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Christmas came and went, without it ever really feeling like a holiday. I guess the 75 degree weather didn’t help too much. It would be nice to have a white Christmas every year, but we all can’t live in Colorado, or have relatives up there like some people I know.

I was without my camera this year, so I had to rely on Sara to help me out with her new digital camera. Somehow, all my camera accessories made it to Abilene, but the camera itself didn’t. I won’t mention names here, but you know who you are.

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Ok. So the title is a bit deceiving, but hopefully it grabbed your attention. It seems that there is a new philosophy in education and how to rear children: Everyone is a winner. I admit that this could play an important role in the early development of a child, but as a child matures, one must be taught that this is not the case in the “real world.” And no, I am not talking about “The Real World” from MTV, which is about as unreal as you can get in my own personal opinion. Instead I am talking about life after high school, or college for some people. After you leave the folds of your parent’s wings, you (hopefully) enter a world where you are responsible for your actions, and held accountable for the amount of work that you do or don’t do.

What brings me to this subject? Caleb made a post about how he has seen two high school championships in the same number of weeks. He also makes a comment about the fact that there are 10 high school football champions in the state of Texas. (Actually there are 11, but who is counting?) This is a far cry from the days of 6 outright champions. One champion for each classification, and one for sixman football. In the past few years, we have gone to a system that has two divisions for each classification, creating a small school/large school state football champion. While I think this can be somewhat understanding at the 5A level, and perhaps the 4A level, adding two divisions to the smaller classifications has brought some pretty watered-down competition to football in Texas.

Recently it was voted to add a second division to sixman football, which makes little sense to me. The author of sixmanfootball.com recently posted a commentary on this situation, and makes a pretty good argument against it. Is it really necessary to split up what are already the smallest schools in this great state? What added value does this bring to sixman football? What is incredulous about this change, is that only one of the four voting delegates on the UIL Legislative Committee is from a sixman school, and two represent schools that do not even play football! Does it not make more sense to let the superintendents from the sixman schools vote on this?

The everyone-is-special push is only hurting developing teenagers in the long run. I look upon the upcoming generation and see adolescents that are unmotivated and have a self-serving attitude. “What are you going to give me?” seems to be a recurring theme among those coming up. I admit, this is not true with all, but it is becoming more and more predominant in my opinion, and is a harsh reality from the world where those that refuse to bring a bit of self-motivation and determination to the table will not be consoled with a consolation prize or a participant ribbon.

So if anyone, besides Rachael, read the techincal part of my last post, you know that I am trying to reduce the amount of referrer traffic, etc. to my site. Well, it looks like Referrer Karma works! I was about to goto bed tonight, when I checked my wp-shortstat page. Low and behold, the number of unknown referrers was way down!

Remembering that I had installed something to prevent these unknown referrers, I went to my ref-karma logs and found this: 1419

Looks like its working to me. In the screenshot you can see where good referrals from some blogger.com sites and BK are being let through. The arukutipa.weblog.com.pt is actually a valid referrer. Seems as though its an art website (Note: I did not link to it as there are a couple of questionable images) that used my lightning picture for one of their daily images. If anyone can read what they said about it, please translate it for me.

It feels like forever since I have posted, and by my standards, I guess it has. I’ll start with the technical stuff first that way you will at least have to scan over it to make sure that you get to the “good” stuff.

A couple of things have changed on the site, one that you can see, the other that you can’t.

1. Recently I have noticed that my site has been a target of trackback spammers. What this means is that people set up bots on the internet to scan for blogs that allow trackbacks, and then create some form of link that will create a trackback. This will help them in their search engine rankings and hopefully increase traffic to their sites. Taking a trick from Trae’s site, I installed trencaspammers that will require someone that wants to comment to type in a numeric code that is presented to them. This is not completely foolproof, but will hopefully help.

Edit: Trackback spammers cannot be stopped with trencaspammers. It was installed as a way to prevent normal comment spammers. Sorry for the confusion.

2. Along with comment spammers, I have also noticed an increase in referrer spammers. It is not noticable on the site, but it does mess up my monthly stats, and we can’t have that now can we? Tonite I installed Referrer Karma in hopes that it will deter this in the future. This is the change that you cannot see, but I just wanted to brag a little bit.

On to mocking my fellow bloggers:

• Jess is trying to prove to everyone that he really does work, but most are not fooled. Next time rub some grease on them clothes, then maybe it will be somewhat believeable.
• Matt and Bree must be on one of those extended vacations as they have not posted since their hoax Thanksgiving photos. The shame must be burning if they have been staying out of sight for this long.
• Preston finally got a blog going. He just informed me that he still has two finals to go, so don’t look for many posts until after he is done with those.
• HAPPY BELATED BIRTHDAY Rachael!!! A quarter-century old eh? Next stop, 30!
• Finally, Caleb posted! And a good one too. Make sure you read Piper’s sermon that he links too. Better yet, listen to it. You will not be disappointed. It only took Caleb 4 months to follow my advice to listen to Piper.