Sing Louder

Yeah! Seen on a light post in north Oklahoma City.

Image Leeches

My website, RocketJam.com has a lot of images on it. There are photos, graphics I created in Photoshop and even some drawings that I've done. Many of the top-level pages on the site also have a section-themed graphic. You can easily find images like these via the image search that Google, Yahoo and most other search engines have available today.

A fairly common problem on the internet for website owners is the practice of hotlinking. This is when someone on another website (usually, the free, social/blog type sites like MySpace) links directly to one of the graphics on your website to display it on their own website. Besides the issue of copyright infringement, they are using the bandwidth you are paying for to display your images on their site.

I get a fair amount of this occurring with the graphics on RocketJam.com which shows up in the site's log files. As long as people aren't using my art and graphics in some type of for-profit venture I generally don't mind if people want to use them on their personal pages/blogs/forum posts or whatever. They don't even have to give me credit for them (which is good, because they don't). I'm actually usually flattered that they liked the image(s) enough to want to use them.

The thing that bothers me is the practice of hotlinking to them. You can easily save images from a webpage to your computer by right-clicking them and choosing the "Save Image As..." option, or, with a Mac you can just drag the image to your desktop to save it. Then you can upload it directly to your own web page or a picture hosting service such as Flickr and link to them there. This makes everyone happy. If you're really respectful of other people's property, you might even shoot them an email asking if they mind if you use their image.

I ignore most of the hotlinking that happens to my site since the bandwidth used is generally not worth the trouble of trying to eliminate the problem. However, I had a problem this past week and a half or so with a MySpace site. A girl with aspirations to become a model or actress or something had linked to an 18KB graphic. This was a very attractive girl and her page is peppered with pictures of her in scant clothing and suggestive poses. Her page apparently gets quite a bit of traffic because it generated a noticable spike in my website's bandwidth. The 18KB graphic she linked to had used over 700MB of my bandwidth in that week and a half! Besides the bandwidth she was stealing from me, it also skews the statistics I get from the server log files, making it difficult to determine how much traffic is coming to my site versus how much is going to sites like hers.

When I first discovered the problem, I created a MySpace account, just so I could send her a message, kindly asking her to not link directly to the image on my site. I told her she could use the image, but she needed to download it and host it on her own site. After waiting 4 or 5 days and getting no response, I took steps to break her link.

There are greater steps you can take to eliminate all hotlinking from your site, but they all have drawbacks to some extent. Unless the problem gets a lot worse for me, I'll continue to handle these incidents on a case by case basis.

Mosiah Chapter 11 Updated For The 21st Century

Joseph Smith Jr. wrote the Book of Mormon in the late 1820's. Whether translated from ancient records thru the power of God as he claimed or imagined and generated out of whole cloth from his mind, it contains passages that compare favorably with sacred writings from many of the world's religions.

The following few verses come from Mosiah chapter 11. They were reworked slightly to reflect the United States' current government and involvement in Iraq. I didn't do this reworking. I got permission from the person who did to spread his "new translation", however he wished to remain anonymous.

MOSIAH 11

1. And it came to pass that the Supreme court conferred the kingdom upon George W Bush, one of GHWBush the 41st's sons.

2. And he did walk after the desires of his own heart.

3. And he did tax his people and the sons of his people with his massive budget deficits. And he did spend everyone's money as if it were his own.

.....

5. And he did change his cabinet often, to find even those who were even more toadier.

.....

15. And, he repented of his wine bibbing.

.....

17. He did not send a sufficient number of troops to fight his personal battles.

.....

19. And, because of the great initial victory, he did cause his people to celebrate much. They did boast of their own strength, saying that their fifty could stand against thousands of Saddam's men, not realizing that the Iowa National Guard could defeat all of Saddam's armies before breakfast. And W's toadies did boast, and did delight in the shedding of blood of the Saddamites, and this because of the wickedness of King George and his toadies.

20. And it came to pass .. that Abinidi .. went forth among them, and began to prphesy, saying .... Wo unto this people, for I have seen their abominations such as warmongering, and Enron and King George's rape of the environment, and except they repent, I will visit the red states in mine anger.

If you are interested in a comparison, you can read the original Mosiah here

Preserving the American Way of LIfe

"When the war ended," O'Hare said to me, "I expected to be a lot more in fifteen years than a dispatcher of frozen-custard trucks."

"I guess we've all had disappointments," I said.

He didn't respond to this feeble try at brotherhood. His concern was for himself alone. "I was going to be a doctor, I was going to be a lawyer, a writer, an architect, an engineer, a newspaper reporter--" he said. "There wasn't anything I couldn't be," he said.

"And then I got married--" he said, "and the wife started having kids right away, and I opened a damn diaper service with a buddy, and the buddy ran off with the money, and the wife kept having kids. After the diaper service it was Venetian blinds, and after the Venetian-blind business went bust, it was frozen custard. And all the time the wife was having more kids, and the damn car breaking down, and bill-collectors coming around, and termites boiling out of the baseboards every spring and fall."

"Sorry," I said.

"And I asked myself," said O'Hare, "what does it mean? Where do I fit in? What's the point of any of it?"

Mother Night, Kurt Vonnegut