A Time of Rememberance

You probably already know, but as I write this, it is the day of the 10th anniversary of the attacks on the United States by terrorists. September 11th, 2001 was a day that changed all of America, for the rest of time.

What prides me about this country is that as a country, we did not strike back with the same violence that struck us. We instead did something good for the countries that were home to the terrorists. We sewed the seeds of democracy, in hopes that their lives would improve. Many people would have simply dropped bombs on the Middle East, but we took this approach of inducing peace.

This year as well, we found and killed Osama bin Landen, founder of the extremist group, Al Qaeda. While many people applauded his death, with many shouting “USA!! USA!!” in D.C. after news arrived of Osama’s death.

I’m glad I live in such a proud country, and I’d like to pay my respects to the soldiers that worked to defend our freedoms, those who just were in the wrong place at the wrong time, and killed by the plane crashes, as well as the families who lost loved ones 10 years ago.

We will never forget.

Animated flag image by 3DFlags.com

Well Here We Are Again

Lots has happened for OKS since I last wrote. The things that have happened have been good and bad, but where we are at now is a place I am content with.

Comcast began blocking port 25 TCP, and that was very greedy of them. They want my family to, during this economic downturn, pay more for that, and that just ain’t happening.  However, those nice people at Google gave me a good deal, and now I am using Google Apps for mail at no charge. Aren’t they nice?

On brighter news, the OKS Minecraft server has become a beautiful place. It isn’t exactly stock, but people like it. The latest and coolest addition is the Dynamic Map. The Dynamic Map lets you see what is on the server right now. As the world updates, the Dynamic Map does as well. Hence the name, Dynamic. Right now, an Amazon EC2 instance is hard at work preparing a new static map render, and when it completes, the link will be shown here on this page.

UPDATE: The render that was taking place is long since done, and it is available at http://ec2.theoks.tk/mczoomable_new/.

Thanks, and have fun!