I've been busy with School, work, and other stuff so I haven't posted in a while.

Last weekend we moved Haven BBS to a new computer. So it now has more power, is easier to keep updated, and is up to date with latest Citadel/UX software. Amazingly it went pretty smooth.

We did have some issues, but they got fixed or worked around pretty quick. I like the new web interface. And it is good we had that, as we had an issue getting the text client working. We got the text client fixed

I did forget to move the modem, and I haven't really tried to dial in and check to make sure it works. I will have to do that today.

So last night I picked up a new game, Guild Wars. One of the message boards I hang out on, has tech info, and some more general areas. One of those areas is a gaming forum. There have been a number of threads on Guild Wars. So I figured why not, I'll pick it up. It is a MMO of sorts, however no monthly fees, and you can pick if you want PVP or not. Which is rather nice. I don't usually like playing PvP, so that is really nice for me.

Also it isn't like the other MMORPGs, I had played Ultima Online for a while. I am able to get up and running really quick. With UO it took forever before you were able to do anything. So far in one night I went from Level 1 to Level 3.

I think I will like this game. Now if only I had more time to play.

I've started towkring on a new blog type thing. My plan is to create a web log I can use to keep track of various technical problems and thier solutions. If others can use it great. I also am thinking of inviting some others to write for it also. This way maybe we can get a resource for a bunch of people. Not just things based off what I finnd.

I'm not sure how good an idea this is. However, I figured I would try it.

Manga Reviews

Dears
By: Peach-Pit
Published by: Tokyopop

Dears is about a group of very pretty aliens (even the guy aliens are pretty), that have crash landed on earth. So far not much is known about the 'Dears' as they are called,

Takeya is a high school who is living on his own. It is hinted at that something has happened between him and his parents. His mother drops off a little money each month to his landlord. His landlord has a daughter the same age as Takeya, and sh watches after him, making sure he gets to school ontime, and to work on time.

Onthe way home one day Takeya find a girl who looks lost and alone. He tries to help the girl, but she doesn't speak a language Takeya knows. This girl ends up following him home. Along the way we figure out that she is a 'Dears'. Not only that, but she has bonded to Takeya. He is now her master, and she is his slave. He is not at all comfortable with this, and tries to get rid of her. she ends up being called 'Ren', because Takeya can't really pronounce her full name. The books then start dealing with the situations Ren and Takeya find themselves in.

In book 2 we find out Ren is a "devective unit", and the Dears Community wants Ren back because of this. We are no given why Ren is a defective unit, nor do we know much about the dears. However something does not seem right.

So far there are only two books out in the series. I rather like this book for the comedy aspects. The artwork is very well done. The covers show a slightly exagerated pictures of the Dears, but other than that I rather like the artwork. The story is interesting, and I am curious as to where it is going.

Artwork: A-
Story: B+
OVerall: B+

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I was a bit suprised by this. I've been reading up on Buddhism, because after some research under my last class I was thinking Buddhism would fit more closely with my personal beliefs. However, according to this quiz, I fit more with Paganism. Interesting. Maybe Buddhism is closer to where I want to be, rather than where I am.

You scored as Paganism. Your beliefs are most closely aligned with those of paganism, Wicca, or a similar earth-based religion. You may also follow a Native American religion. Paganism 83% Buddhism 75% agnosticism 67% Satanism 67% Islam 58% Judaism 54% atheism 54% Hinduism 46% Christianity 42% Which religion is the right one for you? (new version) created with QuizFarm.com

I am borrowing a IR Keyboard From mybuddy Alan. It works with my Treo 600, and so far isn't too bad. It will take a little bit to get used to it, but I can see how it could be useful. It is a bit hard to hit the space and the shift, and the backspace other than that it seems to work pretty well. I have noticed when I really get typeing fast it loses letters though.

I really should take some typing test and see what I am up to as far words per minute.

Today was Fry's Electronics Grand Opening. I headed over to Fry's with a friend, that place was HUGE! They had some pretty good deals going too. I picked up a car charger outlet that I can plug my computer or cd player or whatever into, for only $17. I figure for $17 I can't go too wrong. I will have to head up there again when it isn't so busy. I did see a lot of nifty things.

The Knight You scored 42% Cardinal, 28% Monk, 38% Lady, and 62% Knight!

You are the hero. Brave and bold. You are strong and utterly selfless. You are also a pawn to your superiors and will be lucky if you live very long. If you survive the Holy wars you are thrust into you will be praised for your valor and opportunities both romantic and financial will become available to you.

My test tracked 4 variables How you compared to other people your age and gender: You scored higher than 62% on Cardinal You scored higher than 17% on Monk You scored higher than 34% on Lady You scored higher than 79% on Knight

Link: The Who Would You Be in 1400 AD Test written by KnightlyKnave on Ok Cupid

We went geocaching today. We found 3 caches. Computer Geeks Dream, Temple, and True Blue.

I took this picture while at the Temple cache.

Test #2

Test of picture upload.

If you see this it worked.

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Well the post below this one was made using my Treo 600, and the HBlogger software on it. I think that is pretty cool Being able to update the blog using a palm based phone. Now if I can only figure out how to upload pictures too. That would make it even better. I'll have to keep trying, and playing.

I am really really enjoying my Treo 600. It is a lot of fun, plus it is very useful. I can check mail, I can make calls, keep track of my schedule, and tasks. It really is nice to do all those things from one device instead of two or more. There are still some things I am working on figuring out. hopefully I will have a bit of time to work on them here soon.

test post from my Treo 600.

If this works it will be pretty cool.

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So over the weekend I ran into work and picked up a new phone to play with. We are looking at the Good Link Server software and with that software we need either Palm based phones or Pocket PC based phones. So we got a trial from Good, and Verizon has sent us 3 phones to play with. We have three Treo 600s, however we asked for 3 Treos, and one Pocket PC based phone. So now we are waiting for the Pocket PC based phone.

I get to test out one of the Treos and the Good Link software. The Treo is pretty cool, when I can get one I think I most likely will try to get a Treo 650.

So for a while I have two phones.

I also had to replace one of my switches in the network at home. My little CompUSA switch stopped working. So I bought a Linksys 8 port switch from Best Buy. I dropped it in play where the CompUSA switch was, now everything is working.

So far so good.

So I bought an iPod Shuffle 1GB. So far I am liking it. I thought I might miss the FM radio of my old Intel 128MB Pocket Concert MP3 player. However, I rarely used that feature. The size of the iPod is nice. The sound is really good. The one thing I don't exactly like is not having an LCD. Though, being able to toss it on Random play and let it go is pretty nice.

I haven't been able to fill the full 1GB with my best songs yet. I also want to figure out how to make it work with two computers. It seems to have an affinity for only one computer. Well after a bit of research, it seems that you can only have the Shuffle hooked up to one computer, unlike the normal iPods.

Though, it does seem to have the ability to act as a 1GB flash drive. Which could be pretty nice.

I could almost see moving away from WinAMP completely and switching to iTunes, and re-ripping all my CDs to ACC instead. Almost.

I had someone mention they had a problem with the iPod (not Shuffle, the regular iPod), because you couldn't copy files off of it if you needed too (more or less use it as a backup device). Only one problem with this, when the iPods came out there were a number of news stories where someone went into a computer store with an iPod, hooked it up to the Macintosh at the store, and Pirated a bunch of software with the iPod because it shows up as a drive. I wonder if this person had the iPod drivers on thier computer when they tried to get the files off the iPod onto the computer. Hmm.

Well I recently started a new project with a couple of friends, this is on top of going to school, and working full time. Plus trying to play some City of Heroes every once in a while.

I obvously won't be getting bored anytime soon.

School is going pretty well, though I turned in a really bad paper on Monday night. It wasn't as good as I would have liked it to be. My learning team this semester might be problematic. I need to call the one guy, I got a response back from one of the girls, and the other one should be there tonight anyways since it was with her I made the plans for the learning team with. So we will see how this goes.

Work, well, it has been busy. I can't really be bored at work, I have too much to do of late. Plus I keep trying to clean up my office, but I keep getting interupted, or have other things to work on. I should come in on a weekend and work on cleaning it up. Then again I should do that at home too.

At home we are trying to create a list of all the things we want to do to the house, and put them in priority. This way maybe we can get a few of them done. I think one of my first priorities will be picking up a power sprayer for painting the rooms. Then some paint and masking tape. I am thinking the Kitchen first. (less stuff to move out of the way in the Kitchen)

Recently I made a new character in City of Heroes. MarvelLawyer, I am really waiting for City of Villians to come out so I can switch him to a Villian.

Last week my son and wife went out for a walk while I was making dinner. They came back with a little boy from around the corner. Now he is a few years old than Sparky, but had been left home by himself. The little boy was 8. I'm not sure if he knew where his parents were, he gave us nearly as many conflicting stories of where they were as his age. So what do we do. Well we had him call his parents, I don't know if he got a hold of them or not, or if he was just talking into the phone or what. He said they would be home in a half hour.

Dinner was done, so we fed him, because I felt it would be rude to eat in front of him. After my wife took him home, his parents still were not there, we talked a bit about it. I told her next time, we just call Child Protective Services and let them handle it.

I have a rough time with the throught of leaving Sparky home by himself, but he is only 5 going on 6. Maybe it is just me, but I didn't really get left home by myself till I was 10. Is 8 old enough to be left alone from the time he gets home from school till after 7:00P.M.?

Well I have just past the third week of class, and so far so good. It is keeping me busy. I have two papers due for next Monday, plus we have to finish our Team Paper, and for the week after we need to have a PowerPoint presentation ready for us to present.

So it keeps us on our toes.

Monday night we were discussing Critical Thinking. We got into a few things that I found interesting. I had to keep my snide comments to myself. This is something that isn't always easy for me. One of the things that was brought up was "Group Think". My first thought was the Blogsphere. Part of my thought on this was based on observations of the blogsphere, one person gets a thought, and the rest all parrot it. Blogs do not seem to invite much discussion or debate. There are very few blogs I have seen that have a debate going on in thier comments area. Part of this could be due to poor debate skills, but a lot of it also seems to be, that not many people disagree with the original poster.

I did have one other snide thought durring class, but I can't remember what it was in reference to. Ah well.

As far as school goes, I have been a little reluctant to discuss it. I have caught some flak for not going back to some place like IUPUI or University of Indianapolis, or something like that. However I also don't want to take 12 years to get a degree. So I looked instead at Indiana Weslian University and University of Phoenix, which both have adult learning classes.

More or less Classes are 5 to 6 weeks long, and are accredited by the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools. I can complete a degree in 4 years this way while working full time.

I am putting in 4 hours of class time a week, plus an additional 6 - 8 hours of study, paper writing and meeting with my learning team. The first class are designed to get you back into the swing of things. After this I will be taking the classes I would have taken at IUPUI or U of I.

I had the first class, and had homework due for that class before I even got there. For the next class I have three chapters in the book, plus 4 magazine/newspaper articles to read. I also have a 1100 word paper to write, and have to meet with my learning team. And something else I have forgotten currently that is due on the 3rd.

I am down to my last two days at TRU. Tomorrow night will be my last night there, if I can get in. We got 4" of snow last night, down by my house and in Greenwood. I have enjoyed several of the people I have worked with at TRU. Most of the kids have been great, and a lot of the parents have been nice. So it really hasn't been too bad.

I only have 4 more days of working at TRU, till I am done.

Monday I start classes. I am going back to school, and am going to try to get my Bachelors Degree. I've talked about doing this before, and now I have decided I am going to do it. I have signed up, filled out the paperwork for work, and am off and running.

Now comes the hard part. Keeping up with the school work, and working my butt off. I think the part time job may have helped me prep for this somewhat. We will see. Wish me luck!

One thing I would love to do, is some work on my car. However I don't have the money, time or skills to do it. I really like my current car, and would love to do a bunch of work to it.

I would get the side ground effects fixed on it, my wife ran over a curb and popped all the tabs that hold it in place off.

I would also like to redo the front lights to put in the really bright white lights in, replace the after market lights the previous owner installed with a new set that I think would look better.

I wouldn't mind doing somethings to the engine to give the car a little more horse power. It has a nice sized engine in it, the Chevrolet 3800 V6, but a bit more power would be nice.

New brakes, and rotors would be nice, something a bit higher performance. The brakes are ok, but they are stock. It would be nice to get something that worked even better than stock, even more so if I were upping the horse power on the car.

A better stereo and speakers would be nice. Now I don't want something where I can rattle the windows of all the houses on the block, I want something that sounds good, and clear. Some speakers that when I turn up the sound, I don't notice the imperfections in speakers. A new stereo would be nice, one with an external input, maybe XM or Sirus capabilities. I do like the factory stereo that is in there, it has both Tape and CD, but the external input would be really nice.

Lastly I want to build a CarPC. I want the CarPC to have a touch screen, wireless networking, a serial port, Network port, and a large hard drive. I want to be able to hook my GPS up to it, and it show me maps, where I am, where I am going, and how to get there. I want to be able to play MP3s, so I can have my whole CD collection at my finger tips, so I can play what ever song I feel like playing whenever I feel like playing it. I would love for the CarPC to run Linux, but I think with some of the things I want, it would have to run Windows instead. I don't know of any good GPS software in Linux.

It almost gets tempting to put a second LCD screen in the back of the front passenger seat, so that DVDs could be played to that one, for my Son. The more I think on that idea, the more I think I would have to put in a second CarPC to do that. I know I wouldn't want to listen to whatever he was watching while I was driving. So a mini portable DVD Player would be better here, and a set of headphones for him.

I have nothing to say at this time.

Don't have time to write, I am working 60+ hours a week between two jobs. Maybe after the holidays I will have time to write.

The Indianapolis Star has an article called "Web Game Leads to Bomb Scare". Read the article if you are into Geocaching.

First problem I have, is that someone didn't think before placing this cache. Putting it next to a train is just dumb. Putting a cache anywhere near police departments, government buildings, or trasportation buildings is really, really dumb.

My second problem is with Blackford County Sheriff Kevin Mahan saying "They need to find another game." He would have had no clue about this if the cache was placed in the woods like most caches are. Which pretty much leads us back to problem number 1. I guess what bugs me about this is how people who may have some form of power or authority start talking out thier asses about things that they don't understand or know anything about. It is just one of those things that bugs me I guess.

I've thought about placing a cache in the woods behind my house. It is supposed to be given to the Indiana Parks department, and there is a trail being put in back there. The only thing I debate on is putting the entrance by my house, or putting the entrance over by the other end of the trail.

My weekend kind of started on Thursday. Thursday morning I woke up early, and started working from home. I was up at 5:00A.M. working on the e-mail server at work. Around 7:15 or so, I went into the office. Worked some more on the mail server. After getting done at my day job, I had to go to Toys 'R' Us till 9:00P.M. Once I was done there, I went home and worked on the mail server again, I finally got done around 1:00A.M.

Friday:
We flew out of Indy around 6:00A.M., I woke up at 3:30A.M., I slept only an hour or two on the plane rides. We got to San Deigo, and couldn't find our ride. I got on the Internet, got the number for my brother, and called him. Turns out that someone got confused and thought we were renting a car. My last contact with them, I asked for someone to come pick us up at the airport. Ah, well. So we end up taking a shuttle to our hotel. Later people show up, and we have to head out to the rehersal, and dinner after. I think I got to bed somewhere around Midnight, Pacific time, so 2AM Indiana time. UGH!

Saturday was the wedding. The wedding started close to 2 hours late. The Bride's car (my sister-in-law now) broke down, and someone had to go get her. The person who went got lost, so it took a bit to get her picked up. It was a nice ceremony, and the bride was very pretty. I need to get copies of the pictures people took at the wedding, and get any good ones to my brother.

Sunday was spent at B & N's new house that they had bought. Nice place, a few questionable things with the construction, but nothing major. The place is pretty big. 3 Bedrooms, 2.5 baths, loft, nice sized kitchen. They had a doggie door put in the sidelight of thier sliding glass door in back. A nice sized concrete patio in back. Really a nice place.

Monday I was jared awake at 5:00A.M. Pacific time, one of my users was having a problem. I got him taken care of, and thought all was good. I then tried to sleep till the alarm was set to go off around 6:30A.M. We had our flight out at 11:00A.M. and we should have ended up at home around 9:00P.M. For the most part the flights were fine, however, we landed late, almost 9:30P.M. instead. I also found out the user I talked to was still having problems.

Here is hoping we can get them taken care of, they are problems with our dialup provider. I should know more tonight after 9:00P.M.

I got the part time job! Whee!

This past week I was in a training class all week. So I wasn't in the office at all. I did work from home a few hours a number of days. So it made my week seem very, very busy. I did learn quite a bit at the class. Some of this will be added to the skills I already use at work, some will have to wait till we upgrade a server or two.

Friday evening, I had an interview over at Toys 'R' Us, for a part time job. I hope to get it. I need a few extra $$ for the holidays, and it would be nice to get caught up on bills, and maybe get ahead. Plus I figured the discount couldn't hurt (if they offer one), both for Sparky and for myself.

Friday night we had a few friends over to watch movies. It was a great time. We watched "History of the World: Part One". After that we were going to watch another movie, but we instead ended up talking. Everyone left around 1:00AM, and I stayed up till 3:00A.M. I had a great time. It was fun and intersesting.

Saturday Sparky, Alan and I went out Geocaching. I have been interested in this activity for a while, and a number of our friends are into it (Bear, Ting, Alan, etc). Alan is letting me borrow a GPS from him for a while. So Saturday we went out and found my first cache. Sparky had already been out geocaching before, I hadn't been. There are around 5 Caches near our house. But then we live near a nice wooded park area. I think I am going to like this. Hopefully after next weekend we can go out again and find one of the other nearby caches.

So last night I get home, and I can't get out to the internet. I start checking things, and figure out the firewall is off. That is strange because the machine is old enough that if power goes off when power comes back on, it automatically comes back when power comes back. After a few tries I get the machine to power on. My wife informs me that when she was tucking our son into bed, there was smoke in his bedroom, and a little bit in my office when she came out of our son's room. Turns out the power supply in the firewall burned up, or at least the fan did.

Luckly I had a spare older machine down in the garage. So I got the old firewall up and running long enough to download the IPCop 1.4 ISO which just came out earlier this month. Grabbed the machine from the garage, put a second NIC in it, dropped the CD in, booted, ran the install, and next thing you know it is asking for the floppy with the config on it. Less than 10 minutes and I had a new box in place running the new version of IPCop.

The new web interface for IPCop is nice, a lot nicer than before. It also has more functionality than it did before. I like this new version a lot better than the old. The old version was very workable, and worked great. The new version just looks better. I love the picture of the penguin behind the shield.

I also figured out yesterday what happened to my file/print server. I have a bad memory chip in it. I have an RMA for the bad chip, and it will be on its way back to the manufactuer real soon.

Last night I went to G.T. South's to meet up with a Haven user from out of town. Aahz was working over in Cincinnati, so he drove from there to Indy. Campy and his girlfriend met up with Aahz, and myself. It was a neat to meet a user from out of town that I hadn't met before. It was nice to talk to Campy and his GF again.

One of the things I miss is the old Haven user meets, when things would pop up at random and you would get to meet a user you hadn't met before. however we aren't gettting the new users like we used to.

This past weekend we had a garage sale at the house. We had stuff that needed to be gotten rid of, so we tried a garage sale. This was all my wife's idea, so I left everything to her. I think we made a total of $30 or $35 on the garage sale. We ended up taking most everything else over to Goodwill, so we will get a tax deduction out of it later this year. What didn't get sold, or donated will most likely end up on Ebay.

We have donated a lot of stuff this year, a couch, two love seats, 4 or 5 bags of cloths, two bags of household goods. I still have a car to donate, I found the title for it, so I just have to get that transfered to my name, then we should be off and running.

The past two nights I have worked with two really good groups. Monday night I was with a group that attempted my Perez Park mision. It didn't go well, we tried, but got our butts kicked. We worked on another mission before that, and we did great. We had only one Blaster (me), two defenders, a tanker, a scrapper, and a controller. It wasn't just the fact that we were kicking butt, it was also that we were chatting between times.

Last night we had a full complement of people, and still had a rough time with one mission. Again there was some chatting while resting or while trying to figure out a plan of attack.

I almost wish CoH had a voice chat built in like Counter-Strike does.

So I have been having a problem with my file and print server at home. It keeps dropping the DVD-ROM and the CDRW. It tells me they are unplugged. So I figured I would just unplug them. Start the machine back up, and it now blue screens. Great. So tonight I try plugging both drives back in and see if it works, if not, I guess I start over, again.

After that I walked into the bedroom. We had been leaving our windows open at night, it has been nice and cool out. I had to close them last night. I guess we have a skunk in the woods behind the house. The bedroom reaked! I closed the windows, and the smell went away pretty quick.

I also did something to my neck yesterday, so I didn't sleep well because I keep turning over and moving my head, which would make my neck hurt even more. I also had to get up early since I needed to reboot a few servers.

Whee.

I picked up two new DVD sets last night. I picked up the first season of Magnum P.I., and Fellowship of the Rings Boxed set. I had just gotten the Two Towers boxed set as a late birthday present. I can't wait to sit down and watch it again.

I almost finished Magnum already today. I need to go look up and see when second season of Magnum is coming out.

The pilot for Magnum looks like it was recorded from the TV broadcast, in fact you can see some dust or something in the film. Most of the rest of the episodes are fine.

I bought some items from the Haven BBS Store, and I finally got them. I should not have had them shipped by slow boat, ah well, live and learn. I got a mouse pad, coaster, and a Messenger Bag.

The coaster looks pretty good, the type and logo are a bit fuzzy, but not that bad. The Mouse Pad looks fantastic. The Messenger Bag, well, it is yellow, which isn't bad, but it causes the colors to wash out on the image. If I was better at graphics I would redesign it, but my graphics skills are somewhere between non-existant, and amature.

I wish there was a way to capture the inernal monologue that I have with myself when I mow the yard. I often get great ideas while mowing the yard, but then don't have the time nor do I remember everything I said to myself while mowing the yard. Now if I could also do that without getting the noise of the mower, or my MP3s playing that would be great.

My Blog changed, so I am testing something to make sure it is not perminant. I know I need to post something, I haven't had time.

I've been playing City of Heroes, which is a MMORPG (why when I see that do I think of Mighty Morphing Online Role Playing Game??), in the super hero genre. I play on the Pincle Server, and have 4 main characters that I play. I figure I will list them in the oder of how much I play them, and then with entries like this I will write up various things I notice or see while I am playing.

DarkSkyFire; is my highest level character. He is a Level 13 Technology Blaster. Specializing in guns. This is the character that I had over 3K in XP debt due to deaths. I've been working that off rather quickly, and am now down to about half of that.

Lt. Medic; is a Level 8 Technology Defender, specializing in healing. This character is impossible to solo with, he has next to no attack ability. However he is very good in groups. I can heal pretty well, I still have a few problems if we get into a large group of Purples (which has happened).

John Haven; is a Level 4 Mutant Scrapper. He specializes in swords and self healing.

Technius Prime; is a Level 4 Technology Tanker. Hitting hard, is what he does. Not much else to say here.

Last Night

I have been trying to write up my thoughts and what happened at Incon. I had a good time, however I got some sad news this morning.

One of my fellow panelists, and also a member of COJ has his father pass away this weekend. His father was also a brother to of one of our other members.

So I really don't feel like working on the Review of Incon. At least not right now.

Intellectual Property from what I can tell by reading up on it, is a bit too broad a term or set of laws. I've spent a lot of time over at Groklaw reading up on the SCO case. I have a bit of interest in this case since I have been a supporter of Linux since I started to play with it in late 1993 or early 1994. However recently I got thinking about IP after a talk done by Gregory Blepp in Germany. Groklaw has eyewitness reports on what was said, and you can read it over at Groklaw. Durring his talk Mr. Blepp talks about ways of copying IP, one of the methods is " just taking the idea and completely rewriting" it. This to me seems just partially silly. If I come up with an idea, who is to say someone else didn't come up with the same idea? In fact let me give you an example.

I used to work in the window manufacturing business, so I was theoretically part of the housing industry. Now, over 10 years later, I am not. I am a homeowner, and started thinking about my house and some things I would like to be able to do. One of those things is have better control over the temps in each room. So I started working on an idea on how to have a temp sensor in each room, and tie that back to a computer of some sort. Then have the vents on a set of motors or servos or something. Then when one room is cool enough you have the computer tell the motors to close most of the way, and shunt the hot/cold air away from there and to the other parts of the house that need that heating/cooling. The othe important piece of this was that you set the temp of the house, and the computer controls if the air or heat is on, this way you don't muck with the temp. You set it and forget it.

I mention this idea to some friends and they then tell me it has already been done. Does this mean I stole thier idea and re-wrote it like Mr. Blepp suggests? Nope, I wasn't ever involved with the building of houses, I made windows which were sold to retailers who sold them to builders. Though we did later make a line of windows which we sold directly to the builders. Did I steal some companies IP?

If I had heard about the idea, is it ok for me to think of a way to do it, and maybe do it better? Or is that wrong of me to do, and only the company that brought this to market should be able to do that? That is one of the questions we need to ask ourselves with IP. What should be covered? Should it be the specific implementation or should it be the whole idea, so no one else can ever do the same thing even if done in a different way?