Swimming in the Pensieve

January isn’t even half-over; yet these past few days mark the very first time I’ve had _anybody_ deep-link to any resource on any web site I’ve had–EVER.

I’m not talking about having a single web site for a few months, folks. I’m talking about having several (in many instances simultaneous) web sites over a period of many years. This is the first time I’ve had somebody directly link to an image on any site I’ve ever had–too cheap-n-weak to pay for his own bandwidth, and willing to steal it from a family of 8. (”Ya’ mother has to be a pretty lousy mother, for you to put a bullet in the furnace like that.”–William Cosby)

Yeah. Okay, so it’s not that much of a theft–dollar-wise–from our family (over the very short-haul), but it really is the principal of the matter that semi-chaps my posterior. I did wonder what kind of an individual would stoop to stealing money from what is obviously a large family, so I took a tip-toe through the server logs–right back to his web site.

The image in question received 43 hits from his test-bed home in a personal space on charter communications; then, an additional 13 hits from his new web page home at ‘atspace.com’–a total of 1,093,456 Bytes of raw transfer, with something on the order of 10% TCP/IP overhead. Call it 1,202,802 Bytes of bandwidth, for 56 hits.

How much of a cheap-skate can you be?
Atspace.com is a free web space provider, with unlimited bandwidth provision and, from my gander at this putz’s web site, nothing but his unfinished flash opus magnus was actually hosted on his own FREE web space! The kid is billing himself as a “squeaked-by two Sylvan Prometric tests, but couldn’t cut the MCSE requirement” MCP–with only 6 years of experience in the computing field. We aren’t even talking about an “experienced” MCP+I, here, either.

Just how much chutzpah can a single human being possess anyway?

Kid…if you can’t program triple-faults for the ‘286 processor–knowing why you’re doing it in the first place–_you_don’t_have_computer_experience_..OKAY? Moreover, even as a piddly-two-off-MCP (the irony of which is not lost on me, BTW), you have no license to steal from others–particularly my children–to promote yourself “professionally” to the market. (And people call the Open Source community a bunch of thieves???)

Got it?

Funny. A self-billed, microsoft certified putz steals because he wants to set-up shop in someplace called Cozad. Not a far-cry from what MSFT has been doing to the entire computing industry for about two-and-a-half decades. Although, it’s just small potatoes, in comparison, when you stop to think about it; the true damage is that REAL, EXPERIENCED, computer professionals get a bad-rap because of dross lke that.

Anyway, I’m not as bent-out-of-shape as the above might lead you to believe. It’s simply a matter of some peoples’ children needing to be slapped back into line–and I really don’t care for the fact that Bandini® splatters (to paraphrase a cliché) at such times.

A word of caution to others who think the above is a cute little trick: Not linking directly to images on somebody else’s web server is so deeply ingrained in the traditional habits and practices of establishing an Internet presence that it is both common knowlegde, and nearly the epitome of rudeness when one ignores said conventions. “I didn’t know!” never enters the equation, because idiots who do this certainly did know that they should not have done so.
Rest assured that, in some Internet circles, this destroys one’s own credibility from the get-go.