No I am not some wierdo new person that has magically appeared on your friends list....okay maybe I am, but I was already there in the first place. It is the blogger formerly known as persy. Henceforth I am known as Vangrat.

This is directed at those people who believe the charges behind Julian. Also, that the information released by Wikileaks is the equivalent of personal information:

Good on you for sticking up for your personal confidential information. The problem here is this is not personal information. This is governmental information, which is information that should be transparent in the first place. Information that would help people make decisions on whether they want to keep their government in play.

As for the rape charges, if you follow the news from the time the charges were made to now, you will see that the information currently being fed to the public is twisted from the original facts of the case. Both women have agreed that the intercourse was consensual, as such, there is no case. These charges are mocked up in order for a super power to get their hands on Julian. They are trying to defeat his credibility by smearing his name.

Wikileaks is a group organization. Do you truly believe that the people behind the site would not list their own founder as a rapist if he was such? Julian is a figure head for the site. Someone for people to say "Hey, this guy is wikileaks!" But the truth is, the site is run by multiple different parties, all of which are separate from Julian. Yes Julian has a say in the site, but if he were a rapist, and worse, the people running the site would soon back down and refuse to do anymore. Furthermore, they may even denounce the site and work towards creating a new one without Julian's name attached to it.

Governmental information should not be protected. A government is put in place by its people for its people. More so for the United States as it is a country founded by the people for the people, written into their very constitution. A people should have the fear of their government, not the other way around.

Information pertaining to one's government should be transparent in so much as it does not get someone killed. Those pundits claiming this information will get someone killed, have not read the leaks, and obviously have something to hide themselves, as this information has not harmed nor killed anyone.

Consequently, the news agencies around the world should focus less on what Julian is being charged with, and more on what he has released into the wild. This information is the point of the matter. Julian being trumped up on false charges is side tracking from the true meaning behind all of this.

I just came back from the store with a brand new Samsung Galaxy S. This is an upgrade from my Samsung Omnia i900. I can say with full authority as someone who deals with mobiles on a daily basis that I love this phone. Smooth reaction times, light weight, huge screen, android marketplace, samsung marketplace, android marketplace (have to mention that twice). Beautiful vibrant colours on the screen. The AMOLED screen is fantastic. I am very happy with what I got.

[Edit 10/11/10 6:36 A.M.] Sorry, I was a bit sleepy when I posted this. Let me give you more back ground information. The topic for this discussion was, "What are your thoughts and feelings about illegal immigrants protesting for their inalienable rights in the United States?"
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In my English composition course, we discussed illegal immigration. I thought I would share my thoughts with you here and see what you have to say as well.

"I do not think immigration will ever stop, nor would I want it to. The LEGAL immigrants that go into the United States, or any other country for that matter, help to bring in a diverse array of skills. These skills may, or may not, be available in the local population, but the social diversity brings new thought processes regardless.

I personally have moved from the U.S. to Australia, and plan on living here for a long time to come. The red tape to become a legal resident, much less a citizen, of Australia is incredible, but well worth it. This red tape is nowhere near as bad in the United States, however.

When a person "jumps" the border into the U.S. they are, in all intents and purposes, an illegal immigrant. In the past the immigrants into the U.S., I am talking about the European settlers, did do bad things to the local populace in order to take their land. These natives were not Mexican, or from Central America. Some Mexicans may have Native American heritage. But then so do I. My great great grandmother was Native American. Did that stop me from paying Taxes and having to follow the laws in the United States? No.

The times have changed, there is a democratic government in place in the U.S.. If immigrants want to go into the United States, then they need to follow the laws of the country they are immigrating to. Otherwise, all they are inciting is anarchy.

If someone broke into my home, stole my food, my money, threatened my livelihood; would I not fight them and take it back, kick them out, do whatever it took to remove them from my home? Then why are illegal immigrants so surprised that the United States government is doing the same. They were not invited in. They can ask to come in, and follow the laws. Otherwise they can stay out."

I recently had to write up this analysis for the communications course that I am taking as part of my Bachelors degree. If anyone watches Burn Notice, then you may find this interesting, and rather humorous to think about if they actually did take this advice...the show would probably be boring as hell too.

		10 Aug 10    5:24 AM MST
This analysis covers the brief conversation between two of the main characters in the television series Burn Notice during the initial scene of episode nine in season four. The story premise is about a spy, Michael Weston, who is fired, or burned, and works towards getting his name cleared; unfortunately he is completely cut off from his old life, no cash, no job history, and is told he cannot leave Miami Florida. Michael is supported by his ex-girlfriend Fiona, and his good friend Sam. The specific scene in question is based inside a restaurant; the conversation is between Michael, Sam, and Fiona, although I will only be focusing on Michael and Fiona. The center of the conversation is on a bible that Michael has “acquired” through a bank heist; the bible contains blacked out words that all three characters agree is a code of some sort. Michael and Fiona are attending to the conversation in that they are actively listening. However, due to the fact that they are in a restaurant there is background noise from other customers. They are also eating food, Fiona is laid back with her shoes off and feet propped up on the table. Michael is leaning forward over his food but paying close attention to what Fiona is saying. In an effort to increase attentiveness, Fiona could put her feet down and lean into the conversation; as Michael is a bit of an internal thinker he could clear his mind and focus more on the conversation as well. The biggest noise even though they are in a restaurant is the food, they are there for the meal and as such it becomes a bit hard to focus on the issue of the coded bible. Michael interprets the bible and their conversation about it as an opportunity to gather intelligence. Fiona interprets the bible and their conversation as a way to put Michael’s life in danger. Because Michael is so focused on clearing his name, and stopping the bad guys, he does not care that his life is in danger. This stops him from interpreting Fiona’s message as anything other than a way to put him down. Fiona cares so much about Michael that she cannot see that he truly believes in what he is doing. Both characters could do with taking a look at each other’s feelings and messages, then clearing their minds of their own needs/wants. Michael responds to Fiona reactions as though she does not understand, he attempts to explain but when she does not agree, or gives him counter advice to what it is that he wants to do, he becomes frustrated and states finalities. Fiona responds to Michael’s ideas as though they were stupid and fool hearty, shooting down his message, up to the point where Michael proves that she is wrong; when this happens Fiona backs down and makes up excuses. Instead of responding with explanations and dismissing Fiona’s message out of hand, Michael could listen and accept her communication at face value. Fiona could accept what Michael is saying without degrading his sense of self, and give constructive feedback rather than complaints. Their overall responses to each other could be more open and accepting rather than standoffish and self absorbed. As far as remembering goes, Michael remembers all that he has done before hand as well as what Fiona has done, this gives credit to the fact that he will remember this conversation as well. Fiona is so absorbed in protecting Michael that her memories are clouded by her perceptions of Michael getting hurt, causing her to misremember things even during the conversation. This could all be improved in the same way that above has been, focus more on the conversation and less on the food, be open and accepting rather than aggressive, remove the distractions of their own self thoughts. Overall, Michael is a good listener but doesn’t seem to care that other people are scared for him. He could improve his listening skills by being more open and accepting of other people’s feelings. Fiona is angry and easily hurt by those she cares for. She can improve on her listening skills by backing away from the emotional side of the communications a bit and accepting the message as just a message, not strictly aimed at her.

Racking my brain trying to think of something to post on this here blog, and after listening to an episode of Casually Hardcore on http://media.vtwproductions.com/ I decided to start a Things I learned series. Since I have been working on Sharepoint like mad as of late I figure I will put what I have learned from that up here.

To give a bit of background on this, starting last year my boss decided that he wanted a completely rebuilt Sharepoint website (okay I may have pushed it a little bit) since we had been running on WSS 2.0.  As I was the only one in our entire department who had ever even seen a Sharepoint 2007 website much less built one I decided to volunteer my efforts in rebuilding our WSS site into a 3.0 version.  I have to add also that during this time frame I was going through ITIL V3 certification and as such a lot of what I have built into the site is based around this framework.  In any case we setup a development site that I could break as much as I wanted to in order to get this thing up and running.  I have to say I had no idea what I was getting myself into, in any case after about 3 1/2 months of tinkering we had a new and GREATLY improved Sharepoint site (if you had seen our previous version you would understand) and I still only understood about [--] that much of what Sharepoint could do.

Well our company was also going through a corporate merger during this time as well and so I had to put on hold a lot of my learning for Sharepoint until recently.  As stated in previous posts I have been self learning my way through basic and intermediate programming in order to understand what it is Sharepoint is all about.  This week I decided to finally put what I have been learning into practice and build a brand new Change Control web part along with a very useful workflow that would allow our change manager (my boss) to approve/reject any changes put forth for our infrastructure.

It took me all week to build this thing and was a great learning experience all over the place.  I basically dove right in and started working on the site using Sharepoint Developer 2007 (yes 2010 is coming out but I had to use what we are currently working with, we will be moving to 2010 as soon as I can put forth a business case for it).

Initially I thought it would be a great idea to use Developer to build the Change Management console, however after reading a bunch up on the site (and getting completely frustrated with how Microsoft do things) I found that building the change list in the admin console from within the site was the much better idea.  So I did this with much hmm and hawing about what should go where etc, finally I had that complete and went to work building the workflow...god what a nightmare. When you build a list and design a workflow for it, Sharepoint will use whatever task list is closest on hand in order to build the Data Collection part of your workflow, regardless of where you want it to go...I however did not know this and was racking my brain for 3 days because there was no entry on this any where that I could find.  I did however manage to find a side note on some guy's website on how to find a GUID for any given list, and how to decode it..this was a godsend.  I went into the XML document that points your workflow at the particular lists that you want to attach it to and found out that my Data Collection was pointing at a completely and utterly unrelated list then what I wanted it to (I wanted to cry with tears of joy by this point as I finally knew it wasn't me being a dip).  So i pop in the GUID of the task list that I want the Data Collection to point to and the whole workflow just went POOF and started working like magic...mind you this was Friday night at 4:28 PM right as my boss was about to walk out the elevators, I look up at him and go " IT'S FRIGGIN WORKING OMG!!!." I don't think he quite understood my excitement...ah well.

I figure that I will be having quite a few of these moments over the next few years with me starting Uni and all...so why not make a blog entry about them.  i cannot guarantee when these posts will be, but I will try to put them up when I can.

I have taken it upon myself to learn ASP.NET in preparation of my workplace rolling out SharePoint 2010...WOW what a friggin task...

First and formost I have had to learn from the ground up about what the frack programming is all about in the first place, and am up to chapter 5.4 of http://math.hws.edu/javanotes/index.html
Very very good online FREE textbook on programming Java.  After getting to chapter 3 I decided to study HTML/XHTML/CSS/Javascript in conjunction, as they would all flow together and I already knew quite a bit about HTML anyways (btw...XHTML and HTML...same thing just XHTML is stricter...took me 3 minutes to "Learn" XHTML...yeah).
I am very very glad that I took on learning Java prior to learning CSS/Javascript (Java and Javascript are different) as the basics of programming really helped me to grasp the concepts behind the two, and in reverse learning all of these in conjunction have helped me better understand Java as well.

As I stated before I am now up to chapter 5.4 of the Javanotes textbook and have started ASP.NET Webmatrix using a guide/walk through from the library (yes the place with them old fashioned book thingers).  Basically ASP.NET is built using VBScript which much like how Javascript isn't Java but has the same general syntax, VBScript isn't VB but has the same general syntax, which is nice...except for the fact that I HAVEN'T STUDIED EITHER...luckily the Webmatrix book that I am using is walking me through that AS WELL...ffs.

Mind you this is all in preparation for me being able to wrap my head around building an awesome SharePoint site for our business unit, but at the same time is getting me in gear for Uni which is starting oh so soon.  Plus since I will have to take basic programming as one of my courses ANYWAYS I will be all that much more prepared and may even understand what the hell the professor will be talking about.

In Java I am using Eclipse in order to develop programs as it seemed to be the easiest and most useful of all the programming environments shown me, PLUS it was recommended by not one but two sites that give Java tutorials...really fantastic tutorials I might add.  I haven't built anything astounding just yet, mostly Dice games, tax programs, and word games.  Which is exactly what the Webmatrix book on ASP.NET has me doing too..XD
(BTW Webmatrix looks and feels exactly like MS Visual Basic Express/MS Visual Web Developer...not shocking as all are built by the same company).

Anyways enough on coding.

I am up to season 5 of Earth Final Conflict, figured I would finally watch this show...and frankly I am pissed that they cut out the main character not once BUT TWICE now, no friggin wonder this show isn't on the air anymore.  For the love of all that is holy, this is the equivalent of cutting out Capitain Picard in Star Trek in season 3 and then his replacement in season 5, or killing Harry Potter and then killing his replacement...ARRRGGHGHH.
Oh and Smallville...season 8 just finished...8....8 YEARS of smallville...and you know what, I CANNOT WAIT FOR NEXT SEASON...<- geek.

Got a 43 Hunter in borderlands, played CoD MW2 for a while, in STO but bored with the same ol ...however have hope that it will improve, obviously still playing WoW but no where near as much as I used to.  Reading manga from http://manga.animea.net/ specifically Bleach and Naruto...they cannot release chapters fast enough for me XD.
Waiting for the Library to get in the latest Traci Harding book as it looks fantastic and I am a big fan of hers, finished the latest Wheel of Time book a while a go and even though Robert is passed away his replacement has done a magnificent job and I am happy that he has decided to push the series out to even more books.

Blah blah yack yack, ima go curl up with a book (the one listed below) and get some sleep.  Good night all.

So I start university on 19 July through http://waldenu.edu/
I will be going for a  Bachelor of Science in Information Technology - Networking and Operations.
My GI Bill Benefits have been approved, the school has accepted me...and now I am just waiting...

OH MY GOD!!!!!!!!

Yes im still around, yes im still working on a helpdesk, although we are in a new building, and yes pie.

Been working on developing a sharepoint webspace for our business unit, been quite fun, allowing me to get more on my creative side.

Still playing WoW...played the hell out of Fallout 3...need a new game, Sims 3 came out K is loving it quite a bit, think it will have to grow on me.

I am reading all your blogs still, im just a lazy bastard and can't be stuffed posting a reply as it requires me to log in and such muckity muck.

I notice I go through spurts of wanting to post and not posting...could it be some sort of wave algorithim, or just me being random XD

Can't wait for Star Trek Online, DC Universe Online, Star Gate Worlds Online, Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic Online, Champions Online...notice a trend here?

Been going to the gym very regularly for about 5 months now, benching 110kg and running 20 minutes a day somewhere between 3-4km or biking 9-10km, my goal is before the end of the year to be benching 160kg and running 4-5km or biking 11-12km...we shall see.

On the bright side I lost 20k in 5 months im 100kg now ...ouch

Finished cleaning out our garage today, finally done...well for now.  My mother in law gave me a nice bottle of Scotch from the Cellar d^_^b so right now I am having my very first scotch ever...well if you have to have a first, have a good first.  Dewars Scotch bought in 1996 White Lable @_@...question does anyone know if you can drink a Riesling from 1981, or is there a expiration on a white?

Thinking about changing my login name as I found out you can now...not sure what to change it to..