Two weeks ago, House Bill 2463 passed the Oregon House unanimously – 60 to zero to legally require computer workers to report any discovered child porn. Failure to do so can include a penalty of $6,250, up to a year in jail, or both.

Wow. Well it’s about time they all agreed on something – everybody claims to hate child porn, right? But wait – look at this closely – what does the law actually mean?

Much like many laws passed here in Oregon, I think this is a piece of poorly researched feel-good vote getting activity. It’s not that I’m a fan of child porn, but it should be MY right to make moral decisions about what I do, and the government has no business legislating this particular issue.

Back in 1999. I had a retail computer store and one of my computer techs found a cache of child porn, pretty sick stuff. I wrestled briefly with the morality of the issue but quickly realized it was none of my business.

To the best of my recollection, after (I think @jalbrecht2000 originally found it, and told @ckstanley) I got a quick legal consultation to make sure that some stupid law didn’t exist that could put me in jail for not turning him in, and we returned the computer unfixed, and I talked to him personally. In no uncertain terms I told him why we weren’t fixing it and that he was lucky I didn’t him in, and to never come back because he’ll always be “that kiddy porn guy” and he’ll be tormented.

That was how I chose to run my business, and other professionals should be free to run their business without this sort of government intrusion.

This short video is slightly technical at the beginning, but halfway through, I think its simplified enough that even a politician can understand why this bill needs MANY further revisions before it gets thrust upon the citizenship of Oregon.

Now what can you do about the issue? PLEASE SHARE this video with someone that you know, so maybe it will draw the attention of the Oregon Senate before it’s too late.

This morning, email and website access is sporadic (at best) on the PDXTC servers, and it is slowly being restored.

For what it’s worth, the problem was not actually on our end, but in the middle, with one of Portland’s primary bandwith providers making a stupid mistake. i know that’s of little consolation, but it’s the truth.

Tuesday afternoon about 4:45, our primary bandwith provider (Time Warner) made an unannounced and incorrect change to their system, causing not only web and mail servers to go down for PDXTC, but for nearly all of their Portland customers.

While we do have an alternative bandwidth provider for cases like this, they (apparently) have been unable to accommodate the traffic levels, since several local hosting companies have placed a huge load on them due to this Time Warner outage.

We realize the inconvenience this has caused, we apologize, and we are working diligently with Time Warner and yet another provider to achieve a speedy resolution, and prevent this from happening again.

Believe it or not, the board of SEMpdx has been getting a number of emails asking us where to register for SearchFest 2009, coming up in March.

So, I figured I would take a minute to point out the SearchFest registration, as well as the entire SearchFest 2009 agenda, and a link to our sponsors.

This year’s event promises to be the best ever, with a lineup of speakers including:

• Danny Sullivan, Search Engine Land
• Rand Fishkin, SEOmoz
• Vanessa Fox, Nine by Blue
• Marshall Simmonds, New York Times
• Neil Patel, ACS SEO
• Riona MacNamara, Google
• Laura Lippay, Yahoo
• Matt McGee, Small Business SEM
• Greg Hartnett, Best of the Web

and many more…

I will be moderating two sessions myself, including SEO For WordPress, and SEO for Bloggers and copywriters.

The event will take place at the Oregon Zoo in Portland, Oregon on March 10, 2009, so what are you waiting for? Go register now!

I’m looking forward to next Tuesday nights meeting of the Oregon Computer Consultants Association.  The subject is going to be using open source software on your desktop as a replacement for Windows, whether personal use, business use or both.

I’m so fed up with computer problems that I’ve actually considered buying a Mac, but I have a hard time believing that it would help me in the long run, and it certainly wouldn’t be economical.

I want to move to an open source environment where every problem has a solution – but just may not have been invented yet.  There already seem to be open source applications out there that do everything I could possibly want, and I’m hoping that this presentation will give me an up-to-date overview for 2008.

Here’s the Meetup group details
Here’s the OCCA website

and here are the full details of the meeting:

When:
August 26, 2008
6:00 – 7:00 Dinner/Networking
7:00 – 9:00 Meeting/Presentation

Where:
Rheinlander German Restaurant
5035 NE Sandy Blvd
Portland OR 97213

What:
Open Source Software On The Desktop

You’ve heard and read the Linux hype, you may even be running Firefox, but what’s the 4-1-1 on Linux and Open Source Software? Is it ready for the desktop? or the laptop? for Business? for Grandma?

This presentation will address those questions and more:

• What is Open Source Software? What is Linux? and why should I care?
• Are there any ready-to-use open source applications?
• How can I make money if the software is free?
• and more!

This presentation will be “only mildly technical” and audience questions and answers are welcome. Linux and open source applications will be demonstrated live.

Jesse Black, Yellow Crayon Computer Services Jesse Black is Chief Technologist at Yellow Crayon LLC, a Portland-area computer services firm serving individuals and small businesses. He is also co-host of TVLinux, the long-running community television series which promotes Linux and other open source applications. Jesse has used both Linux and Microsoft Windows on a daily basis for several years.

This is an overview of a rural Oregon realtor website, but needs many, if not all, of the basic fundamentals of SEO101. When you’re trying to build links for a real estate site you have to give people a reason to link to you, by providing valuable information that their own visitors will appreciate.

This website is basically a Portland, Oregon business directory, but many of the individual pages are not being found in the search engines.

This applies not only to queries for phrases, but for specific URLs to0, which indicates a potential structural problem. This video points out some possibilities why, and also covers some fundamental search marketing issues.