• Introduction
• Background
• Major Issues/Causes I Support
• The Paranormal
• About This Site and Web Development
• PC Gaming

What's up? I'm Augur, or Sean From IT if you've seen the Captain Morgan's commercial. I'm 20 years old and 5'11" with blue/green eyes and brown hair. I'm an only child and I'm a sophomore at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, the number one engineering school in the country for eight years running. I major in Software Engineering (CS now has two meanings, Counter-Strike or Computer Science...lol) and I'm on co-op during summer-fall quarters at Sony DADC in Terre Haute, IN. I'm a Systems and Network Administrator there (or something like that). Basically, I take care of hundreds of servers in four different countries. Windows, Linux, Unix, Cisco...as heterogeneous of an environment as it can get :-). I graduated from Holmes High School in Covington, KY. Not only did I take the best advanced placement courses in all of Northern Kentucky, but through Chapman CTC I was able to complete all four semesters of the Cisco Networking Academy Program. Sweet, huh?

I was raised in poverty in the city of Covington, Kentucky. It's the fifth largest city in the state (pop. 43k) encompassing most of Kenton County and it borders Cincinnati, Ohio to the north, making it a vital part of the Cincinnati Metro area which stretches as far south as Walton (where a gas station proudly declares itself to be in "South Cincinnati"). Covington was founded by Germans in 1815 and many of the neighborhood names reflect this, such as Mainstrasse where they annually hold an Octoberfest and a Mayfest. I grew up in Austinburg, a historic neighborhood on Covington's east side that stretches from 17th to 21st streets, next to the Wallace Woods and Lavassor Park neighborhoods. This is where I met my best friends growing up. I attended Sixth District Elementary, Holmes Junior High School, Holmes Senior High School and Chapman CTC, and spent my Saturdays and Sundays at St. Benedict's Cathedral and Eastside Church of the Nazerine. I am truly the product of Covington's great education and moral instruction systems. You cannot know me without knowing where and how I grew up - from fishing on the banks of the Licking River to watching the WEBN Labor Day fireworks each year on the Ohio River, this place gave me the perspective that I have on life, which I've found can be radically different from the hordes of people "growing up in the 'burbs" these days. I did not have anything handed to me and I had to work my ass off to get where I am today. I had to support myself financially by age 15 and would have been working since I was 12 if child labor laws didn't forbid it.

My branch of the Feeney Family immigrated from County Sligo, Ireland to New Jersey in the early 1900s. I'm still searching for long-lost family members who stayed in Ireland or immigrated to England, so if you think you're one of these get in touch! On my mother's side I'm the descendent of Appalachia's earliest pioneers. You can read about her youth in the farmland of Grant County and how she tried to teach me those same lessons in the city in "Jack in the City", the book accompanying the play by the same name that we performed in. The relevant excerpts are available on my Writings page.

• Lowering the driving age: Child labor laws let you work at 14 but you can't drive yourself to work until you're 16 in Kentucky.
• Lowering the drinking age: You can die for your country at 18 but you can't have a drink until you're 21. The rest of the world already understands this.
• Lowering taxes: Through efficient government spending and regulation it would be very easy to lower many forms of taxes. On federal government taxes in particular, the disclosure of the "black budget" even as a line item rather than particular details would solve many problems in government accounting.
• Transparent government: Full text of all laws should be easily available online.
• Elimination of unnecessary laws to simplify law codes: Even if a ticket may not have been given for having an ice cream cone in your back pocket for centuries, the law is still "on the books." We need to have a "spring cleaning" of "the books."
• Full disclosure: Nothing should be hidden from the public, even if it may or may not affect them mentally or emotionally. "Public hysteria" and "mass panic" are not valid reasons: if the government did something questionable, the government needs to deal with it responsibly. Any denial of something that did in fact occur should be criminally punishable.
• IRS reform: No federal law actually grants the IRS the power to do what it does. Either this law should be written or the IRS should be minimized to do what it's legally allowed to do.
• US Consumer Credit System reform: Since 1999, US household spending has exceeded income, and it's no wonder: US government spending has exceeded its income for quite a while. After the government is capable of being a good example again, we should focus on preventing unreasonable consumer debt. This will have to happen through a combination of changes on the creditor and debtor sides, as well as changes in the pricing of things consumers are forced to purchase (for example, education). Bankruptcy laws will also need to be adjusted.
• Limitation of Presidential powers: Things like "signing statements" stating that the President is going to enforce one part of the law but not this other part is illegal, and this should be written in stone with criminal punishment for neglecting duties. The President is elected to serve all of the people, not just some, and the Congress is where the people speak, so the President should not ignore the wishes of the Congress no matter how much he personally dislikes them. Additionally, the President should not have the right to authorize any armed forces attacks against foreign countries for a period longer than 30 days without the explicit consent of the Congress. There's a reason the Constitution calls for the Congress to declare war and not the President. Terrorism might not have been as big of a threat when the Constitution was written, but it wasn't nonexistent. Our founders knew what they were doing.
• Inter-Governmental Organizations (IGOs): Yes, the American-initiated League of Nations failed but this should not put us off from fully supporting organizations that have endured the test of time like the United Nations. No military action should be carried out that does not have the support of a great number of the international community. It's only through international cooperation that we will be able to one day solve all of the world's problems.
• Higher education funding: If you don't have a credit-worthy co-signer and want to attend an out-of-state school, you're fucked in America even if you did work your ass off for scholarships in high school. In the EU, undergraduate education is free and you can cross state borders for education as you please.
• K-12 reform: 21st century technology means that the learning paradigm has shifted. Textbooks are no longer relevant in any area outside of history/language class, even when they have accompanying "online resources". Standardized testing is not the solution. In Japan, schools compete against each other for students and this raises the bar. The geography may be different, but we must find a similar solution in the US, even if it involves private schools who would receive state funding per student (sort of like our current higher education system). Technical education funding must also be raised dramatically: I'm tired of seeing programs at ATCs and CTCs disappearing because of funding. For some students, technical programs are the only thing keeping them in school and this important motivator should not be taken away from them.
• Increasing funding for police training and redefining their role in society: Our police force is staffed by our neighbors. We should not be scared of them as they should only benefit society. Instead of spending most of their time giving out tickets to the public for non-violent infractions, they should be investigating corporate crime to prevent scandals that ruin American lives. This will have to happen through open lines of communication between local, state, and federal organizations who should work in unison to ensure our safety.
• Prison prevention rather than reform: In comparison to the rest of the world, we jail a good percentage more of our neighbors. There are two views on what a prison should do: punish criminals or reform criminals. Rather than spend so much time worrying about whether we're punishing them or reforming them, we should actively work to prevent them from becoming criminals in the first place. This can only happen through a combination of education and law reforms leading to a more robust social welfare system in which the poor or simply bored are better challenged in other areas of their life. There should be no distinction between why one would steal bread because the poor should better be given the opportunity to earn their bread.
• Social welfare reform: The Social Security / Disability System can't continue to have band-aids applied to it. A new system must be developed (and not privatized) to ensure that our youth will have the protection they need.
• Raising speed limits: Where safe, such as the majority of interstate highways. The Autobahn has far fewer accidents than US highways because of its recommended rather than enforced limits. The typical American is forced to spend too much attention making sure he or she is within the speed limit instead of on the road, not to mention the impact this has on the relationship between police and public.
• Increased public transportation infrastructure: Imagine the shift in how workers got to work, and where their home could be located in relation to their job, if high-speed trains using electromagnetic or electrodynamic suspension were installed above the median on interstate highways around the nation. These trains can travel upwards of 300mph and are revolutionizing travel in countries like Germany, Japan, and China. This would serve a dual purpose, as the environmental benefit from the number of cars that could be taken off of the road would outweigh the environmental impact of the electricity generation needed for the trains.

I'm into science and technology and up on the latest in the paranormal. In October of 2001, I founded the Northern Kentucky Paranormal Youth Group (NKYPYG). Our goal was to investigate the paranormal with the highest degree of scientific integrity while having fun doing it. Our core investigative team consisted of Brandon Kuntz, Byron Jarboe, and of course myself, Sean Feeney. We started after-school meetings to educate our members out my high school and expanded to include not only Holmes, but Scott and Conner high schools as well. In the summer of 2004 we reorganized the group as The Anomaly Response Network (ARN) in order to focus more on the general public. Anyone with an interest in the unexplained may join. Our research team has at one time included such famed local UFO researchers as Kenny Young and Donnie Blessing. For more information on NKYPYG, you can check out the old site at www.ufounderground.net and to learn more about ARN you can go to www.anomalyresponse.org.

This is the Augury v5. I designed it from the ground up using Notepad++ and Adobe Photoshop CS. It conforms to XHTML 1.0 transitional and CSS 2.0 W3C specs where possible and employs a mix of PHP and JavaScript. This is the second version using Blogger; I chose Blogger in v4 since it keeps track of my blog posts offsite and offers a ton of other cool free features like audioblogging, mobile-to-blog, and an RSS/Atom feed and connects my blog to the Blogger universe. v5 started with the Blogger Beta, which didn't support FTP publishing like the original Blogger so I still had to use a scrolling i-frame on the homepage at first, but then Blogger added hosting of subdomains so now I use PHP includes to include my Blogger content.

I've been a web developer for over seven years now. The first website I ever created using FrontPage was UFO Underground, which is no longer available on the web but trust me, it sucked! I still have it archived somewhere; if you're really interested you're welcome to come over and dig through my CD and DVD backups. The next paranormal site I worked up was NKYPYG's, to which a link is available above. "With the invention of Internet Explorer 5, a wonderful new type of frame came into the fray, the inline frame." I used to think those things were amazing. I've since moved away from them in favor of dynamically driven websites powered by PHP.

When I was an eighth grader at Holmes Junior High I got to create the school's first website. Then when I was a sophomore in high school, I took on the responsibility of becoming the Holmes High School webmaster. This was a tremendous job due to the unstructured design of the website that used to be in place. Even though I kept data from the existing core articles on the site, I pretty much had to start from scratch. To give you an idea of how large the old site was, it took nearly a half hour to transfer the entire wwwroot directory from the NT 4.0 server they were using to the Windows 2000 server Byron and I set up (thanks to Cinergy for donating this server to our Cisco program a few years back). I added a YaBB to the site half way through the year to allow students and teachers to connect after 3pm and to experiment with the creation and maintenance of an internet community, and sure enough it quickly exploded to over 400 members. The over-modded YaBB code was unable to keep up. Rather than upgrade to the new YaBB service pack, I upgraded the board to a phpBB for several reasons, number one being loading times. The summer after I got back from Channel One I created a whole new layout and design for the site utilizing PHP includes. Rather than use FrontPage (yuck!), I hand-coded everything to W3C XHTML 1.0 Transitional specs. I used Flash for all of the nav menus and added a cookie to the flash introduction page so visitors would only see it once. I also used GIF images for most of the site graphics. As you can guess, without all of the FrontPage junk code and the extra bulk of all JPEG images the new site loaded a heck of a lot faster than the old site. Load time was even under 10 seconds for dial up users. My instructor, however, saw a different vision for the site and fired my ass right before my senior year started. Or I quit over creative differences, depending on your interpretation of events :-). You can check out a copy of the design I made for the site in my portfolio: Holmes Online.

As a freshman in college I created a PowerPoint presentation in my spare time about how Rose should let students work on their (crappy not so hot) school website. One of my profs recommended I hold off presenting it to the PR department until I showed success with the new CSSE department website that I was making at the time. So, I did. The new CSSE website went live in July of '06. It is my first full blown CMS (Content Management System) driven website. It uses phpwcms slightly modded. There were a lot of bugs, not in the site but in the backend. We figured out that the cause was letting phpwcms use a MySQL database on a different server than the one that Apache was running on. So, we moved the database over to the web server machine and everything was peachy from there on out. Since I have no idea if they're going to raise my gift aid so I can return to Rose next year, I went ahead and sent the presentation to PR after they created a new layout for the site in spring of 2007. It's a big improvement and even follows standards here and there, but it's still lacking. I haven't heard anything back.

I'm an e-athlete in the true sense of the word. I guess I really started with some 2D games that my uncle setup for me on an old IBM 286 way back in the early 1990's, but I started into FPS (First-Person Shooter) with Doom and Wolfenstine 3D on my 386 computer. Since then I've been hooked on FPS games. Right now I'm probably playing Counter-Strike: Source (CS:S), BF2 Demo or Team Fortress: Source (if it's out). Now that the Steam Friends list is working again, you can add me on there: augur@iglou.com (this email does not work as it is no longer mine, but back when Steam came out it required you to use your email as your login).

I've been in the Cyber-Athlete Amateur League (CAL) off and on since 2003, playing in Counter-Strike 1.6 and Counter-Strike: Source divisions. As President of the PC Gaming Club at Rose I founded the school's CS:S and Unreal Tournament 2k4 teams. I'd really like to start a college league where colleges field teams and play against each other like they do NCAA sports, but I haven't had the time. There is certainly enough interest and players out there, though.