I am unbelievably bored... And I don't know why. I have a lot of college left to do, and I could get ahead if I wanted to, but... I don't want to do that. I could plan my new computer out some more, update for current prices (even the video cards dropped by $50 in a single week), but I don't want to do that. I have Star Trek: Voyager and Stargate SG-1 on my list of things to re-watch, but I don't want to do that.

I think the highlight of my week was someone stealing my bandwidth.

Oh, plus, here's an ongoing story for you:

In January, in each of my two computer classes, you had to fill out a form that said you were going to get certified. So I filled those out and... Waited. Nothing happened. As March started flying by, I thought I should find out what's going on, so I emailed my instructor. They didn't know what was going on and they emailed the Muncie campus certification center. The next day, I get an email from the same instructor saying that we pretty much have one week LESS to finish our courses, so the pressure to plan these exams just doubled. I emailed them back to see if they'd heard any news... No, they hadn't, but I should email the campus that I'm planning to take the exams at, so I did. I emailed Kokomo campus and... They were on vacation for that entire week. Brilliant. I had to wait until April 7th to get a response which pretty much said "I'm sorry, we don't offer those exams, please go somewhere else."

Then, I decided to directly email the Muncie campus myself. Twice. No response. I found out that the Marion campus offers the exams, so I managed to find someone's email address and send off a message. Just my luck that it wasn't the certification center, but they said my message would be forwarded. After a day, I decided to email the forwarded message myself and it turns out that my message was NOT forwarded and that my message was the first one they saw. But! I was finally at the right place and they sent me a bunch of papers to sign up. I wrote a thank you message and was about to send it off when the same person emailed me back and said that they sent me the wrong information and that none of what I was told was true, and that I needed to talk to these two other people.

I replied with a message laced with my disgust and disappointment and then proceeded to message the two addresses I was given... And then I waited until today. I get a response from one of the people and it turns out that I'm talking to someone in Muncie. (The place that ignored my messages twice before.) It turns out that, according to them, the "headquarters", so to speak, Marion does NOT offer the exams that I'm supposed to take, despite the fact that Marion was an option to pick on the forms I filled out at the beginning of the semester. But, no, Marion is not a place I can take these exams, and they would be happy to schedule me at Muncie, which is about an hour away from where I live. An hour there, an hour to take the test, and an hour back... As opposed to Kokomo and Marion which are merely 20 minutes away. Despite the fact that Kokomo has Microsoft certification stickers plastered all over their doors... Despite the fact that Marion is on the form as a location that I can take the certifications at.

However, there is still a chance... I noticed that the message said Marion does not YET offer certifications, and that I should wait a few days. I emailed them with another message laced with disappointment and disgust, and then asked them what they meant by "in a few days". I don't need to take the exam NOW, and I'm not even ready, but I have to take it before May 5th, so if Marion will begin accepting exams between now and then, then I'm going to still schedule at Marion. Unfortunately, I've noticed a trend that people only seem to read the first paragraph or skin over the message looking for sentences with question marks, and then only answering the first one they see. I highly doubt that I'll get an answer to all of my questions, and I'll wind up having to go to Muncie to get anything done because, once again, Ivy Tech has shown that they are a lazy, clueless, unorganized corporation that enjoys pawning responsibilities off on each other until it's too late for anything to be done.

In fact, last year? I was trying to get my financial aid to pay for my books. I called Kokomo, since I registered there, and they said to talk to the financial department in Terre Haute. We called them and they said to contact the financial department in Kokomo. We called them back and they informed us that they had no idea why Terre Haute would send us there, and they insisted that we talk to Terre Haute. Lovely, isn't it? It's times like this where you need to discard your passive demeanor and really launch into whoever you're talking to and make it absolutely clear that it's not your responsibility to handle all this crap and that if it's not resolved soon, then we're just going to leave it. Needless to say, it was eventually cleared up.

Reminds me of the time I bought a 56k dialup modem from Creative, back when they weren't known for their abhorrent drivers. I bought one... It never showed up. I waited for weeks without internet. As you can imagine, I was slowly going insane. We finally called them up to tell them that our purchase never showed up, and that we need a new one. Whoever was on the phone wouldn't comply, and Dad informed them that we weren't going to pay for the missing modem and we were going to buy our equipment elsewhere and promptly hung up. Later that day, the manager of the person who told us no decided to call us back and made sure we understood that another modem was being immediately shipped at no extra charge. That was really quite humorous... We got the second modem in a few days and everything was fine and dandy. Then, actually, months later, a wet and battered box showed up on our doorstep... It was the first modem they sent out. How it managed to finally get delivered, I have no idea, but in the interest of being honest consumers, we called Creative back and said the first modem showed up and we were willing to send it back. We managed to get someone to understand what we were trying to do, but they never followed up... So we got two modems for the price of one.

I guess the moral of the story is... Good things come from even the nastiest situation?

Maybe this is a sign that I'll pass the certification exams...

So with the release of Wordpress 2.5, there is a handy-dandy little plug-in that lets you use the statistics interface used by Wordpress.com. I used to have a little behind-the-scenes stat page that let me see neat things like what pages were most popular and top incoming searches and such. I got rid of it because it would quickly fill up your SQL database with junk and the entire system would get slow... This plug-in, though, monitors your blog and stores the information at Wordpress.com! Very cool!

So my hourly routine consists of refreshing Google Reader, checking my planets on OGame, checking my nice little nation on NationStates, and taking a glance at my blog's dashboard, which consists of latest comments and statistics... On the statistics page, I noticed an incoming link! Oh goody! Someone has finally decided to link to my blog from one of their own posts! In a rush of excitement, I decide to follow the link given to me: http://somenspegelboll.blogspot.com/2008/04/who-has-sonic-screwdriver.html (The blog, I might add, is by someone living in Sweden, and I don't understand Swedish, so if there are any vulgarities, you have my apologies, but I must remind you that I am not responsible for what you may see on someone else's website!) Obviously someone talking about the Sonic Screwdriver and my respective post on my purchase of the thing. I read the post and... No link? Hmm. I read and re-read and read comments and peruse the navigation bar and... Nothing. Leave it to Incoming Links to screw up again. This wouldn't be the first time... But then I mouse over the image! Aha! They were remote linking this image:

It's just a product shot I saved from Google Images. It's no big deal that they were using it... But they were directly linking to my image, hosted on TW's server. They didn't have the sense to at least copy the image to their own server before posting it? Whenever I host an image, whether it's my own or something I found online, I always copy it to my own site before posting it... Not only for security, so that the image will be there as long as I need it to be, but because... It's just not very polite to feed off someone else's bandwidth for an image that's displayed on your own site.

So! Once I discovered why there was an incoming link, I decided to look into something I had considered before, but never needed because... Well, I didn't think I was popular enough that random people would happen across something I posted and then link directly to it. I looked into remote linking protection! First, I looked up some nice .htaccess code. I found the perfect sample from a place called Altlab. Unfortunately, there was an error in the RewriteRule and I had to change a bit, and then there was an error where it would bring up the protection image on images I posted to my blog, so I had to change the first RewriteCond:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(.+\.)?rivenwolf\.net/* [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteRule .*\.(jpe?g|gif|bmp|png)$ nohotlink.jpg [L]

But that code works like a charm and is currently in place! Then, I spent about 30 minutes whipping up a quick image. It's a bit small, but it only weighs about 10KB, so it does the job! Looks pretty nice, if you ask me... Might stand to be a little larger, but the entire point is to save bandwidth, so it'll stay small for now:

So I saved it, uploaded it... And tested it. Blog works perfectly, and navigating directly to an image works perfectly... And linking to an image anywhere on rivenwolf.net from any other site will pop up that little beauty! Hey, I even had a site to experiment on:

So there you have it, folks!