It’s interesting for me to recall my first significant appearance on the internet, but it was exactly five years ago this month, and it was in a very interesting situation. Webmacster87.info did not exist yet, my awareness of phpBB didn’t exist yet, I actually had not even touched IM services yet. However, the past way to share this would be to look at what was happening again.

The month was May 2003, and I was in sixth grade. The big story of the time was that some guy from the Bay Area named Stephen Joseph had sued Kraft/Nabisco because their Oreo cookies contained deadly trans fats, and that they were being marketed towards and sold to children, and furthermore, the public had no awareness of how bad trans fats were. Well, within a week, the suit was retracted, because it had garnered so much press that the claim of the public having no awareness of how bad trans fats are was no longer valid. Nevertheless, that suit did help to raise awareness of the dangers of partially hydrogenated oils, and helped Oreo, Crisco, McDonalds, and many others go trans-fat free, as well as convincing the FDA to add Trans Fat to the nutrition label in 2006.

But what did this have to do with me? Well, at the time that this made the news, in my English class (although at middle school, it was called “Language Arts & Reading”), we ended up being assigned a research paper based on it. We were instructed to do some research on the news and the issues and then write a short essay where we conveyed our opinion on the issue. Now, I personally went about this on the premise that what this Stephen Joseph guy was crazy by wanting to take Oreo cookies out of schools. But, as I went onto his website, Ban Trans Fats, and looked at other things about the case, my mind was changed for me and I found myself completely in favor of banning trans fats.

Not only did I complete my essay and turn it in, but for whatever reason that I do not recall, I had e-mailed Stephen Joseph and sent him a copy of what I wrote. He wrote back with high praise for it, to the point where he wanted to know if he (with my parents’ permission) could post it on his website. He gave it its own dedicated page, where it still is today. And so, when I had the opportunity to share what I wrote with the rest of my class that day five years ago, I had something to brag about.

Looking back, I obviously have somewhat higher standards of writing today than I did then, but that really represents my first free-style persuasive essay (as in the kind where I don’t have to follow “rules” and all that junk), and nowadays, I’m starting to receive awards for some of my written opinions. Plus, it represents my very first little slice of online fame–quite interesting to think about considering how much my life is dependent on the internet today.

Tags: 2003, English, essay, history, internet, memories, middle school, Oreos, Personal, Stephen Joseph, trans fats, Writing

Happy May Day! I’m reporting in stationed from Long Beach, with today being the first day of the 2008 California State PTA Convention (which I blogged about a few days ago). I’m also right in the middle of AP exams review here too, so I’m quite busy right now. But of course, I’ve got time to take a look back on the very busy month of April.
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I’ve gained a lot of experience running and working with bulletin boards in my day, although most of my experience has been based on numerous mistakes. In 2004 and 2005, I established a number of communities, but most of them wound up being unsuccessful for a number of reasons, and that’s pretty much how I learned NOT to run a community.

Well, a few weeks ago, Patrick O’Keefe (of phpBBHacks.com fame, as well as a number of other communities and websites), released a brand new book called Managing Online Forums: Everything You Need to Know to Create and Run Successful Community Discussion Boards. Patrick was on phpBB Weekly #050 back in February, and in addition to talking about phpBBHacks.com on that episode, he gave us an early preview of his book. Since then, he sent copies to both myself and David Lewis for us to read and review. (Plus, we’ll be giving away an autographed copy on phpBB Weekly #061 on May 10th!) I recently finished the book, and am quite excited to have the opportunity to review it.
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Tags: administrators, book, communities, forums, guide, guidelines, management, Managing Online Forums, marketing, Patrick O'Keefe, phpBB, review, staff, tips

Well, here I go again. You probably don’t even really care much about all my travel itineraries, but I find that it satisfies myself to spend the time writing them up anyways. (If it turns out that you actually like my travel itineraries, let me know in the comments.) However, this week will be the California State PTA Convention again, my fourth one in a row. The difference about this year’s (other than the fact that it’s in Long Beach) is that as a student representative on the State PTA Board of Managers, I now get to be a part of running the thing, which therefore makes me more committed during the Convention and means that I have to show up two days earlier. Want to see what I mean? Here we go…
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Tags: California State PTA, Convention, events, itinerary, Long Beach, meetings, PTA, SAT, Subject Tests, trip, workshops

I was at a rally in Sacramento (California’s state capitol) today with the California State PTA, who was there protesting the proposed budget cuts to public education. They have a press release detailing the event. I was one of the speakers of the rally, and thought that I’d share what I said here.
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Tags: budget, California State PTA, capitol, event, governor, protest, PTA, Schwarzenegger, speech

Hello everyone,

This is just to let you know that I will be having little-to-no activity on my blog over the next few weeks, as I have a very busy couple of weeks coming up, between preparing for two AP tests (along with associated practice tests) and SAT Subject Tests, missing 4-5 days of school for a State PTA Convention that I’m working at, etc. Therefore I will be forcefully diverting my attention away from blogging and many of my frequent internet activities until things calm down for a little bit. I appreciate your understanding.

Tags: announcement, AP exams, Blogging, busy, Convention, hiatus, PTA, SAT, SAT Subject Tests, School, tests

As many of you know, I’ve been working with phpBB for a long time, and I’ve been an active user on phpBB.com for almost four years. Nine months of those four years were spent as a member of the MOD team. While their team members do a great job (particularly given that they’re all volunteers), I still find that I have a number of bones to pick with them, and my greatest bone to pick has to do with how they communicate with other members.

I’ve been reading a book that I got from Patrick O’Keefe (of phpBBHacks.com et al) about how to create and run successful community forums (which I’ll be reviewing in full on this blog in a week or so), and one of the biggest things that has been stressed in that book is your relationships with your users and staff. Quite frankly, it’s a book that I think the phpBB team members should read, because I think that they really need to improve their relationships with the users on phpBB.com. Although they’ve repeatedly claimed that they’re trying to work on improving this, they usually tend to carry some kind of “I’m better than you” or “I know more than you” connotation when they communicate with the members on phpBB.com.

A very clear example with this happened yesterday. A few days ago, I started a topic on phpBB.com in response to the phpBB2 Retirement, and the topic started off well. Some people were very glad about the change, others were reluctantly accepting of the change, and some others were disappointed about the change, but it was an intelligent, productive discussion. However, around about page 5 or 6, when some of the team members (who shall be unnamed in this blog post) began arguing with the points that were made by some of the users. This in turn resulted in those users arguing back, which began to cause the atmosphere of that topic to turn a bit sour. (I wasn’t posting through this time, just watching.)

It was on page 6 that a user who had just registered called big_board_owner started making some admittedly poor comments about phpBB’s support policy, as well as claiming that the development process only took like 20 minutes and that he was “offering” his services to do security fixes for phpBB2, even though he flat out refused to listen to the team members who were saying that it takes a WHOLE lot more time than that to produce updates.

Now, granted, that user was agitating the topic and not behaving appropriately. But by the time I got towards the bottom of page 8, I started noticing that the posts that the team members were writing seemed just as rude towards him as he had been to them. Eventually the whole topic turned into a big fist fight between the team members and other members who had ganged up with big_board_owner, to the point where derogatory language was being exchanged in a couple of posts. Eventually, one of the team leaders had to end the dispute by locking the topic on page 12.

I’m not going to deny that the user was being inappropriate, but I feel that the team members sank to that user’s level by arguing with him. The point of the topic was not to argue about who was right or to argue that phpBB2 shouldn’t be retired, it was to discuss the fact that phpBB2 was being retired and to share our opinions on it. Quite frankly, I’d blame the team members for being the first ones to blame others of having “invalid” opinions and for hurting the general atmosphere of the topic. We all have opinions, nothing is going to change that, and the team members shouldn’t consider it their duty to “convert” everyone to the “correct” way of thinking.

The team members need to understand that they are the ones who set the atmosphere on phpBB.com, and as such, they need to hold themselves up to a much higher standard than the other users. This is true for ANY community. Any community will end up with users who sign up simply to cause trouble, and it should be up to the administrators/moderators to deal with that user in the appropriate fashion, NOT to argue with those users. What does arguing do? It makes them angrier and gives them even more reason to misbehave, and this hurts the community at large. Because of the way that the team members mishandled this situation, that topic for discussing (not arguing) the retirement of phpBB2 is now closed and now no one has the opportunity to share their opinions on this very important topic. Having worked with the team members before, I know many of them tend to prefer arguing with these users for their own entertainment and enjoyment rather than thinking about the interests of the community at large. As team members, they should have dealt with that user privately and not permitted him to take the conversation in a bad direction, but they chose instead to argue with him and effectively helped him with his goal to take the conversation in a bad direction.

The way that that topic materialized should be embarrassing to the phpBB team members because it shows that they do not know how to deal with users who register simply to stir up trouble. I for one think that if any reasonable kind of friendly community discussion is to be able to persist on phpBB.com and not fall into the kind of wormhole that the phpBB2 Retirement topic fell into, then the team members really need to take a look at their actions and rectify them, or they are going to find that their rapport with the users will turn sour very quickly.

Tags: administrators, community, discussion, forums, members, phpBB2, shame, team members, topic, users

I don’t frequently talk about politics on this blog, but it seems like pretty much the whole internet agrees that last weeks’ ABC debate between Clinton and Obama, run by “Gibsonopoulos,” was a complete joke and an insult to the point of even having debates. Absolutely insane.

This particular blog did a good parody of this by showing what the Lincoln-Douglas debates in 1858 might have been like had they been moderated by Gibson and Stephanopoulos, and it’s absolutely hilarious. You’ll want to take a look at this. Props to the guy that did this because it’s very well done.

Tags: ABC, Clinton, craziness, debate, Douglas, Gibson, Lincoln, Obama, parody, Stephanopoulos

The short answer: Because I don’t refer people to things that I don’t think are worthwhile.

Yes, I have liked some of the things that MacHeist has done before, but this seems stupid. As if they didn’t have enough to play around with from their December 2006 and January 2008 bundles, they’ve now decided that they have to throw another bundle out the window once again. I mean, how many times do they expect us to throw $49 away? I know that these are large savings on totally random I-never-even-intended-to-purchase-this-otherwise selections of shareware, but it’s not like money grows on trees.

But now, apparently, they’ve decided to step up a notch and sell this as a retail package, but not before offering the same thing for sale online first. While I personally think that one defeats the purpose of the other, who am I to think things through logically?

But what’s crazy about this bundle is that NOTHING IS NEW. A few of the applications are from the original December 2006 bundle, but the majority of these are from the January 2008 bundle that was less than three months ago. I mean, who do they think they are kidding?

Well, they’re not entirely insane, in that they’re admitting this themselves. In an e-mail that they sent out to all of us longtime MacHeist members (I’ve been there since the beginning thanks to an invite that Larry sent me back in October 2006), they acknowledged this glaring fact:

“As an already registered member, we know you may own a lot of these apps, so in an effort to keep you interested, and involved in the world of Mac software, we’ve been hard at work putting together a truly awesome referral program. It’s time to call up those old friends… because this time around, we will be unveiling multiple tiers of software prizes, each crammed with several options.”

Well first of all, for the first part of that sentence, let’s correct “own a lot of these apps” by indicating that I own all of them courtesy of these geniuses. And so what they’ve decided to do is instead turn all of us into pawns in order to annoy our friends and family and website visitors to urge them to spend $50 on software that most of them don’t need, and on stuff that the majority of the concerned internet already has anyway. I seem to recall the January bundle having sold tens of thousands of copies, enough to raise $500,000 for charities in that go-around. So what makes this bundle worth it? No, they want to make us pawns to try to urge people not only to buy this software, but to use our referral links rather than someone else’s.

Well, I’m not going to play that game. I’m not going to try to refer people to something just for the sake of getting benefited for the referral, and I’m certainly not going to try to refer people to something that I think is completely pointless myself. That’s not the way I roll. I don’t know where MacHeist thinks they’re getting this idea from, but I don’t expect to see them getting anywhere close the the amount of participation that they’ve had in their last two bundles, because I think most people (except the people greedy for those referral apps) recognize that this is a pretty lame offering. Therefore, I’m not going to post a referral link for you to go get the bundle–consider this a “deferral” for the bundle. And if you decide that you still want to purchase it, go find someone else’s referral link and use theirs.

P.S.: I do think that MacHeist’s little “trailer” for the retail bundle is pretty cool though, kudos to them on that.

Tags: bundle, MacHeist, referral, retail, sale, shareware, Software, stupid

Junior year is the year of the standardized test. It’s the year of PSAT, ACT, SAT, AP, and many other jumbled non-acronymic letters that float around there, and I’ve had (and still have yet) to go through every single one of them. I took the PSAT last October, the SAT on March 1st, and the ACT today. I have SAT Subject Tests coming on May 3rd and another SAT run-through this fall. I took one AP test last year and have two more coming up in May, as well as one more during senior year.

However, there’s definitely one thing about all this that I’ve learned that I would have flat out refused to accept this time a year ago. Doing well on one of these tests doesn’t just depend on you knowing the academics, it requires you to learn how to take the test. Doesn’t that kind of sound like those video games where the only way to win is to buy the book that tells you how to win? Yeah, it’s kind of like that.
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Tags: ACT, Advanced Placement, AP US History, article, colleges, Kaplan, preparation, PSAT, SAT, standardized, testing, The Princeton Review, thoughts, tips