLifeIsG.com is back and taking submissions!

Off to a slow start, but up and running

Mek — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 21:43:52 +0000

At this point everybody should be able to access MLIA again. In some respects the move went smoothly and in others there was lots of room for improvement.

For instance, some people were still seeing the “MLIA is moving” page well after the new site was up. I think I now know what I could have done to prevent or reduce the number of people who were locked out.

For the lucky few that were able to access the site, the site kept crashing and comments were broken for a brief while. Those bugs have been fixed.

Also, a few people were seeing a “welcome to nginx” page instead of the site. My bad. I had setup mylifeisaverage.com, but forgot to enable www.mylifeisaverage.com.

Lessons have been learned and hopefully it will be better next time – and hopefully there will be no next time.

Thank you all for your patience. Onward and upward.

Update: Of course, immediately after I post this MLIA goes down. However, this time it is not my fault – I promise. The new servers are experiencing internet connectivity issues and it is beyond my control. Apologies.

Update 2: Seeing as I’ve been in a “learn from your mistakes” mood lately, I’ve decided that my mistake here was that I didn’t knock on wood before publishing this post. Knocking on wood originally came from the belief that malevolent spirits lived in dead wood and knocking was meant to drive them away, so they wouldn’t overhear and foil your plans. Clearly the clever devils in my desk must have heard.

Update 3: KNOCK ON WOOD!!! It is back up.

Keep Calm and Carry On

Mek — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 18:34:03 +0000

Within the next 24 36 hours MLIA will be taken offline while the site is moved to a new server.
The MLIA team recommends taking slow, deep breaths to avoid hyperventilation during this downtime.

Keep it average,
Mek

Update: AverageWizard is now on the new servers. Be advised, MLIA might be down for up to 15 hours while the data is transferred. Thanks for your patience.

Update 2: It shouldn’t be much longer now.

Update 3: The switch has been hit. MLIA is coming soon to a browser near you.

Happy Elephant Appreciation Day

Mek — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 22:12:20 +0000

Don’t worry, I am not planning on turning the blog into a twitter feed of obscure holidays.

_OHHI_ alerted me to the fact that it was Elephant Appreciation Day in the comments on my “International Talk Like a Pirate Day” post. Naturally, my first thought was, “Why is there an Elephant Appreciation Day?”. Well, it was started in 1996 by an elephant enthusiast, because

is the largest land mammal of our era,

is unique among mammals for its trunk,

is the most noble of beasts on earth,

is most undeservedly threatened with extinction,

has been man’s benefactor in numerous ways throughout history,

is entertaining and amusing,

is gentle and friendly,

contributes to ecosystem development and maintenance,

These are all great reasons to appreciate elephants – except “entertaining and amusing”; when was the last time an elephant made you laugh? Dumbo doesn’t count – but “undeservedly threatened with extinction” really jumped out at me. It is true that elephants are threatened with extinction and for no particularly good reason. Which is a shame because they are truly awesome animals – awesome in a awe inspiring way, not a totally tubular radicool and awesome kind of way. Can you imagine learning about elephants in a textbook in the same way we learned about the wooly mammoth or the dodo bird? I can, but it sounds lame. So today, we take a minute to appreciate the elephant. Although, I’d like to put an asterisk next to “gently and friendly”, because elephants have been known to open a can of whoop pass from time to time.

Happy International Talk Like a Pirate Day!

Mek — Mon, 19 Sep 2011 20:15:42 +0000

That is all.

Bye bye summer

Mek — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 20:16:29 +0000

Labor day has come and gone and all the non-average beings have returned to the folds of the average; back to school and back to work.
Though thoughts of the summer will carry us through the next few weeks, soon it will be time to think about the end of the year and what charity we want to support. In the past we’ve donated to Toys for Tots and Charity:Water. The MLIA store is down at the moment, but once it is back up – no later than November 1st, I promise – all store proceeds, from now until the end of the year, will be donated to charity. Please leave your charity suggestions in the comments below. By November Charity:Water should also have an update for us on the status of the well we funded. Fingers crossed.

Save Face

Mek — Wed, 08 Jun 2011 11:21:35 +0000

Last year Facebook started suggesting tags on photos using facial recognition technology, but this feature was only available to North American users. Now they’ve opened it up to everybody and guess what? You are not just invited, you are already participating!

If you want to save your friends the effort of clicking on your face and don’t mind facebook recognizing you everywhere you go, read no further.

However, if you’d like to take your face out of facebook, here’s how to do it.

In the top right corner of any facebook page, click Account then Privacy Settings.

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Select Customize settings below the Privacy Settings table

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Scroll down to the “Things others share” section and click Edit Settings next to “Suggest photos of me to friends”

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Select Disabled from the drop-down menu on the right side of the modal popup

A day late

Mek — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 00:59:31 +0000

I started writing a post a few days ago, it began, “My friend has a shirt that says, ‘Procrastinate, because if the world ends tomorrow you won’t have to do it’”. It should have been completed yesterday, but fittingly enough, I postponed putting the finishing touches on it until today. The post concluded, “Since MLIA began in May 2009, the MLIA community has grown much larger and stronger than I would have ever imagined”.

Today, as I’m sure many of you are aware, a number of inappropriate stories were posted on MLIA. I suppose those involved must have thought it was funny to publish stories with mildly offensive words on the MLIA homepage, but they were wrong. They might have had a giggle, but the vast majority of the MLIA community just thought it was childish. I’ve always believed the community should be able to police itself and have resisted creating a long list of banned words. I hope that what happened today is an exception – not the rule – and MLIA can continue to be the self-regulating, self-moderating, super-awesome community it has been for the past two years.

Keep it average.

Pardon our dust

Mek — Fri, 04 Mar 2011 18:04:03 +0000

Over the past 48 hours, we’ve been experiencing a number of outages as we tried (at first, unsuccessfully) to move MLIA onto a more stable setup. We’ve just tried moving again and it seems to be working properly.

We think we’ve ironed out most of the wrinkles, but please bear with us if more bugs crop up. For instance, let us know if you see ‘banned remoteip’ when trying to submit a story. We know that might be a potential issue.