December 2007

Movable Type went open source yesterday, and I don’t care. Too little, too late. A long time ago, it seemed like MT was the way to put together a blog. It was free for personal use, it was good, it was used by heavyweights of blogging. But I could never get past two things: the first was the fact that the license was not actually open source, not a BSD license, not a GPL license, just “you can use it and it’s free.” Well, I did use it at one job I had many years ago, giving a set of internal developers blogs to keep track of their stuff. I also experimented with installs over the years, but for this blog I went with Blogger initially, and eventually, in 2004, I went with WordPress. The second thing I could not get over was the way comments were handled in MT. I have no idea if it’s still the case that commenting in MT spawns new processes for the Perl interpreter with each comment, but I do know that messages like this one, with people complaining about the performance of MT, are nothing new. Meanwhile, WordPress has superseded MT as the blogging software of choice. It’s not without problems, but the license makes it completely hackable, and I can modify and redistribute whatever hacks I make as much as possible.

Something that’s been important to me since I started blogging was that my site would be portable, forever and ever. Anything with a restrictive license or that puts me in a position to be beholden forever is a nonstarter. I use flickr, sure, but there are options to export everything from flickr, which I take advantage of. I think it’s time to think about a mechanism to export entries from twitter, too. Despite it being so ephemeral, I’d like to capture that stuff too and move it out should I choose to.

I really like the photo, but we do look a bit worn out. I do like it very much though. Dooce takes some great photos. This photo was from Friday night, pretty late.

“put your trust in God; but mind to keep your powder dry”

cite

But now I have a gamertag: http://live.xbox.com/member/artlung

Working in the games business, as I do by dint of working for a game company, it’s become sort of sad that I don’t have one.

Even sadder though, is that I’m unlikely to add anything to it anytime soon.

Backstory: Last Tuesday, Leah drove with Alison and Tony (my niece and her husband) back to Utah, where they will go to school. They were great houseguests and their soups will be missed. So last week Leah was hanging out with Robin and the Armstrongs. I stayed back and worked. On Friday I flew to Utah, Saturday hung out in Utah, yesterday drove the 750 or so miles from Salt Lake City to LAX, then LAX to home in Moorpark.

I’m way behind on phone calls with a few colleagues. I will catch up today and tomorrow.

I’m late mentioning this, but the security requirements doled out by the Transportation Security Agency are mindless and stupid and arbitrary. I don’t even think about them anymore. Put my shoes in a bin? Okay, fine. Keep my paperwork in my hand? Okay. Hand carry my bag over to the security screeners? Okay. Bah.

Southwest Airlines is more like a bus than an airline. I actually kind of like that.

I arrived to snowfall, and impressive driving by Dooce and co-piloting by Chuck and Leahpeah. I was happy to arrive safely, and even happier to end the night with conversation and a nightcap. Then, precious sleep.

Incidentally, this is what happens to the aggregate traffic on my hosting account when Leah gets Dooced. In case you can’t tell that’s about a quadrupling of our aggregate bandwidth usage. Luckily, we could sustain that. But if we have more growth like that I’ll need to look at another upgrade. Still, Leah’s site has stayed up like a champ.

The rings Leah made look just as good in person. Does she have a future in lapidary arts and jewelry-making? Who can say? She is a person who takes to creative projects with aplomb and seemingly, with ease. I’m not sure if she’d call it easy. But she paints, takes photos, draws, watercolors, sews, knits, makes jewelry, beads and those are just the ones off the top of my head!

Saturday we hung out with Los tres Armstrongs and had a lovely time. Included, much talk of Disney Princesses and Dora the Explorer and her friends and wondrous chilling out. Then, sushi with adult conversation. Nothing Jon Deal has to say in this post is true except maybe the participants, but it was nice meeting him and his wife. I got kudos for driving in snow. Bah, I’ve driven in snow before! I’m a big boy! I can do it! Mooooooooooooom! But seriously, it felt pretty manly to man a snow scraper for the first time in years.

Sunday the pioneer children drove and drove and drove. It was a good trip once we got through the weather in Salt Lake City and southward. Leah was happy once we hit about St. George. No snow on the ground, we washed the car, we gassed up, we bought drive-thru tater tots.

Sidenote: If Leah is going to order at a drive-thru, the order is going to get wrong. It doesn’t matter who does the talking (me)—they are apt to “forget” we said “tater tots” when we said “french fries.” Also, fry sauce and mints!

Then we drove, and then we almost got by Las Vegas (good only as the place we got married) but then I had to urinate, and at the stop I chose, the AM/PM Mini Mart and Gas Station was CLOSED. Like, concrete barricades. Like, shut down. And yes, we had just seen the sign off the highway saying “AM/PM MINI MART NEXT EXIT: Last Chance to Pee!” I am not making that up. That’s a true fact, and yet, they were closed. Then we escaped, but not before making a left turn to get back on the freeway, and diligently following the the dotted white line for the turn lane onto the service road for the freeway. Problem: Leah suddenly saying “Uh, those headlights are pointed in our direction.” I said, “uh, yes they are”—then I changed lanes as far right as possible. That dotted line was representing Las Vegas, and that’s when we realized that LAS VEGAS WAS TRYING TO KILL US. We politely declined and got gas and relived ourselves and got coffee in Primm, Nevada. That’s when we realized that we don’t like Nevada at all, whatsoever. I don’t think it likes us either.

Then we came further south on the 15 to the 10 so we could go to LAX, and I don’t remember the 10 freeway being so complicated. About every 10 minutes I was choosing to stay on the 10 and this required lane changes, at least that’s how it felt. I was not impressed. Eventually, after 12 hours of driving, we got home, and collapsed in heaps.

Now, the workweek begins!

Oh, also, Chuck and Leta and Jon and Dooce are every bit as charming as you might suppose. We are glad of their generous hospitality. Also, the conversations about hosting, WordPress, Drupal and whatnot were awesome. I think Leah likes using the cameras of others, too:

I had a great weekend. I am very tired.

Week, here I come!

Stuck in my head like a stone in my shoe is the song Oblivious by Aztec Camera. Here’s a live recording by Roddy Frame, then the awesome lyrics.

Aztec Camera / Oblivious

from the mountain tops
down to the sunny street
a different drum is playing a different kind of beat
it’s like a mystery
that never ends
I see you crying and i want to kill your friends

I hear your footsteps in the street
...it won’t be long before we meet
it’s obvious
just count me in and count me out and I’ll be waiting for the shout
oblivious

met Mo and she’s okay
said no one really changed
got different badges but they wear them just the same
down by the ballroom
I recognized
that flaming fountain in those kindred caring eyes

I hear your footsteps in the street
...it won’t be long before we meet
it’s obvious
just count me in and count me out and I’ll be waiting for the shout
oblivious

I hope it haunts me ‘til I’m hopeless
I hope it hits you when you go
and sometimes on the edge of sleeping
it rises up to let me know it’s not so deep I’m not so slow

I hear your footsteps in the street
...it won’t be long before we meet
it’s obvious
just count me in and count me out and I’ll be waiting for the shout
oblivious

they’re calling all the shots
they’ll call and say they phoned
they’ll call us lonely when we’re really just alone
and like a funny film
it’s kinda cute
they’ve bought the bullets and there’s no one left to shoot

I hear your footsteps in the street
...it won’t be long before we meet
it’s obvious
just count me in and count me out and I’ll be waiting for the shout
oblivious

Went bowling yesterday with co-workers, it was pretty fun. I bowled a 137, a 130, and a 114 which put me third among the 12 folks bowling.

My head is feeling better too. It’s all good.

The song in my head which I was unable a good copy of from either on iTunes, Amazon MP3 store, or via skreemr is Oblivious by Aztec Camera. Meanwhile, YouTube does not disappoint.

Particularly the line “I see you crying and I want to kill your friends”.

From Q&A: Talking with Stephen King in Time Magazine.

Do you actually think Britney and Lindsay should be on our cover?
Yeah, I do.

Sort of a, ‘This is what the media’s actually interested it, so let’s just put it out there’ thing?
I think there ought to be some serious discussion by smart people, really smart people, about whether or not proliferation of things like The Smoking Gun and TMZ and YouTube and the whole celebrity culture is healthy. We’ve switched from a culture that was interested in manufacturing, economics, politics — trying to play a serious part in the world — to a culture that’s really entertainment-based. I mean, I know people who can tell you who won the last four seasons on American Idol and they don’t know who their f———Representatives are.

But you’ve been well in the public eye for decades now. Is it pretty blatant how much worse it’s gotten?
It’s worse every year. And the guy says to me — the Nightline guy — I didn’t get the guy’s name. Granted, I haven’t been feeling real well and it was a long day of interviews. But he said to me, “If we didn’t cover cultural things, we wouldn’t be covering you and The Mist, and promoting the movie.” And I’m like, “Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan aren’t cultural.” They aren’t political. They’re economic only in the mildest sense of the word. In fact, if I had to pick somebody, some celebrity who has had some impact this year, some sort of echo in the larger American life, I would say Hannah Montana. That whole issue of online ticket sales and scalping fascinates me. There are [legitimate] issues there about the Internet, so that actually does seem to have some cultural significance. But Britney? Britney Spears is just trailer trash. That’s all. I mean, I don’t mean to be pejorative. But you observe her behavior for the past five years and you say, “Here’s a lady who can’t take care of her kids, she can’t take care of herself, she has no retirement fund, everything that she gets runs right through her hands.” And yet, you know and I know that if you go to those sites that tell you what the most blogged-about things on the Internet are, it’s Britney, it’s Lindsay. So I think it would be terrific [to have them as TIME Persons of the Year]. There would be such a scream from the American reading public, sure. But at the same time, it’s time for somebody to discuss the difference between real news and fake news.

(via Open Culture)