3.31.05: Grr. Arrgh. ‹ Blog « Without-Feathers.com

It is a waste of energy to be angry with a man who behaves badly, just as it is to be angry with a car that won’t go.
Bertrand Russell

Grr. Arrgh.

March 31, 2005

If I weren’t the sweetest li’l ball of sunshine since Paula Abdul, I might just scream my head off. It’s been a weird week.

Wait, let me narrow that down—it’s been a weird week online. The offline world is treating me right (so far); it’s the electronic realm that’s playing evil mind games with me.

First there was the guy who stole one of my wallpapers and posted it on his LiveJournal. Bad, right? Worse—he hotlinked it. The entire 800x600 thing. And it showed up in his friends section, of course, which means that my bandwidth has been working overtime to load that entire frickin’ thing every time someone looks at his journal or his friends section. Grr. He didn’t explicitly claim it as his, and there’s a watermark in the corner with my URL, so there’s a small comfort, at least. Fortunately for him, I played nice and sent him an e-mail, thus giving him a chance to take down the graphic before I replaced it with something slightly less… aesthetic. If I’d checked my February referrals before sending that e-mail, he’d be getting e-mails from his friends shrieking about his less-than-legal pastimes with female goats.

Then there’s the code check thing. I’m doing code checks for most of my fanlistings this week, meaning that I check all the sites on my member lists to make sure they have a code or a link back to my fanlisting. All of my fanlistings state explicitly in the rules sections that to have your site listed, you must put up a code or a text link back to the fanlisting. Not that hard, right? You’d be surprised how many people try to slip past that one. (For some reason, a lot of bands sign up, apparently for free promotion, and don’t put so much as a mention on their sites. Go figure.) What a waste of my time.

To top it all off, I just finished my monthly plagiarism check, and found that another free essay site ripped off the very same essay that got stolen last time. Sigh. So I do my usual private-eye bit, send off e-mails, threaten to sue, and in the process find out that this site is affiliated with the same site that stole my essay last time. Snarl. After second e-mail, I get results: someone e-mails me back. Observe the honor and virtue!

Here is the email address of the person who submitted the essay to us as there own work xxxxxxx@hotmail.com. It has been removed! I do not run www.findfreecollegeessays.com or www.getfreeessays.com. However, I am partners with the people that do the support work on them. I have never received a copyright infringement email from you before. I have ensured that this particular piece of work has been removed from all databases. I cannot guarantee that someone will not try to submit it to us again, but I will try to keep it from getting into our system again. The systems are automated and it would be nearly impossible to guarantee that someone will not try to submit the work or some altered version of it to us again. We will remove it as soon as we find any piece of work submitted to us by a person wrongfully claiming to give us copyrights to text. I am sorry for any inconvenience this may have caused you. I am an easy going guy, therefore there is no reason to be rude in anyway. I have spent over an hour making sure that it was removed from all my websites.

Take care,
xxxxx xxxxxxx

When I read this, I rolled my eyes so hard they’re still halfway stuck. Aww, diddee hafta waste him’s pwecious time wif duh siwwy wady’s pwoblem? Awwww.

Double snarl.