Been Injured?
I have a very strong opinion about personal injury and responsibility. When you are injured personally, then you have a right to be compensated, both as a way to cover your losses, but also as a way to punish the wrongful party so that they will be discouraged from doing the same thing in the future. I love the fact that the US legal system recognizes this, unlike other countries. Here, you can easily find lawyers who will help you, for example there are Chicago personal injury lawyers who can help you get what you need.
How I Secure Email
A friend of mine have recently been exploring ways to keep email safe and secure. He lives in a country where freedom isn’t necessarily present so we have been looking at ways to keep email secure from computer to computer, especially since Yahoo and other companies seem very willing to turn information over to less than friendly governments.
We previously tried Hushmail but I don’t like the interface and it seemed to clunky to have a totally encrypted solution and have a dedicated email address just for encrypted emails. That’s why we went to something a little better and I think this solution is pretty good.
We are using Thunderbird with the Enigmail extension. This means that we are able to encrypt every email before we send it out and only decrypt it once it gets back here. To make things better, we use gmail since they allow IMAP mail for free. It seems to be a great solution that is working well.
The TEFL Fight
When I decided to get out of the bad school reporting site business, it was a tough decision. I just couldn’t deal with the day in and day out harassment from a few socially inept teachers. They made my life difficult and went to the point of stalking me. I knew enough was enough so I decided to close up, but I couldn’t stop thinking about the teachers.
Luckily, just as TEFLWatch stopped the forum, two other sites leapt into the fray like vultures. I went ahead and passed the relevant post to a third site. A lot was said on these sites about how they were going to do much better than I could do and that I hadn’t done a good job.
Well, I think a month on, we can look at how well these sites have taken on their new charges. We see one site, Thai EFL Watch. It seems like an inordinate numbers of their posts seem to be from the troll Topper and “his” schools. Of course, he wants them to be thought of as good schools. TEFL Guardian has a lot of promise, but can’t get people to post on it. TEFL School Reviews is doing surprisingly well. Some people said it’s connection to the old TW Forum would be bad news, but that’s hasn’t proved the case.
Don’t Let Them Get You Down
The best advice out there is to don’t let them get you down. There are people out there with such meaningless lives that they strive to make everyone’s life as miserable as there own. They will lie, cheat, or steal away your happiness. You might even voluntarily give up that happiness, but don’t do it. Recognize these light suckers for what they are.
Whether they are a Bob or a Richard, in fact it doesn’t matter what their name is, they are evil people who can never be happy and do not want anyone else to be happy. I, for one, have never been happier since pushing away light suckers. I learned to recognize the symptoms early on so that they couldn’t spread their poison.
Good riddance.
TEFLWatch Has Been Forked
Filed under: Information, Protect Yourself, View from the Watchtower
All good projects eventually get forked. If someone stops a project or abandons a project, there will always be someone there willing to take on the project, if the project is a good one. The change allows a group to take this project off in a new direction and it allows me to ensure that teachers are looked after.
The new project is called TEFL School Reviews. It is very much a work in progress and a lot more work needs to be done on it. Thankfully, it will not be work that I have to undertake.
The new project has already put up a forum, The TEFL School Reviews Forum. They were given a database cleaned of personally identifiable information and they are running that ship. They were also given access to the rate this school posts, ratings and comments. I’ve always made it clear that if something happened and I was unable to continue this site, for whatever reason, I would make sure the community could continue it. And that’s what I’ve done.
What lies ahead for TEFLWatch? I relish the opportunity to get my opinion out there on TEFL issues without being the spokesman for a TEFL blacklist site. I may come up with opinions that run counter to the new project and they may have some very negative opinions of me from time to time, but that is part of moving forward. Helping teachers in dealing with bad schools is a project much bigger and more important than I am.