It’s public now — I’ll be speaking about outsourcing at Casual Connect Seattle at 12pm on July 25! :)

Go register and check it out!

I’m excited. Woo!

So last night, some thieving, bottom-feeding piece of shit kicked the window of my condo, climbed inside and took off with my 360, all my games, and my laptop that has all of my personal information of the last several years on it.

After I called the police and got over my initial shock, I reverted into the aspect of my personality I’m most in touch with and best at functioning under: Get-Shit-Done Mode.

Now, aside from the extreme shittiness of getting robbed, this is actually a really interesting problem solving opportunity. What do you do when someone potentially has all of your personal information and could do absolutely anything they wanted to with it? What countermeasures can you take to stop him from screwing with your life? The scope is enormous and the possibilities are really fucking unpleasant. Where should I start?

First off, find out what he took.

* My Xbox 360.
* All nine of my 360 games (many recently purchased.)
* My laptop.
* The beer from my fridge (oh, you ASSHOLE!)

All things considered, that’s not bad. He left a lot of other valuables behind, and I appreciate that much.

Second, empower the police as much as possible.

The police can track stolen goods via serial numbers, so that if they show up at a pawn shop, they’re run through the police database to check to see if they’re stolen. If so, red flag, and I get my stuff back. Yay!

I wisely purchased a warranty with my 360 when I got it a couple years ago, and it had my serial number on it. I wrote it down. Then I called Dell to get my laptop’s serial number. I gave both to the police. I also reported both as stolen to their respective companies so all future support to those devices will be forbidden, making them a lot less useful. :)

Third, find out what information on me he has.

He left my desktop PC but took my laptop, which is slightly out of date but still has all my information on it. I have a perfect mirror of my laptop’s My Documents folder on my desktop PC, so I started poring through it to see exactly what sensitive files he had access to. Unfortunately, it’s pretty bad.

* All my bookmarks.
* Quicken.
* Bank statements.
* All my bank account numbers.
* What few passwords I’d scrawled here and there (stupid, I know.)

Essentially, my liability here is HUGE. To protect myself, I’ll essentially have to sever every meaningful financial tie I have, sever myself from all my normal resources, and create an entirely new support structure for my life on paper and survive in the meantime. I may even have to get a new social security card over this. I have no choice. I can’t risk not doing it.

This is pretty bad, but I can work with this. :)

Fourth, make a to-do list and do it.

* Delete bookmarks remotely. (see below)
* Generate list of compromised passwords.
* Generate list of every website I need to change my password on.
* Close all bank accounts and reopen them with new numbers.
* Cancel all debit and credit cards and get new ones.
* Schedule glass installation.
* Schedule security system installation.
* Install window clamps\locks on every window.

The first and fastest thing I could do to protect my data was to delete all my bookmarks remotely. See, I have a bookmark synchronizer called Foxmarks that syncs all my bookmarks to a remote server so they’re the same on every PC I use. Great app. So I immediately saved a local backup of all my bookmarks, deleted all the bookmarks, then synced to the server so there wouldn’t be any bookmarks there. Now, the next time he starts Firefox from my stolen laptop, it’ll automatically sync to the server and delete ALL the bookmarks on that machine. Zing!

So I worked through the rest of the list point by point. I created all-new passwords and threw out ones I’ve used for years. I called my banks and cancelled accounts I’ve had for years and opened new ones. I’ve been cutting up all my credit and debit cards because I can only assume they’ve been compromised. I changed my passwords on nearly 25 websites I use on a daily basis because there’s a possibility they could be compromised.

Fortunately, I just got a new credit card that’s not recorded ANYWHERE, so I can live off of that for a few days while I wait for my new ones to come in.

I scheduled what appointments I could, then went to Home Depot for all the security measures I need to secure my home. I installed these badass window clamps on every single window and sliding door in my condo, and put dowel rods in the other appropriate locations so the doors and windows won’t open.

I also installed a stronger light bulb out on my porch to better the lighting situation and decrease the chances of this happening again. My next step after that is to start installing even more powerful outdoor lighting so the potential entry points are better lit than they were before, and won’t be as appealing a target as they used to be.

I’ve arranged for an glass repairman to come out and fix the glass on Monday, and also for an alarm company to come out ASA-fucking-P to install an alarm system. I’d really like it if the alarm system offered all manner of horribly lethal countermeasures but I’m not sure if I’ll be that lucky.

I’m tentatively planning to buy a gun or two to keep around the house and get all that taken care of from a legal licensing standpoint, in the offchance that anyone should break in while I’m home so I can immediately riddle their body with hot shrieking lead death and snatch their joke of a life right out of them. As is my Texas-given right! :) Yay Texas.

So far I’ve actually already done about 95% of everything I need to do to legally, financially, and personally protect myself and my privacy. It’s just a few more little steps and I’ll be done. It’ll all be more or less done in an evening and a day.

In a weird way, as much as this sucks, this was exciting and fun just because I’ve never had to deal with a mindfuck like this before. It makes me feel powerful to be able to take shit like this and flip it on its head and just take care of business like it’s anything else, without getting cloudy or stupid or seizing up. I’m even a little proud of myself for it.

So, let’s see what the next few days bring!

Some of you may remember when I lost my www.jonjones.us domain. For the last 14 months, domain-squatting asshole spammers had hijacked it and ran stupid spam ads on it. They never returned my emails or my phone calls and I couldn’t even reach a human being to ask for it back.

Well, today, I *FINALLY* got it back!! Thank you, GoDaddy domain backordering services! Fuck you, spammers! The sooner your species is stamped out, the better the world will be for it. I hope you and everyone you have ever loved die of horribly painful diseases, and that hell actually exists so you can be brutally tortured, flayed, dismembered, disembowled and violated for all eternity in it.

Since I lost that domain, I’ve learned my lesson and bought up 15 other domains that are all variations on my name that all forward back to this single domain. And they’re all renewed through forever. Losing my place on the internet will never happen again and I’ll squat on every piece of goddamn virtual real estate that might be of value to me until the end of time. :)

Oh happy day!

Here’s a fun life update for my friends and family that read the site. I’ll hide it all behind the jump lest I clutter up all my useful chatter. :) Warning: Fairly intense and not about game art outsourcing. (more…)

I just installed two new plugins that show the top commenters on the site (not including my chatty self) and also to give you the option to subscribe to the comments feed on a post if you want to keep track of it. :)

Enjoy!

If you’ll permit me to geek out a bit (and be late to the party) I just discovered Flickr and posted a ton of photos from my various trips on there.

Jon Jones’s Flickr

This kicks ass. SO much easier and better than what I’d been doing before for photos!

I just realized that it’s been a good four or five months since I posted anything about my personal life. Since a lot of my friends and relatives are only able to keep up with what’s going on with me through the blog, I figured I’d post a little update on my life. Click the jump to read more: (more…)

My spam filter caught about 1500 comment spams since last night. There’s no way I can filter through all that by hand, so if your comment gets accidentally filtered out, PLEASE email me to let me know. Sorry for the trouble.

I just noticed that the nine-year anniversary of the release of Quake 2 was yesterday. I remember buying it the day it came out because I wanted to mod for it, because I’d been making art for Quake 1 for several months already. I guess that means I’ve been doing game art for over nine years, and working professionally on published titles for almost six years.

Weird, I never think about how much time has passed. I still feel like a newbie. :)

Ah well. Just a pretty startling observation for me.

I cleaned up a bunch of stuff around the site today!

• I put all the relevant information about me on the About Jon page above, instead of spamming it all over every page. You’re here for the content, not to listen to me ramble on about my stupid ass. :)
• I created a Contact Jon page after realizing that I don’t have my email address listed anywhere. Oops.
• All sorts of social bookmarking links on the bottom of each post. If you like a post of mine, you can submit it to del.icio.us, Digg, Fark, Blogmarks or Yahoo with a single click!
• I created a MUCH more friendly Archives page. Now you can go back and look at my old posts in reverse chronological order, listing the title of each post. The old way was stupid and took up a lot of space.
• Added a new book to the smArtist Reading page, added a few more favorite smArticles to the Most Popular smArticles page, slightly rewrote the explanation of a smArtist, turned that text into a part of the header graphic to clear up annoying formatting problems, shortened the excerpt text on the Recent Comments, and cleaned up a bunch of other little things.

Is there anything else I might be missing that would make the site more user-friendly?

I added a link up at the top of the page to a current list of my favorite books, and a quick description of why I love it and why I recommend it. I’ve had A LOT of people ask me over time what my favorite books are, and I figured that it was time to get them all down in one place. So there it is!

I also renamed “Jon’s most popular articles” to “Most Popular smArticles” because I am a douchebag and love the smArtist name. Enjoy my megalomania!

Photographic evidence of Jon Jones in full Retard Regalia

Okay, so here’s the full story…

For Halloween at NCsoft we had a company-wide costume contest. I wasn’t going to participate but at the last minute I had a stroke of genius and decided that I was going to be “retarded.”

I wore this at work all day. That’s a too-small kids’ Spongebob Squarepants shirt stained in juice and coffee and smeared in guacamole, a pair of red boxers with a drawstring, kneehigh olive green and blood red socks, snow boots, a Spongebob bib turned around backwards to be a cape, a giant stupid wig, an 8-ball bicycle helmet and (thanks Josh!) a pair of mittens safety-pinned to my shirt.

I was in character for a good deal of the day. I attended our team meeting dressed like that, laughing at everything everybody said, headbutting walls, trying to eat my hair and, when called upon to give a status report, I started to give it, then paused halfway, squinted my eyes through, said “UUUUHHHH OHHHHHHHHH” really loud, as though I’d just shat myself. I’d run up and down the halls, waving at people I knew, engaging in ‘tardspeak (”HIIII TAAYYLOOORRR!!! DUHUHUHHHUHUHUH!! *snort*”), etc. Everyone loved it, I didn’t seem to offend anyone and it was all in good fun.

Until I discovered that NCsoft’s Global Art Director from Korea — apparently the #2 man in ALL of NCsoft worldwide — was in town, that day, and wanted to meet with me for my very first project art review. With ten minutes’ notice. With no way to reschedule. And best of all, without a change of clothes.

To my credit, I went to the meeting in full retard regalia without trying to cover up what I was. I claimed I always dressed like that. :)

At the end of the meeting, he asked what I was actually supposed to be through the translator, and I told him “mentally retarded.” And he said “Ah, okay!” then turned to the Art Director and spoke a bunch of Korean, then did the back-of-your-hand-slapping-the-chest motion and went “DUURRR!!!” then finished the sentence in Korean, and the AD started laughing. Truly, some things do transcend language barriers.

It was still pretty fucking humiliating though. :)