"Avoid all needle drugs. The only dope worth shooting is Richard Nixon."
-Abbie Hoffman
Learning the Lessons Of Nixon
Blogger Jay McCarthy's family home was destroyed by fire. Donate here to help Jay's family with the extra costs that insurance will not cover.
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11/28/2003
Adam goes to Best Buy at 5AM
Why? Well, it turns out that BB was giving out some insane rebates on computers. It turns out that people showed up as early as 4AM. Adam details the mayhem.
What's scarier: Aliens, or Movable Type documentation?
I've wanted to thoroughly prepare myself for porting this weblog to Movable Type, so instead of my usual rush-in-headlong-and-swear-when-you-meet-an-obstacle approach I've been taking time to do a lot of reading before doing anything. As I packed to visit my (wonderful) relatives in New Jersey for Thanksgiving this year, I pulled out my copy of Essential Blogging with the intention of reading the Movable Type segments of the book which I previously skipped in favor of the Blogger portions.
Scary!!
Upload all of the files in the Movable Type directory to your web server. Upload all these files/olders in ASCII mode: docs, lib, mt.cfg, styles.css, tmpl, and all of the CGI scripts...Upload these files in Binary mode: image. Note: be careful when uploading your files as certain files must be uploaded in ASCII mode, whereas others must be uploaded in binary mode. If you get it wrong, the system will not work.
Translation: MT is going to pop out of your chest and start eating your face.
I know there will be some readers who will look at the above and think, Oh, Come On. Get a Grip. But, consider for a few moments how few people would even be able to change the permissions on a file on a UNIX system; reflect momentarily on your own l33tness and realize its true uniqueness. Myself, to truly understand a lot of what's going on would require a stack of those telephone-size technical books, several on UNIX, a number on Perl, and something on web servers and the CGI-bin. My professional experience has not generally acquainted me with these subjects, so I basically do such installations "blind" -- that is blindly following the installation instructions, and if anything goes wrong I have no idea what to do.
Ok, I know my FTP program has an autodetection mode that would take care of this stuff, I think. But in general, a short perusal of what I've got gives me the notion that I'd have to be a lot more familiar with UNIX than I really am, and my familiarity with Perl or the database used to store the data is, well, zero. Fortunately for me Dear Husband already has a working implementation of MT on his server (even though his own main blog is in Greymatter). Nonetheless, I would like to become familiar enough with the system so that I can install patches and plugins on my own. Since I understand the basic UNIX file management commands and changing permissions I think I should be able to do this.
And I do look forward to learning about it. My maxim in things technical is Feel the Fear, Make a Backup, and Do It Anyway. I realize I could just go for TypePad, but I think it will be kind of fun to have my own system. I haven't played around with any UNIX for awhile, at least not since I was using my Linux box regularly, and commandline has its own charms.
After reading this post by Betsy, in which she finally has a dream about her mother that doesn't involve the terminal illness that ended her life, I wondered when I was finally going to have a dream in which my father showed up. Do you find that it takes a long time for your dreams to catch up with reality? It took me nearly a year before I started having dreams in which I was a mother. Sometimes events do break through this stasis; after I was in the hospital with an illness, I had a week in which I had a series of terrifying nightmares that didn't involve hospitals or sickness but in which I was always being run over by cars, or people were breaking into my house, and one particularly colorful one where apparently sharks had figured out how to swim through air (all the better to accelerate down the hallway to eat me).
Well, my friend Meg reports on a dream she had showing what my Dad is up to in the afterlife. Apparently he's set up shop as a business consultant:
I had a really nice dream about your dad this morning. I was in a large open office with a bunch of cubicles in it. It was nighttime, and I think there was some kind of party going on. Someone had a headache and I directed them to a huge bottle of Excedrin in the desk in this one cubicle near the outer wall. I went in there myself a while later, and there was Joe sitting behind the desk, looking about 40-ish.
I said hello, asked him how his trip was, how things were going. He said everything was great and he was really happy. I asked some sort of general afterlifey questions, and he was deliberately and bemusedly evasive about the answers to those. We chatted for a little while, and then I introduced him to my boss at the dance studio. She's been struggling and frustrated on a number of fronts lately, and it occurred to me that he might have some great advice for her. It seemed like just the right thing to do. When I left the cubicle, they were chatting away.
Good old Joe. Always helping out.
I think this dream is particularly nice for a couple of reasons. Before he had his heart attacks, my Dad was a very Type-A person -- driven, hurried, and sometimes hostile. His illness really changed his personality. He became more reflective and more likely to see things from others' point of view, rather than the kind of Generalissimo tunnel vision that many driven career people have where other people are often seen as obstacles rather than as unique humans. He took up meditation. To my shock and delight, he became very interested in interior decorating, and when he bought a condo he spent a lot of time designing his own living space and collecting artwork, particularly pottery and rugs, to go in it. If you hadn't known him before, his transformation into Mr. Better Homes and Gardens wasn't nearly as shocking and funny, but to us it was. It seemed like a kind of unearthing process; he was coming out from under all the personal and societal crap about success and being a breadwinner and being a guy and instead just being a person among people.
Most of Meg's relationship with my Dad happened before this, however, and my Dad wasn't always very nice to Meg. I think it's a testament to Meg's essential character that she hasn't held any grudges even though she's certainly entitled. I think it's wonderful when people are able to change their minds about each other and not be constrained by history, but to take a bigger, more expansive view, one with more possibilities; one with a future. Forgiveness is a wonderful trait to have; it makes all things new.
Susan Mernit reports that she is taking her bicycle on CalTrain, the commuter railway that runs along the peninsula capped by San Francisco, to get to work. Once she gets off the train, she can use her bike to get where she wants to go. The only thing that I am more envious of than the special space set aside in one of the cars to store bikes is the total lack of hostility towards bicycles adopted by the transit officials who run the system. In Boston conductors and token sellers look upon bicyclists who use the limited and begrudging hours you can bring a bike on the transit system (which doesn't include rush hour) as nuisances that they'd gladly be rid of. The frankly hostile treatment on the commuter trains by conductors who would like nothing better than to turn you away with your bicycle is particularly bad.
Critt has put up a new category on his blog, just listing ideas for future blog posts. He calls it seeds. Critt's seeds are just one word. Why would I read them? Well, it turns out they are very pretty:
passion and decisiveness
republic
oath
1st ammendment
clean water
I suspect most of us who blog a lot have a backlog of "blogseeds." For a long time I used Stickies, a Windows clone of the popular Mac utility that allows you to make short notes that look like Post-It Notes that "stick" to your desktop. Sometimes I used Notepad, too. When I'm out in the Real World, I use a small Moleskine notebook. These days I mostly use the "Draft" function of Blogger. But I like this idea of making blogseeds public, if a bit hidden out of the way of the main blog. What if someone besides me wants to come along and water them by making a comment? I used to get this kind of participation all the time when I worked in an office because I was really into whiteboards, and my co-workers would come by and look at what I had written and drawn there and give me their two cents.
My whiteboards were like temporary frescoes where you could see my thoughts, and unlike a fresco, it wasn't vandalism to come along with a marker and write on them.
But the "fresco of the mind" represented a special category of thought: ideas that I had that I hadn't acted on or made widely public yet. Blogs have some of this longitudinal ad-hockery, in that they allow us to expose not just "finished product" but the stream of our thought. The fact that blogging tools lower the labor cost of making or modifying the webpage make it much more likely that we might make a post that simply says "Garanimals!" and leave it at that, than we did when we made and modified each page by hand. But for me, and I suspect for a lot of us, there's a sort of lower limit of thought that makes it on to a blog. Critt's idea of blogseeds represent a kind of liminal state.
Now that makes me think of something else: what if I could have a "public whiteboard" on my blog? Maybe you could see part of it through a window in a sidebar here, and if you clicked on it, you could see what's on my whiteboard, and then pick up some virtual dry-erase markers and have-at too. Now that's a reason I could get behind buying a Tablet PC (the kind that Scoble talks about here). One of the pleasures of a whiteboard was the kind of freeform entry; sure, you wouldn't write anything long, but it was incomparable for writing something short, and for drawing diagrams, which I love to do but haven't found anything on a computer that makes it as fun as a whiteboard...Whiteboards are like coloring for grownups. I'd love to have a program on my PC that let me have an "electronic whiteboard" that published automatically to the web and let others write on free space. I know about these things, but they're cumbersome and expensive, and every time I see one, I think, well it would take me about a day to lose the special marker. What I'd like is an app that responds to a touch-sensitive screen on my PC. I'd write on it with a stylus, push a button at the bottom, and dump it to the web. When I wanted to erase a part, I'd wave my hand or finger over the screen, and republish. It would save states, so I could say, What did my whiteboard have on it a year ago?
How do you collect seeds for your weblog (and other stuff?)
What confused me is that Prose's hour essentially amounted to a celebration rather than a condemnation of gluttony. An intellectual muddiness mashed together people who gain a few pounds with those who endanger their health, and condemned anyone who criticized either of them as some sort of shallow, vain, self-obsessed health Nazis.
Which brings us back to the original topic: why is something like overeating a moral issue at all? Doesn't God want us to enjoy life? Well, sure he does. But he also calls us to be a good steward of all of his creation. The human body -- so beautiful and intricate and perfect and adaptable -- is surely one of the greatest of his creations. We should no more be happy and content to treat our bodies like trash dumpsters, stuffing junk into ourselves, than we would approve of someone clogging a beautiful natural stream with Hefty bags of trash. yesterday Even if you don't believe in God, your body is what you've got to carry yourself around with until you rejoin the Earth, and you should treat your own body -- your own piece of Nature -- as least as well as you would a forest trail or a wild bird.
In our society, this notion is often confused and lumped in with a kind of no-fun neo-Puritanism that would have you constantly on the treadmill and eating soy products. It's not: it's about some concepts that are very hard to grasp in American society: moderation, stewardship of scarce resources (we only get one body), and a recognition of the impact our actions have on others. As someone who had the intensely unpleasant experience of finding her father dead at 61 because he couldn't or wouldn't cut out the cheesesteaks despite heart disease and diabetes, I can hardly see gluttony as a victimless crime. Self-destructiveness might seem to be a personal choice, but it's not to the people who love us and want to have us around for a long time.
The good news is that we don't have to be perfect; we just have to have good stewardship of Nature -- starting with ourselves -- as a goal, and make a sincere effort to try to treat all of Creation with respect. Even if our backyard is a mess and we're not so hot on recycling and use disposable diapers and are carrying a few extra pounds and really crave a Big Mac, that's okay. We can start from wherever we are, and each action we take -- cleaning up a bit of trash in a public park, choosing to walk somewhere instead of driving, passing by that fast food, is a gift to Nature, and if you are so inclined, to God -- a personal gift you are making by caring for his Creations, including you.
Advent Calendar Blog: Subscribe to Daily Christmas Factoids from Now Until the Holiday
In preparation for the upcoming holiday, I've launched a sideblog Advent Blog, which will show one Christmas-related factoid or story a day. New entries will appear in the Advent Blog sidebar on this page, or, alternatively, you can subscribe to the Advent Blog's RSS feed. Or, if you'd like to see it directly you can just go there now.
Some notes: I had hoped to make a simple second blog with an RSS feed and have it populate the sidebar. I tried Feedster to do this, and although it does create a link for a "BlogTOC," it wasn't quite what I had in mind. I tried Sideblog, too, but it crashed. There are a number of scripts that will take an RSS feed and display them on your webpage, but they involve installing PHP on your server, which I feel is a bit beyond my abilities today. So right now, I have a simple Blogger-based blog for the Advent Blog entries, and I link them via Blogrolling.com, which populates the Advent Blog box on this page. It's all a bit cumbersome, and I'm not certain it's better than doing it manually. If anyone has any suggestions for a way to get an RSS feed from another blog to populate a box on this page, do let me know about it. In the meantime, holiday cheer for all, even if it means Santa will have to hand-code those URLs!
What they don't know is if they did actually buy something none of the employees would have known how to work the register anyway. That place is MBI (mouth-breathing idiot) central. I'm praying for the day when they put in self-service checkout so I don't have to torment myself watching someone try to make change from a ten and fail because they can't subtract.
Why am I choosing Movable Type as my new blogging platform? Software and the Great Middle Way
"Free from extremes, it is the great middle way," reads a verse in The Aspiration Prayer of Mahamudra, a prayer that reflects on how to apply Buddhist teachings to the notion of personal progress as you make choices in life.
Don't get too far from the middle, it says, and this reminds me of advice I used to give my clients on how to choose software for their businesses. Back when I was a technology analyst, I was frequently asked by my clients what software to buy. I advised people on inventory management software -- software that told them where and what was in their warehouse. Because of the scale of the implementations, the cost of putting in a new system often exceeded a million dollars. In addition, if it didn't work, it meant that the company couldn't ship things to their customers. It was very high-risk, the equivalent of a heart transplant for a company.
Often, once some research was done, it would turn out that there really weren't that many choices that fit their needs and would work with what they already had in the rest of their business -- everything from logistics and accounting software to barcode scanners. But this didn't always make the decision any easier. Sometimes there were wide price disparities between the remaining options. At other times, one package would seem to be technologically far advanced from the others, and offer features the client really wanted, but the company that developed it was small and unstable.
In these situations, I almost always advised the client to go straight for the middle and stay there. Don't be tempted by the low-cost competitor, or the competitor with all the new gizmos. Go for the product that is stable and attracts the most third-party developers and VARs (people to sell and install the software). It might not be the cheapest or the most cutting edge, but you're much more likely not to be stuck on a technological island as the low-cost or technologically advanced product is abandoned and not supported anymore.
Was I wrong a lot? Sure. Sometimes the Great Middle Software would stagnate. Sometimes the low-cost or high-tech providers were right on the cusp of a breakthrough that made them the dominant provider next year. But usually I was right, because the Great Middle Software company had things going for it that didn't necessarily show up in a demo but made the whole company more stable so that over time, more features and more quality was added to that software. Good examples would be a big reseller channel, or lots of third-party developers writing add-on modules for that package. That kind of traction takes years to build and is a fearsome barrier to entry to any competitor.
So now I am eating my own dogfood and taking what I believe to be the Great Middle Way in my choice of blogging platform. Sure, I'm intrigued by Blogware -- Joey's blog looks awesome in it, and I think the feature set is cool. Radio is likely to be the first beneficiary of Dave Winer's Channel Z initiative, which would make a blog into a chameleon, switching from reverse-chron to hierarchical to wiki-like at the click of a link. Blogger might wake up from it's Google-inspired trance and start adding features again (if they are allowed to skip the useless "strategy meetings" that I suspect are clogging up their schedule as Google tries to remember why they bought them and what the heck they are going to do now).
But I'm choosing Movable Type anyway. They've got the third-party developers making plugins; they've started to ink reseller agreements. I suspect that if I migrate to Movable Type, I'll be able to get new features for my blog just by sitting there and waiting for them as Six Apart and the developer community makes stuff for themselves. Then, if they stagnate or crash, well, it's migrate-to-the-next-ice-floe before this one sinks time again. My guess? I'll be pretty happy for the next three years, after an intensely miserable install and work out the bugs phase.
Really Simple Events (RSE): Extending RSS into Calendars
I'm very interested in the idea of extending RSS into calendars (see a previous post on the topic). On a weekly basis I scan the "egghead events" listings at local universities and bookstores for readings and lectures I'd like to attend (For a list of the calendars I browse, look on the right-hand column on this page, just below the blogroll). But what I'd really like is to be able to subscribe to their calendars via RSS and have them populate a calendar or events listing on my webpage.
Via Scoble, I find the blog of Robert McLaws, who has the same idea and even a nifty name for it: Really Simple Events (RSE). Be sure to check the comments below the post, where several visitors to his blog offer news of what's happening in the calendar syndication space.
In a previous blog entry, I noted the startling deficiencies of the New Yorker's website:
I actually retyped this because the New Yorker's website is so incredibly poor, as compared to, for example, the website of The Atlantic Monthly's. The New Yorker only puts a few articles per week on the site and then doesn't index or perhaps deletes those from previous weeks, while the Atlantic posts and indexes every article, has bonus material, and has made a real effort at archiving works from long-ago issues (the magazine was started shortly after the Civil War) online.
Via The Kicker comes the excellent news that Greg.org is launching a New Yorker archive that will be searchable and available as an RSS feed.
All I want to know is: Where is the PayPal button on this guy's page? I am itching to send him money, just itching!
Grief: it's all in your head. (So's everything else.)
Psychscape, which provides commentary on the most interesting new research out of teh Medscape site, has a post up on a study of the impact of grief on the brain.
The study employs functional MRI (fMRI), which allows researchers to see what parts of the brain are most active during a particular task. So what lit up for the grieving participants when they looked at a picture of a loved one?
Interestingly enough, this distributed neural network subserves affect processing, mentalizing, episodic memory retrieval, processing of familiar faces, visual imagery, autonomic regulation, and modulation/coordination of these functions. This neural network may account for the unique, subjective quality of grief and provide new leads in understanding the health consequences of grief and the neurobiology of attachment.
...This finding that a significant activation in the left medial frontal gyrus corresponds to the regions associated with mentalizing, i.e., representing one’s own and others’ mental states suggests that the participants reflected on their own state of mind, as well as that of the person in the picture, during the elicitation of grief. This is suggestive of Bowlby who viewed grief as a natural expression of what he called the "attachment behavioral system," evoked to discourage prolonged separation of an individual from a primary attachment figure.
So grief seems to light up the same parts of the brain that light up when a baby is taken away from its mother, for example.
Now, participants in the study were asked to bring a photo of a loved one who had died. I could bring a photo, I suppose, but my problem is that the MicroCenter consumer electronics catalog makes me tear up. No more buying gizmos for Dad for Christmas, I think.
I've blogged before about the book Hardcore Zen, an autobiography of Akron punk band Zero Defex guitarist Brad Warner, who gets the job of his dreams working on Godzilla-style Japanese TV and also becomes a Buddhist monk while living in Japan. The book's cover features the bathroom and toilet of my beloved Someday Cafe in Davis Square. In another interview, Warner comments on why he and the publisher chose to put a picture of a toilet on the cover of a book about Buddhism:
"The reason that it has that cover was to keep it from being stocked in the Buddhism section of the bookshop," he says. "It's written more for people who don't have any interest in Buddhism. I kind of feel that there's something in the philosophy that could be useful to people that would never come upon it if it's presented the way it always is: 'This very bland, stoic, arcane, academic philosophy.' I wanted to get it out of the Buddha-nerd ghetto."
Works for me. Still not clear if Warner has ever visited the Someday or the aforementioned bathroom. The book's publisher, Wisdom, is located in Somerville within rock-throwing distance of the cafe, though.
If you are still kicking around the idea of creating a wireless access point at The Someday Cafe, you may be interested in the following snippet from the Doc Searls weblog -- it describes a package for managing a public wifi access point which is free to community wireless access providers.
Some blog tools publish RSS feeds automatically, and others don't. What if you want to read a blog in your news aggregator that doesn't have a feed? Well, with MyRSS, you can make one! You don't even have to wait for the author of that site -- or the author of the weblog software they use -- to get around to it.
It's as simple as could be -- you just click on "Add A Feed" and give MyRSS the URL of the site, and it creates an RSS feed for it. Now, those RSS feeds are hosted at MyRSS, and in order to keep their bandwith consumption down, free feeds are only updated once a day. If you feel strongly about sharing a non-RSS enabled website with the rest of the world via syndication, you can "sponsor" a feed by giving a small amount of money; then the feed will be updated once an hour.
I'm going to inaugurate my use of this service by making an RSS feed for Me and Ophelia, a blog by Ingrid Jones of Dorset, UK. Okay, here goes, I'm typing in the URL into MyRSS...
Holy cow, it worked! I'm always so thrilled when technological stuff works the first time around!
So here is a link to an RSS 1.0 feed for Ingrid's blog: Me And Ophelia RSS 1.0. Now, if you click on that you're going to get a very funny looking page full of tags and stuff. However, if you are using a RSS aggregator/newsreader to look at blogs you'll be able to add it to your RSS favorites and get notified each time a new post comes up. For her part, Ingrid can put a link to it on her sidebar to let others know that her site is now available in RSS.
Does raising money online really change anything about politics?
Back at Bloggercon the subject of raising money online for political campaigns was a contentious issue:
Dave Winer: "What did you listen to aside from their money? I find it kind of galling that you use the Internet to raise money for TV ads."
Are blog-community generated political donations a tax on the smart, the way the lottery is a tax on the stupid? Is it a way to get money from smart, formerly disaffected people, to make TV ads to get the dumb, disaffected people watching The Bachelor?
When he's talking about power back in the hands of people he seems to make that notion completely synonymous with giving money. Maybe that's the case now - but is that the way it should always be? "Are we going to be the Status Quo Party?" Apparently.
Dave Winer's ideas have influenced me to think that the Dean campaign is doing nothing new or interesting if they are using the Internet as a new tool to get more TV ads. The money should go back into a real political discourse, not into infecting the Internet with the old disease.
It occurred to me today why I had a problem with the idea that raising money online is just the Same Old Same Old. It is this: in every political campaign since JFK, television has played a crucial role. It still does today. There are lots and lots of people in this country whose primary source of news is television and other mass media. These people vote. As campaigns have gotten more expensive, more effort by candidates has been made to raise money for television and other mass-media ads. Before the advent of the internet, they raised this money at big-donor schmoozefests. Nobody took the concerns of small-dollar givers seriously because there was no way to raise money efficiently enough from them to fund even one campaign ad.
So this is what's changed: it used to be that only PACs and corporations could buy airtime. Now The People can.
Elections are conversations that are mediated by candidates. When I vote for, say, Al Gore, I'm making a statement about my values to other voters, and when they vote they are making a statement about what's important to them that I can hear through the election results. The 2000 election was a conversation between the Red States and the Blue States (okay, the conversation was mostly an exchange of raised middle fingers, but it was still an exchange of information). Right now, a lot of the conversation that composes an election happens on television. For the first time in my lifetime, I can combine with other voters in numbers large enough to buy my own campaign ad and take part in that very expensive conversation.
Before now, that part of the conversation -- which made up a huge chunk of what many voters knew about candidates -- was funded almost exclusively by large-dollar corporate and PAC givers. And as a result, it ineluctably ended up saying what they wanted to say, and not what I and my fellow voters wanted it to say. I want to talk to those people who watch the Bachelor and think Saddam was funding al Qaida and think that Republican tax cuts made their life better, and to do so I need a TV ad. They do not live in my neighborhood and they do not read my blog and they are not going to anytime soon. But they are citizens just like me, and I want to have a conversation with them about something we both care about: what's happening to our country. And I want to have a conversation with them that isn't bought and paid for by special interest groups. I want the message to come from me, not from Exxon or a trial lawyers' PAC.
So I think raising money on the Internet does matter and does make a positive difference because it changes the balance of power between large organized givers and ordinary citizens. The internet makes it possible and cost-effective to raise a lot of small-dollar contributions in a short time and reduce a candidate's dependency on special interest groups and corporations, and that does matter.
We can lament the fact that so much of our national conversation happens on television, and that as a result it's so expensive to produce, but to dump TV is to dump millions of voters, primarily older Americans and poorer Americans who get their news and views from television, newspapers, and AM talk radio. We can ignore them, but we do so entirely at our own peril, because, especially those older Americans, do they ever vote.
bookofjoe is the only anesthesiologist medblogger I know. I really like his blog, both because it often makes me laugh and because he links to interesting stuff. Joe's blog is also an exemplar of the "small bites" type of blog (whereas my posts tend to be Hungry Man Dinner length).
Today I noticed that Joe has a piece up at Blogcritics responding to David Brooks' recent NYT column endorsing gay marriage from a conservative point of view.
Being a hospital chaplain during a healthcare crisis
Magdalen News has a post on the healthcare crisis and faith:
Right now in the US, [healthcare] is under acute strain. I do not believe it can continue in its current form for the next ten years. I can't see what form it will take instead. But I know that it is going to be shaped by individuals and groups who take the trouble to learn about the economics and policies of healthcare and to push for a system that reflects our values. Policy, at the national level, is not my strong suit; I'm not an economist, and my memory of Civics class involves a lot of reading novels in the back row. But some of us are going to have to learn how to think about the problem, mighty quick.
Meanwhile, for the time being, my role is to keep asking questions: What do we believe is important? How are we called to live? How will the Church (and the Synagogue, and the Sangha, and the Circle) take part in the conversation about how we care for each other? How will each of us individually begin to live our values and beliefs professionally as well as personally, publicly as well as privately? How will my ministry be both pastoral and prophetic, in a time of enormous change? How will our society handle the three-way tension among technology that allows us to do almost anything-- the economic reality that not everyone can benefit from such technology-- and the spiritual truth that not everything that's possible is good for us? How can our progress and our problem solving be guided by sanity, compassion, justice and mercy?
A few days ago I blogged about my resolve to port my blog off of Blogger. Frankly, I had been thinking about addressing my many legacy issues with this site for a long time, but like a lot of things, it took one incident to really make me fed up enough to get started.
I suspect a lot of people eventually migrate from one blogging platform to another, and in particular I think there are a lot of bloggers who like me are moving from Blogger to Movable Type. So, I am going to post periodic updates on my progress and how I did each step in case others would like some insight into how it works.
Porting is not the only thing I will be doing, however. My aim (and we'll see how far I get) is to physically move the files from my ISP in Canada to my husband's co-lo server in Virginia, at a savings to our family of $240 a year in saved hosting fees, not to mention the fact that I will have a lot more disk space, which will enable me to start posting photos again. I also want to move the site out of its HTML-table based layout into a CSS layout which is cleaner, faster, and more accessible to people using adaptive technology due to low or no vision or other handicaps. I'll probably also upgrade search and do some fun things with logs.
So, those first steps:
First I made a complete backup of my site onto a CD. I used a program called NetLoad to do this. NetLoad allows you to look at a website and make a complete copy of it and its subfolders on a folder on your hard drive. Once I did this, I burned the website onto a CD.
This morning, I uploaded all those files to Dear Husband's server. First I was going to use Netload, just in reverse, to say, okay, make this directory on this server look exactly like this folder with my website in it here on my hard drive. But NetLoad kept crashing on this one. Dear Husband recommended that I download SmartFTP and use that instead. Worked like a charm, and at first blush I really like the look and feel of SmartFTP.
Now that I've got a reliable backup, and have moved the files to the server they're going to live on, there's lots more to do. I have to import my blog posts from Blogger into Movable Type. There have been reports that it's difficult to port blogs with more than a certain number of entries from Blogger into MT (it's a big number, but my blog is nearing its fourth birthday and I suspect I have more than that number), so I have some concerns about that. Once I port my blog, I'll "flip the switch" so that you, the visitor, will be directed to the Fig.com server instead of the Intergate server where my site is currently hosted. So I will also have to deal with the Evil Netsol to change my DNS so that when you type www.cadence90.com you get taken to the new server instead of the old one. I'll let you know how it goes.
In our most recent town election, there were 23 candidates for office. Out of those candidates, 4 had websites, and none had weblogs.
Our local weekly newspaper simply isn't big enough to give adequate space and attention to the full dimensions of the civic conversation. There's one editor, and one reporter, who, respectively, have between eight and ten pages weekly of space that they can fill, and usually two or three of that are filled with community-bulletin-board style prepackaged listings. (Watertown isn't alone among small and midsize communities in suffering from this sort of "news anorexia." For a lot of people living outside of major urban areas, it's easier to flip on CNN and find out what's going on in Indonesia than it is to find out what happened at the last school committee meeting. I talk more about this issue, and what bloggers can do about it, in my essay The Blogger as Citizen Journalist).
After the election, I opined as I would like it if some of the folks who were elected -- and at least one person who wasn't -- would start a blog to combat the news vacuum citizens of Watertown face. In particular, I'd love it if Susan Falkoff, Pam Piantedosi, and John Portz (all on the town council) had blogs, and I'd also love to see Anita O'Brien, who was a candidate for School Committee and is the head of the nonprofit Watertown Education Foundation have a blog. I really want to know what these people have to say, and not through the very narrow funnel of the Watertown Tab.
I had planned to buy a few copies of Essential Blogging or Rebecca Blood's book, and pass them out, and offer to help a person do the initial setup work on a blog. Thus far all that has stopped me from doing so is shyness, because I don't know any of these people personally, but I still want to do it.
Eric, another Watertown resident and blogger, has an even more revolutionary idea: why isn't the Watertown website a blog? His notion is that the backend of the city's website could easily be a community-oriented blogging platform like Scoop.
I suspect that the reason that this never occurred to me is my native pessimism about getting organizations, be they civic, corporate, or nonprofit, to make significant changes in the way they communicate with the outside world. Such organizations are natural conservatives, and their web presence is usually well behind whatever could be considered cutting-edge in terms of either technology or philosophy. Often, the fear of change and fear of distributing power to more than a few people are stated as security concerns. I suspect the most common response by the people who currently maintain the Watertown website to changing the site into a blog where many people could post is, "Well, what if one of the posters says something that gets us sued?" Thus is the boogeyman of potential lawsuits used to defend the status quo.
But I think Eric's notion is a good challenge to my native pessimism about organizations, which is, after all, just as likely to be wrong as a native optimism about the same subject. It's entirely possible that the folks behind the Watertown website are themselves reading blogs and think they are cool and would be interested in a pilot project. Who knows? In any case, I think a nice email to the site maintainers is in order, simply because it's such a dramatic improvement over what came before. Regardless of how it proceeds I think it will become an important news and information service for Watertown residents, who, after all, just wanna know when the overnight parking ban starts!
That said, I think Eric and I and other Watertown bloggers should cook up a plot to get more civically-minded people and town officials to blog. We should befriend the civically-minded among us, and maybe they'll soak up our "pinko-bloggie" mindset. Of course, when they do, we'll be right there to set up their blogs for them, and before they know it, they'll have their first "Hello World!" post.
Way down at the end of the story is what could be the punchline: Attorneys contested eight ballot interpretations. As eight is bigger than three...this leaves Corbett free to have a court challenge. The article doesn't say whether Corbett is considering it. Right now, Falkoff is the official winner of the election, and that would only be changed if Corbett brought a suit and won it -- even while such a suit was going on, Falkoff would still have her seat.
Another interesting detail is that Falkoff's recount law expert (both candidates were represented by a lawyer who sat at the recount table as election officials did the recount) was Dennis Newman, who was one of Al Gore's lawyers during the Palm Beach County, Florida recount during the 2000 election. My first reaction? Wow, things must be slow in the off season!
A few weeks ago I covered an event where the filmmakers of the documentary Unprecedented! The 2000 Presidential Election screened the film and did a Q&A; afterwards. It strikes me as funny that people from that film are hanging around my little town.
posted by Lisa Williams 11/23/2003
Congresscritters act to outlaw spam
I expected this to take a lot longer, given the fact that it took several decades to see federal legislation restricting telemarketing, but over at Blogcritics there's a piece up on the bill that just passed the House that would make spam illegal:
The House voted overwhelmingly Saturday for a bill to outlaw most Internet spam and create a "do not spam" registry for those who do not wish to receive unsolicited junk e-mail.
Obviously this is going to be a helluva lot more difficult to enforce than the telemarketing act -- it's not clear to me that a registry approach will do anything at all to offshore spammers. I suspect that one approach that would work better is to require ISPs to put up more spam-filters, but I doubt that Congress wants to attack spam by placing regulations on telecommunications companies, and it's not clear that doing so would really eliminate all spam although I suspect it would be more effective than a registry approach.
In any case, I'm glad to have our Congresscritters onboard.
For my friend Andy Latto, who has played in bridge tournaments with his Dad, A post on The Bermuda Bowl, a premier bridge tournament might be of interest...
For the past week or so I have been waking up at night, usually around 4AM, unable to go back to sleep.
At first I attributed this to the small but cumulative discomforts of pregnancy, but I realized that it was not back aches or a leg cramp or the need to visit the bathroom that was waking me up. What was inside my head was waking me up.
I would trundle out of bed in my pajamas and sit at the dining room table, idly browsing the latest blog posts in my newsreader. My thoughts turned again and again to of all things, babysitters.
And for some reason thinking about babysitters made me miserable all out of proportion to my difficulties with them. Nobody seemed to care, I thought, about coming on time, or in some cases coming at all; being the custodial parent it was always me left holding the bag; like the car and the bridge abutment, the car always moves, the bridge abutment never does -- everyone else's schedule always took precedence over my own, I thought glumly.
I think now that I was sad because the message that I was getting from all this was that nobody besides me thought that the things I was doing with my time was important and thus worth showing up for. Furthermore, what if they were right? What if their assessment of the importance of what I was doing was more in line with what beloved old Philip K. Dick called The Reality Situation?
I mean, who really needs a satirical novel set in the year 2034? How could anything that I had to do or say rise above the level of a mere hobby? There are the lucky few who are certain in their knowledge that what they do every day has inherent value; they teach the young to read, they look for cures for cancer; they try to govern wisely; yet even a worker at the most modest job has their paycheck to point to when asked why they get up every day, and if that worker has a family their efforts are further dignified by the fact that they use the money they earn to support their family.
Those of us outside the official economy -- the mothers, the old, the disabled -- have no such prescripted supports of their reason for being. Society tells them in ways large and small that they are just taking up space.
Oh, sure, I had my philosophical defenses: Isaac Newton and Thomas Jefferson didn't get paid for their famous efforts. They, like me, could only be considered hobbyists; yet no one could deny the value of their contributions. The books of Dickens and Beecher Stowe and Sinclair did more to clean up child labor, slavery, and meat packing, respectively, than did any legislator of their time, so their scribblings could not be considered idle; and who couldn't see the chinks in the armor of the economy when in its supposedly infinite wisdom it neglected to pay little if anything for food for the poor or a decent education for all?
Indeed, I had such arguments: but what if the world was telling me, "Oh, by the way: Those are bullshit."
Thus the number of steps between trouble with childcare and existential crisis are shown to be worryingly small.
I attempted to settle myself into a sort of glum stoicism. As I had been reading in A History of Knowledge just the previous day:
Stoicism taught that happiness consists in conforming the will to the divine reason, which governs the universe. A man is happy if he fully accepts what is and does not desire what cannot be.
So parenting is a Good Thing. It is not as if I have been sentenced to a prison camp, I thought. If I do not do anything else, well, all I can say is that I am aligned with the Reality Situation. Best to give up such filmy aspirations and rededicate myself to the sturdy and observable work of domesticity.
Trying to become a Stoic provided little comfort and instead made me very irritable. My "hobbies" were superfluous, but living without them seemed mean and crabbed, and I stomped around on my mental heath quoting King Lear:
O, reason not the need: our basest beggars
Are in the poorest thing superfluous:
Allow not nature more than nature needs,
Man's life is cheap as beast's...
In fact I did not really feel any better at all until Dear Husband pointed out to me that I was taking very seriously the opinions of people who did not think it was important to vote or to read a book or to have basic professionalism. He himself, he said, thought what I was doing was important, and suggested that my grim outlook might be more the product of isolation than anything else: I was only being exposed to the opinions of people who didn't think what I did mattered. "You know that if you asked Cori, or Cally, or Meg if what you wanted was important they would not tell you No," he said.
I am the same as anybody, I thought. I too want to make some little dent, to contribute something beyond subsistence living. And no one can tell me No.
...some people still seem to think that somehow the whole TCS brouhaha comes down to whether TCS publishes crap and/or tells people what to write. That is, a few lefties seem to be arguing: TCS is a sort of astroturf lobbying front -> TCS publishes crap. Most righties seem to be running this argument in reverse. Since TCS does not publish crap, i.e. it's OK or even quite good, thank you -> TCS cannot be some sort of astroturf lobbying front. It is in fact totally irrelevant whether the content is any good AND whether 99% of the contributors have been told what to say.
There's still just as much of a problem, allegedly. The problem - allegedly - is that TCS is - allegedly (did I remember to say allegedly?) only acquiring all this good stuff by way of assembling respectable cover in which lobbying pieces that want to masquerade as independent journalism can pass for what they are not. This isn't the worst thing anyone has ever done. It's not the sleaziest thing that will happen in journalism this year - if it's true. Its just: a violation of journalistic ethics ... if true. if you can imagine feeling annoyed if the NY Times started selling ads that looked like articles and weren't identified as ads - if you can understand why that might be regarded as a slip in quality-control, you can understand what the concern is here.
Everything about Icelandic geography screams 'Under Construction - Please Come Back Later!', but the Icelanders are a stubborn and resourceful people, and seem perfectly content to wait it out while the various volcanoes do their business and the lichen gingerly get to work turning the rock into something approaching soil. So what if the locals have to make fenceposts and houses from (Siberian!) driftwood, and import whatever wood doesn't float in of its own accord?
The airport he arrives at is separated from Reykjavik by just a field, and in the nightlike 8AM of Iceland, Maciej just picks up his bag and walks toward the lighted city. Do go visit his post -- the writing is funny and he has these wonderful, eerie pictures of mist rising off of Icelandic valleys and lakes.
My endnotes on this post were getting so long and unwieldy that they were clearly lobbying to become their own post, and I support their right of self-determination.
Dave and Andrew pointed to this piece. Andrew is working on an outliner plugin for blogs that I am eager to try and you may have have interest in if you like the idea of injecting some hierarchy/outlining into your blogging.
Ryan and Jay also wrote up some impressions of what they saw. Jim and Adam also put in their two cents.
Adam, in particular, is struck by the similarity between Dave's vision and forum software; I think of what's being proposed above as a type of radically decentralized forum, where bloggers and other purveyors of news are not going to any central "hub" to be able to efficiently respond to one another. The point at which "community" would happen is the point at which a reader would assemble that community in an RSS reader. However, Adam points out that many forum/blog software already supports the export of comment threads as RSS feeds, which can be seen as a sort of "subscribable conversation." That brings up one question that I hadn't thought of before, however: what about the role of comments and threaded discussions? There seem to be a ton of people out there posting comments to blogs who don't have their own blogs and may never want to; how would the representation of such peoples' opinions be blended into this? See The Blogosphere and the Commentsphere for some ideas about the "parallel universe of comments."
As I see it, the nice thing about Our Syndicated Future is that everybody could participate regardless of where they stood on the issue of "hub" sites vs. "everybody with their own decentralized presence, assembled ad-hoc by a reader." As long as everybody adds an RSS feed (or the developer of the software they use kindly does it for them), it'll happen on its own. This is an advantage because it doesn't really require anybody to make a big philosophical decision or even necessarily change platforms -- just add some features to their platform that are good for much more near-term uses than the eventual development of a new layer of the Web. As such, its a change that can and will be accomplished the only way anything of substance gets accomplished in technology (or society): by the incremental actions of many people seeking some new good for themselves and their audience of friends.
For quite some time we have been wary of outliners in general, as being typical of top-down, hierarchical thinking in general. The rigidity of hierarchies seemed to us typical of what we though of as Unix-think, a directory/sub-directory world-view endemic among programmers and one of the barriers between them and the people who would actually be using their products. A world-view which, in our decidedly analog opinion, made it more rather than less difficult to "think outside the box".
But the outliner at the heart of Channel Z is a flexible organizer which is most notable for its ability to create links BETWEEN widely separate and disparate branches of the overall tree, and find and trace relations between information streams which would otherwise not be obviously connected. The ability to create, change, add and shuffle levels and categories allow myriad new ways of organizing and accessing the content, whatever and wherever it is.
Considering recent advances in three-dimesional display technology, I suspect that the two-dimensional mania is a blip on the radar-screen of human consciousness, and a formative epoch which is drawing to an end. The ability to cross-categorize and connect disparate branches of the information tree make Channel Z a true three-dimensional tool for content management. As this is much closer to the way our brains were designed to think, we can't but see it as a huge advance in making the virtual world an integral adjunct to our cognitive apparatus.
See? Now he's gone and gotten me all excited. In truth I expect to wait quite some time to have a blog that I can view in any number of different ways -- reverse-chron, hierarchical, topical, and wiki-like... We wait in hope...
Better Living Through RSS and Our Syndicated Future
I've had an RSS feed for this site for about eight months, and in the last month I've been playing with the benefits of RSS for blog-reading, searching, and site maintenance. I discovered a few nifty things just in the last few days:
FeedDemon tutorial Via Nick Bradbury's blog, I found out about this FeedDemon tutorial. FeedDemon is the RSS reader I use right now, and Nick is the author of FeedDemon as well as a CSS stylesheet editor called TopStyle that Dear Husband swears by.
Speaking of Dave and Better Living through RSS, last night I attended the Thursday night bloggers' meeting at the Berkman Center where Dave demoed -- what should I call it? -- a new kind of architecture for a blogging system, which would eventually enable users to view a blog not just in its plain reverse-chron format but also hierarchically by topic, and in a sort of wiki-like way, depending on the preferences of the reader. Interestingly, each topic and subtopic also has its own unique RSS feed, so you could subscribe, for example, to either "Baseball" or "Baseball>Boston Red Sox" (although that's a bad example as I believe Dave is a Mets fan). If you subscribed to "Baseball," you'd get the underlying stuff about the Sox and any other teams that were lower on the hierarchy. The hierarchy itself is separate from the actual data of the posts, and if someone else liked your categorization scheme and wanted to use it, they could if you wanted to publish an OPML file of that hierarchy and put it in a public place.
In answering the question, "Why do it this way?" Dave gave an interesting response -- the atomization of a blog into feeds would allow users to merge the "my world" of their blog with content from the many "their worlds" on the net. Such merged topical hierarchies could then themselves be exported as an OPML file and a defacto statement of "this is my point of view -- my information and other information from beyond my domain that I think is important."
I really like the idea of giving new forms of representations to blog data beyond simple reverse-chron or simple categories. I'd like to be able to switch views of my blog from reverse-chron to "wiki-like" or even a visual representation of the connections that I am building between me and ideas and others' ideas. I'm thinking of it for myself, but Dave makes a good point about why it is good for readers that are new to a blog (I paraphrase here, so any errors are my own:
What would you do with a blog with 100 or 200 contributors on a subject with tremendous data flow? How do you make that digestible to a reader just coming into it in the middle?
Dave's idea is that supporting views other than reverse-chron gives new participants entry points into the data rather than just throwing them midstream into a conversation that has been going on for some time. As an aside, Dave noted that he doesn't really like the idea of a "team blog" with say 20 people contributing, and I infer from this that he thinks that this is a sort of compromise because we don't have the technology to allow readers to assemble "multiblogs" comprised of any number of different voices on the fly. A point he made about this:
Think of it as building something for the next [event of September 11th's magnitude].
The idea being is that if enough people build and use in this direction, you would have a better platform to see an event in real time as thousands of people blog it, report on it, take photos of it -- and a reader would be able to assemble this into a coherent mass for themselves on the fly, and then save that hierarchy as a snapshot of the state of that day, and allow that hierarchical "tree" to grow leaves and change over time.
Oddly, what this all makes me think of is a remark by my old boss Harry Tse on Chinese food (it's dinner time and I am pretty hungry. Maybe that's why the food metaphors!). He noted that most Chinese food is plated in such a way that knives aren't neccessary for the diner. Western food, he said, involved a different division of labor between the cook and the eater -- western cooks might put a steak on the plate, but a Chinese cook would be more likely to slice the steak into bite-size pieces easy to handle with chopsticks.
In a similar way, development of RSS is changing the division of labor between the author of web content and the reader of web content. Right now, the author is responsible for almost everything including the visual layout of the page. In an RSS world, the reader has much more control over how to display their information to themselves, slicing and dicing incoming information from different sites, displaying it in ways far beyond simple reverse-chron, and putting the visual "sauce" on it that they like best.
Update: See here for other accounts from people who saw the demo and more responses to the ideas therein.
It occurred to me as Christmas approaches that Rowan has no idea who either Jesus or Santa is. Right now, he's going through the vocabulary explosion phase that many toddlers go through where they rapidly acquire a lot of vocabulary. He's started speaking in short sentences and is able to express some abstractions verbally ("Find Nana," for instance, when we were in a grocery store and she was in another aisle) and statements about his own and other peoples' emotional states ("Rowan happy," or "Mommy mad," after I found Rowan and Mercer collaborating on hoovering up breakfast cereal off the pantry floor after they had snagged the box off the shelf).
For now, his sentences are still pretty short, so I've concentrated on getting two messages across. I'll ask him a question, and if he doesn't know the answer I'll supply one. Now we routinely have the following exchanges:
Mommy: Rowan, what does Santa bring?
Rowan: "Toys!"
Mommy: "Rowan, what does Jesus say?
Rowan: "Love people."
In a few days I'll be hauling out the nativity set, so we'll have a little refresher on the whole "Baby Jesus' Birthday" bit. Last week when I took him to church, I asked him, "Do you know what this place is?" and he just looked at me quizzically. So I said, "Church." and he said, "Church." Then he looked around for a bit and said, "House." To which I replied, "Sort of. Jesus' house." For the rest of the service he played with his wooden trains on the pew and occasionally would look around and say, "Jesus house."
At a loss for a nice Christmas present for a very young child?
The younger a child is, the harder it is to confidently select a toy for them that you know that the tot will like. If you have some of the under-5 crowd on your Christmas list this year, you may want to check out the following resources:
The Oppenheim Toy Portfolio is produced by people who review hundreds of toys each year for safety, durability, developmental appropriateness, and the just-plain-fun aspects of toys. Their website has abbreviated versions of the toy rankings broken out by age. If you have your own children, it might be worth the money to buy the annual guidebook, which is easier to flip through and contains articles laying out basic principles that can help you pick good toys.
I also get a lot of ideas from the Constructive Playthings catalog, which always contains a lot of things that are hard to find at mainstream toy outlets like Toys R' Us and Target. If, like me, you want toys that are fun for your kid but don't use electronics to make a lot of noise, Constructive Playthings is a goldmine of inventive and fun toys that don't require batteries -- but aren't boring "granola wooden toys." C'mon, you know the kind I mean.
This is not an anti-anti-depressant rant. Far from it - I believe they're treating a real need. But it disturbs me that they're treating a real need primarily in Women.
If you believe that depression is a brain chemistry problem as much as a malaise of the soul and you believe - as science has shown - that one of the triggers of that problem is extreme stress or trauma then you might come to the conclusion as I have - that's there's a huge number of women who have found something about their experience so stressful, so traumatizing that their brain has ceased to function as it should. And you might further come to the conclusion that as the number of women turning to pharmaceutical support increases that it becomes a little ridiculous to say it's just an individual here and there.
I wrote a comment back:
Francis Fukuyama, in his book "Our Posthuman Future," makes an interesting aside that our modern pharmacology is nudging people towards a neurologically androgenous state containing the good parts of each gender's psyche -- his argument is taht we give little boys Ritalin to make them a bit more compliant and attentive in the classroom, and women SSRIs to increase their serotonin levels to give them some of that "alpha male" feeling.
The alpha-male reference is telling: Robert Sapolsky, a researcher on the neurochemistry of stress (and author of the book aimed at laypeople Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers: A Guide to Stress, Stress-Related Diseases, and Coping, studies primates in the wild. Taking samples from a group of baboons routinely shows that the higher a baboon is on the pecking order, the fewer stress hormones they have circulating in their blood. These same stress hormones, over time, have shown to attack parts of the brain that help form short-term memories and also seem to interfere with the brain's ability to regulate neurotransmitter levels in response to stress -- in particular, it inhibits our ability to take up both dopamine and serotonin, neurotransmitters that a lack of which usually trigger feelings of unhappiness. Taking this view, people who are more likely to be lower in the human social pecking order would be much more likely to be depressed.
Owlmother made an interesting comment in reply:
I am not sure about the effect of Ritalin on sex drive since it's largely little boys treated (though what we don't know about the effects of all these drugs on fertility, etc. will fill books), but SSRIs are legendary for decreasing sex drive. Almost as if moving toward chemical androgyny, we're also moving away from biological imperative to reproduce.
The stress hormones are produced by a little thing called the cortisol gland. The flight or fight mechanism comes from it. In autopsies of suicides the cortisol gland is found to be three to ten times in normal size from overproduction.
The funny thing was that I once knew that the stress hormone in question was cortisol, but I had forgotten. My circulating cortisol level made it tough to recall what cortisol was!
I've blogged about Sapolsky a number of times. I encourage you to find out about his work if you are interested in the workings of either stress or depression. My blog posts link to a number of articles and a link to an archived audio version of an interview he did on the NPR program Fresh Air.
I met poet Martin Espada in college, when I took a class of his. His class was great and his booklist for the class was wonderful. I was just thinking about him because I've been writing a portion of my book in which one of the characters is in prison. In Martin's class we read a poem from a series that was written by a man who was an inmate at the New Mexico State Prison during the 1980 prison riot (here is a brief description of the riot from a student in a New Mexico k-12 public school, on her school's history website. Here's a story from the Albequerque Journal from 1999 looking back on the incident; it has a photo of the charred prison building and describes the horrifyingly gory results of the riot).
In the poem, I remember an image of the narrator lying down on the floor of his cell, and pushing the mattress up against the bars, because fires have been started inside the prison, and the cellblock is filling with smoke. It's a horrible image of a person who must be afraid to die trapped there in a cell without air in a building that's on fire; and the tone is like the tone you find when a reporter suddenly finds themselves in a building that a mortar shell has crashed into: amazed, terrified, aware of every detail.
Was it Jimmy Santiago Baca who wrote this poem? I'm not sure. Maybe I could go to the Grolier Poetry Bookshop a few miles from me in Harvard Square and find out. Maybe I should try to drop Mr. Espada an email to ask. I think he would be cheered up to know that one of his students still thinks about stuff he taught over a decade ago.
The essay [by physicist Werner Heisenberg] is written in a style that seeks to hammer home his ideas with repetition. The central question he is trying to answer is, have we now figured out everything there is to know in physics (so we can therefore pack up and go home, or something)
He looks at the history of physics in chronological order, and details time after time when scientists thought they had the whole thing almost completely figured out, only to discover a new layer that showed them how little they had really discovered.
Again and again, he describes the same thing. They are about to figure it all out, and then they discover the whole thing is only a tiny part of a much more complex picture.
And he gets to the punch line. He asks if we have it all figured out now. His answer: YES!
Except, of course, by the time the ink is dry, Heisenberg is proved wrong. I love the universe for how it routinely afflicts the comfortable. The universe is a Punk, and I like that in a cosmos.
Tech Central Station, a site which has published many authors who got their start by writing their own blogs -- including Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit, "Sydney Smith," the pseudonymous author of Medpundit, and Pejman Yousefzadeh of Pejmanesque -- may turn out to be a unique and uniquely successful variety of astroturf -- that is, fake grassroots media, community, and letters-to-the-editor style support for a political agenda that turns out to be manufactured behind the scenes by a for-profit marketing company. Josh Marshall over at Talking Points Memo defines it thusly:
Simply put, Astroturf organizers are in the business of creating phony grassroots support, or rather the appearance of grassroots support, for this or that cause.
Now it elapses that one of the most prominent Astroturf generators -- DCI Group -- is in fact the real owner of Tech Central Station. You can read Josh Marshall's item on it here. Josh points to the article which broke the story, "Meet The Press," by Nick Confessore in the Washington Monthly. Here's what Confessore found out:
But TCS doesn't just act like a lobbying shop. It's actually published by one--the DCI Group, a prominent Washington "public affairs" firm specializing in P.R., lobbying, and so-called "Astroturf" organizing, generally on behalf of corporations, GOP politicians, and the occasional Third-World despot. The two organizations share most of the same owners, some staff, and even the same suite of offices in downtown Washington, a block off K Street. As it happens, many of DCI's clients are also "sponsors" of the site it houses. TCS not only runs the sponsors' banner ads; its contributors aggressively defend those firms' policy positions, on TCS and elsewhere. (Italics mine).
My question is, what does this mean for the readers and the writers at TCS? One possible scenario is that TCS, unlike conventional media, doesn't make money exclusively from advertising but instead has a roster of clients of DCI who would like certain views and agendas to be talked about, and then DCI "shops" for someone who conveniently holds those views.
If it's happening, that's wrong. But why is it wrong? Well, it's wrong for two reasons: one, in conventional advertising-supported media, the ad for gin or gasoline or a new pharmaceutical is clearly shown to the reader AS AN ADVERTISMENT. If in fact DCI is getting paid to find authors to promote certain views in advance, then those stories are themselves paid advertisements and should be labeled as such. Secondly, if in fact those authors weren't aware that DCI was being paid up front to put out stories with a certain preselected point of view, it's terribly manipulative and abusive of that author's dignity, who is in essence being made to sell a product and star in a commercial without being told about it. Presumably if that author wanted to write press releases for a political action group, industry lobbying group, or think tank for a living, they would apply for those jobs themselves. Not to mention the fact that such jobs would pay quite a bit more than what freelance authors are likely paid for writing articles for a website.
Such "prepaid journalism" can't be confused with what's normally referred to as "editorial bias." Sure, Fox and the NYT have editorial "slants." But as far as we know, neither one is taking money up front from a lobbying group and *then* writing stories tailored to that point of view. If they did, it would rightfully be a Big Scandal. Instead, they take a certain editorial view and take their chances in the free market that that view will be palatable to a big enough audience that advertisers will want to come along for the ride and show their products alongside the news content. In this way, when the money comes and how it comes does make a real difference.
Update & Note: Update: Chris over at Crooked Timber has a take on the story, and also Glenn Reynolds' response to the article, in which he says he never felt pressured to write a certain way, which of course he wouldn't if he were being preselected for his point of view. My point is that if DCI is being paid up front to find people to support their clients' point of view, and DCI was not up front about that with Reynolds and the other writers, then that's abusive. Note: My own earlier take on blogs and journalism, "The Blogger as Citizen Journalist," can be found here.
As Alwin points out, one good reason to read medblogs is that for the layperson, they can filter the confusing welter of health news (butter bad one day, good the next) that has led to many people simply throwing up their hands and saying "I'll do whatever I damn well please," be it drinking, smoking, or eating too much fast food, all the while reminding you that their uncle Aldo did all the same things and lived to be 99. Reading the mainstream medical news through the filter of a medblog gives me as a layperson context and brings me back to the fact that no matter what an individual story says there are basic maintenance rules for our health that I ignore only at my own peril.
I hadn't initially thought of this in conjunction with healthcare policy, but Matt's post today on healthcare reform proposals certainly fills the same function for me, only this time giving me perspective on a number of competing reform proposals.
I love the smell of literary hubris in the morning.
Does Cory Doctorow think he's a better writer than Philip K. Dick?:
With Paycheck (a new John Woo movie based on a Philip K Dick story) opening on Christmas, the time is right for Wired to run a long feature on Dick's life and death, and his posthumous career as a film-writer. I have to confess that I prefer the movies built on Dick's work to the work itself, which I often find clumsily written, thinly characterized, and incoherently plotted -- but when streamlined by a screenwriter and acted out by a cast of talented actors and designed by a stylish director, Dick's work really shines. link
Boy, coming from a guy with one short story collection and one enjoyable novella about Disneyland about a guy who is one of the most influential science fiction writers of the past fifty years, that has the smell of hubris.
This is the kind of crazy-talk that stems from changing from reading weblogs in your browser to reading them in an RSS aggregator. It's so much faster to have an aggregator just show you a list of only the posts you haven't read from the blogs you like on a single page that soon you run out of blogs to read before you run out of coffee in your cup and think, Gee, I need to add some more blogs to my reading list.
And I used to think Jay McCarthy was a nut when he said he read 600 blogs. Now I think, Gee, I wonder if he'll publish an OPML file of his RSS bookmarks.
Interview with Richard Wallace, the creator of the Alice chatbot
From the excellent Collision Detection blog comes a profile of Richard Wallace, the creator of the Alice chatbot, who responds to typed queries with surprisingly lifelike conversational responses. First thoughts: Wallace seems like the kind of guy who needs the services of the Eliza "therapist" chatbot and that he'd also be the kind of person you'd like to have as a friend.
Collision Detection is the site of Clive Thompson, science/technology journalist.
Ever since reading Jane Jacobs' The Death and Life of Great American Cities, I've looked at cities in a new way. Well, maybe that's not entirely accurate. I like cities, and I like living in an urban area. I like the fact that there is a sidewalk outside my house and I didn't mind when I lived in an area so dense that when I walked outside I could reach out and touch my neighbors house while touching my own house with my other hand. I like living someplace where I can walk to get the necessities of life -- from groceries to a post office, hardware store, and the like -- and a bit more (like a library or a coffeeshop). Jacobs' book gave me a new language to talk about why these things are good in the face of a sort of poorly-thought-out disapproval of city living (where do you park? isn't it dangerous? don't you miss having a yard? Somehow countering these with, "How can you live so far from a bookstore?" just seemed crabby, and furthermore an inadequate defense of the pleasures of urban living).
So I was entirely pleased to find The City Comforts Blog, by David Lucher Sucher (thanks, Commenters!), who writes about "Cities, architecture, the 'new urbanism,' real estate, historic preservation, urban design, land use law, landscape, transport etc etc"
I haven't been writing many original articles because I have been too busy writing my book, but I do have a few ideas hanging around:
Playing Dead: The success of cop/doctor/lawyer shows on TV has created a boom in roles for actors where they portray a corpse. How do they get such jobs? How long do they have to lie there? Does it take a long time to get into the makeup? How do they feel about it?
Backing Up Dad My dad spent his life creating systems for massively parallel computer backups. I've often wondered what it would be like, now that he's passed on, to send off a bit of him to Trace Genetics and get his DNA profile on a CD.
A Brief History of Plastic Who invented the credit card? (It is widely attributed to Bank of America). What are they doing today? What do they think of their invention?
Sure, you don't need ethernet cables anymore, you can get a wireless handset for your home phone, there are cell phones, etc...but eventually you have to plug them all into an electrical outlet. And so everybody has a big old mess of power cables and adapters unique to each device. I mean, you don't want to see behind my entertainment console, it's Snake City back there. But there's hope!
Blogrolling is back in working order. Most blogrolls should have all the links you put in up to Saturday night. I'll probably turn mine on a bit later.
I got 3000 emails on this problem this morning when I woke up so I obviously can't reply to everyone. Please check here for updates.
Posted on 8:39 AM by Jason
Blogrolling has been the victim off a malicious hack in the past 9 hours. The blogroll links have been restored from an offsite backup from Saturday. I'm tracing the cause off this now and the site may go offline at some point today while I make changes and collect evidence. All new links since Saturday afternoon have unfortunately been lost due to this. I'll post more here as I know it.
From the website that ended up on thousands of blogrolls this morning:
This is Laura's husband. To all of those who accused Laura of doing something to your blogrolls, you should be the ones to be reported. First off, you don't answer harassment with harassment, that's just ignorance. Secondly, I think I will report you if Laura wants me to. According to what I've been told blogroll is having a problem. So grow up. It has nothing to do with Laura.
Before starting something, I suggest you atleast wait 24 hours and if some news hasn't been posted somewhere, either on a friends blog or on the blogroll website (assuming they have one), then you can start asking questions. Whatever you do, please don't harass her. I've got access logs and I'm more than willing to share them with abuse@whateveryourdomainis because it is starting to cause damage to her computer when it restarts.
Hell hath no fury like an angry hubby with access logs.
There are a gazillion others. Go check out Feedster on it (which, btw, is getting the news a lot faster than Google, who presumably won't know about it until they recrawl/reindex. Props).
The willingness comes from the pain: porting from Blogger to MT
As is heard regularly in church basements across the nation where friends of Bill W meet, "the willingness comes from the pain." Today's Blogrolling hack has finally given me the pain that has given me the willingness to start the steps to move this blog from Blogger to Movable Type. But, first a few words on Blogger:
The Blogger Problem: Reliance on Third-Party Services and Software for Basic Blogging Features
I've known for ages that I should port this blog from Blogger to Movable Type. In order to keep up with the feature set of MT, I like many other bloggers now have blogs that are studded with unwieldy outriggers sticking out at odd angles -- a third-party commenting package, a third-party blogroll management system; there are systems to bang on Blogger hard enough so that it spits out RSS 2.0, and many more. You might ask, why is this a problem? Well, as you rely on more and more service providers for features that should be native to your blogging platform, you've introduced more points of failure into your blog, and more services -- many run by volunteers -- that you're depending on to make your site "work."
Why has Blogger fallen behind in providing users with features like comments, blogrolling, and Trackbacks?
It's often the case that the early leaders in any technology market end up being laggards in terms of their feature set as the market matures. Why? Legacy burden. The simple fact is that in the software world it's often easier to take advantage of new standards and implement new features if you're starting from scratch and you don't have a large legacy codebase to drag around. As your codebase gets bigger, it takes more force to move it.
Back when Blogger was a small organization that ran on love and $35 contributions from Pro users like me, I was willing to cut them a lot more slack, and I still have a lot of sentimental feeling for the company that got me started blogging and has kept me blogging for 3+ years. But now Google owns them -- and I have higher expectations of Google. I had hoped that once Google bought Blogger we would see an "Apollo"-style project to give Blogger users the feature set that MT users enjoy -- just the way the US responded to the USSR's launch of Sputnik with the space program. Unfortunately, I don't see any evidence of new features being added to Blogger, and I am beginning to think that Google's acquisition may have done the exact opposite -- the Google acquisition seems to have frozen Blogger in place. Aside from opening some Pro features to the entire userbase, what new features have been added? None, so far as I can tell, but Blogger's methods of informing users about new features has always been a little flaky. Nonetheless, if there were major new features -- like integrated comments -- I would know about it by now. Is Google holding Blogger back? It looks like it from here.
Who is master of Blogger's fate? Blogger's risk as a company is now tied to how well other companies that aren't under their control are doing
Whether or not I or other users stay users of Blogger is now in part dependent on how well third-party commenting and blogrolling services work. By not implenting those features themselves, Blogger as a company has given up part of its control over its own fate. What's keeping a lot of Blogger users from dumping the service is not a love of Blogger but inertia in the face of the time and inconvenience of porting their blog to a new platform. Hoping your users will stay because they are too busy to move to a better system isn't a strategy. As soon as someone makes it easy to move, there will be a mass exodus.
Well, today's Blogrolling hack -- where my blogrolls were destroyed and replaced with dozens of spam links -- finally gave me the pain that gave me the willingness to start the process of moving this blog over to MT. I'm currently making a backup of my site, the first step in moving this site to my husband's co-lo server where he runs an implementation of MT. If Blogger can't be the master of its own fate then I am going to have to be the master of my own.
Blogrolling Hacked! Blogroll links replaced with blogroll spam!
Blogrolling has been hacked! When I looked at my page this morning, all of my blogroll links had been deleted and replaced with links to spam sites! I deleted the script that allows the blogroll to display in the boxes on the left. I actually left my Blogrolling Gold account intact to allow the Blogrolling folks to see what's been happening. I did try to change my password, but, naturally, the script that allows you to change the passwords is down.
I've heard of plenty of incidences of comment spam, and been a victim of comment spam myself, but this is the first time I've heard of spammers hijacking blogrolls to farm links for their sites.
Luckily for me, I just happened to export the OPML file for my blogroll two days ago when I was hoping to use it as a way to populate my RSS reader, so I have a relatively recent backup of my blogroll that I can use when I find another blogroll tool.
UPDATE: Looks like I'm not the only one. Skadz has been hacked too; look at his blogroll on the right (he may of course fix it at any minute, but now he's got about 50 links to "Laura's Blog." Sadly, this may mean that whoever hacked Blogrolling may be having a very broad effect across Blogrolling's thousands of users. When Blogrolling manages to boot out the hacker, what will this mean for all the users' blogrolls, which have been erased? Will everybody have to start from scratch again if they did not happen to export an OPML copy of their blogroll(s) to their local machine? Will Blogrolling be able to back up to a previous, uncorrupted state, thereby only losing recent blogroll ads by users? Stay tuned.
As I mentioned earlier this week, Watertown's town councillor at-large race was close enough that candidate Stephen Corbett, who lost by only five votes, requested a recount by the deadline of Friday, Nov. 14. Well, the recount is on! It's been scheduled to begin at 9A this Wednesday Nov 19th at 9A. Maybe I'll go down and take a peek and tell you what I see.
posted by Lisa Williams 11/17/2003
Modern camera, retro housing
Via The Photography Blog we get word of this digital camera in a body that makes it look like a sturdy old Kodak Instamatic. It's very cool-looking, and has 3x optical zoom, 5+ megapixels, and the ability to capture short movies. Someday I'm going to be in the market to replace my trusty Fuji MX-2700, and I'll probably look at this camera although I'm wary of buying consumer electronics from a company I haven't heard of before (BenQ).
Via Localfeeds, I discovered this post on Oddbits referencing New Mexico State University's series of How-To handouts. The handouts are in English and Spanish. There's a "family" section which contains a handout on potty training -- it would be a nice thing for a pediatrician to have on hand in their office, particularly since the text is both in English and in Spanish.
One of the best things about Dr. Smith's review of the book is her use of links as a subtle channel of sarcasm running behind or alongside the actual text of her review. The book is an autobiography that concerns the author's marriage to a spouse with borderline personality disorder. A quote, illustrating Dr. Smith's witty use of links:
Note that clicking on the linked word "real" brings you to an article about the fabulating journalist Stephen Glass.
Links can add supplementary material to your text, giving readers who are not as familiar with the subject a leg up by pointing them to definitions of terms and key concepts. But just as often, links serve another purpose to a narrator. In this post, we must imagine Dr. Smith orating her review in a darkened lecture hall, as a slideshow runs in the background -- when she says, "borderline personality," a picture of Nancy Marchand done up as Livia Soprano might flash on the screen -- making us, the audience, laugh, and providing us a sort of "Dr. Smith in stereo" -- what she's saying, and a sly commentary about what she's thinking about what she's saying.
I'm sure this phenomena has been discussed elsewhere, but of course a search on Google for "what links add to a text" returns far too many results to be useful.
First steps in RSS: I download a few RSS readers and play with them.
I installed Amphetadesk and Feeddemon and played with them both a bit last night.
At first, I was under the impression that I wanted an RSS reader that showed my RSS subscriptions in a webpage, so I expected to like Amphetadesk. However, I found that even displaying a few feeds on a single page was overwhelming -- there were just too many posts, and not enough ways to sort or delimit them so that I could pare down what was on the page to a manageable level for me. My buddy Enoch would undoubtedly put in a word for Bloglines here. Bloglines is another webpage-style RSS aggregator that has a lot of ways to slice, dice, and categorize feeds to optimize your reading experience.
On Dear Husband's advice, I decided to download Feeddemon, which I really like a lot. Feeddemon is a "three pane" RSS aggregator. When you open it, it shows you three windows -- one a sidebar showing the RSS feeds you subscribe to, a second pane showing the titles of posts in an RSS feed or group of feeds, and a third pane that shows you the post you're currently looking at. It's reminiscent of an email client, with the list of inboxes on one side, and two "panes" -- one each for the subjects of all the messages and then a third showing the message you're currently reading.
A couple of features that Amphetadesk has that I'd like to see in Feeddemon include 1) the ability to display your own blog's URL to the sites whose feeds you visit. For instance, when I look at my referrer logs to see where people are visiting my site from, I often get URLs of blogs that link to me that I in turn would like to read. Now, I also get a lot of URLs from "bloglines" that tell me someone visited by way of their aggregator -- but I don't know who they are or where their blog is. Maybe they like it that way, but I like to let people know I stopped by. Secondly, you can use a bookmark in Internet Explorer to add an RSS feed to your subscriptions. With Feeddemon, you have to have Feeddemon open to add feeds. Feeddemon has a nifty feature which doesn't work for me yet but may someday -- a right-click option to "blog this news item." Right now it only wants to launch blogging software that's on your hard drive, not integrate with a hosted blogging service like Blogger or TypePad. But I suspect it will work sometime soon.
The thing I like best about Feeddemon is the ability to slice n' dice my feeds into categories, and then display all the most recent feeds in a given category in an easy to read "newspaper" (this is what Feeddemon calls these aggregated pages it puts together from different feeds). So I can say, Just show me the news I haven't read in my medlogs folder -- and voila! I get a nice, tidy, brief list of posts. Neato.
Another cool thing I've been able to do with my newsreader is to get a feed of all the comments people leave on this site -- Blogback, the commenting package I use, supports the ability to export the comments as an RSS feed. This is nice, because it allows me to see comments that were made on posts that might not be on the front page anymore, which I generally used to just miss.
I read this totally mindblowing weblog post (the colors, maaaan!) about David Frum, the guy who wrote the Axis of Evil speech. Said Frum wrote a book, and John Holbo, the blogger, totally took him apart (http://examinedlife.typepad.com/johnbelle/2003/11/dead_right.html Caution, the post is really long, I kept wishing I had printed it to make it more comfortable to read). The most interesting thing to me about Holbo's criticism of Frum is that he seems to get at something that I've felt but haven't had words to say -- that conservatives are pushing an agenda not for practical or even ideological reasons but for -- for lack of a better word -- aesthetic ones.
They'd like everybody to go back to the hard-bitten, hard-working post-pioneer days where everyone knew their place. It's sort of a twisted version of The City on the Hill or Plato's Republic, with a rigid hierarchy that everybody buys into and respects (and, of course, one in which they are on top). Lots of people like the idea of a social order in which they are not just equals but superiors. In my world there are a lot of smart people, mostly men and mostly in technical professions that say they are libertarians, and if you ask them they will give all sorts of reasonable-sounding theories as to why libertarianism is the best. But I really think the reason that they like libertarianism is that they think it would transform society into a meritocracy based on technical skills -- the end result being that they could dump the country-club-MBA-venture capital class off the throne and sit on it themselves. This is why if you attack their "ideas" they respond with such vigor: because you're not really attacking ideas, you're attacking their sense of self-worth. If you don't believe libertarianism is best, then by extension you don't believe that in a perfect world men like him would lead by divine right.
The same blogger quoted Nietzche:
§29 Add lies. – In France, when the [x idea that was supported by the ruling class] were attacked, hence began to be defended, one could see again something so often seen, but so unsightly: - men lied, made up grounds for these laws, simply to avoid admitting they were used to the laws and no longer wanted them to be different. And so it goes, and always has, within every established morality and religion: the grounds and reasons for a custom are always lies added on only after someone begins to attack the custom and inquire after its justification and point. Tucked away here we find the great dishonesty of conservatives of all ages: they add lies.
Most conservatives have no real, defensible logical reasons for what they believe -- they have defenses and denials that are intended to shore up their own threatened sense of status in society. But I would say that people who are out of power are often the same way -- they tend to make up reasons to believe in political positions that if they panned out would put them in a better place, without looking at real, logical or ethical justifications for same -- they like it because it's good for them, whether it's actually true or not.
Buchanan's the same way: if everyone shared his beliefs, he'd be king, right? Maybe that's a sort of litmus test for whether a person *really* believes something -- do they still believe in the idea even if when it came true they'd be worse off? Most of us believe in gravity whether its specific application is good for us or not but few people believe in their political beliefs in that evenhanded way.
I am finally getting around to choosing and installing an RSS reader. I found this useful page with a list: RSS Readers (RSS Info)
Hey, what's an RSS reader, and why would I want one? RSS readers allow you to read all the blogs you like on a single page or screen, and just show you the newest info from each blog (provided they publish the right file formats). You can find out more about them here and information on other nifty tools to enhance your reading and writing of blogs here.
This article from the Globe's West Weekly section, Boston Watertown eyes vote recount, discusses the possible vote recount between town councillor at large candidates Susan Falkoff and Stephen Corbett. At first count, Falkoff won by only five votes. The Watertown
Tab notes that Corbett has requested a recount. The deadline was yesterday, Nov. 14.
I'm glad to see that Corbett's intention, if he does request a recount, is to recount all votes in Watertown, instead of cherry-picking in districts where he might feel that he was stronger. Last month, I blogged an event I covered where two documentary filmmakers screened and talked about Unprecedented!, the documentary they made about the Florida recount in the 2000 Bush/Gore race. One of the major criticisms the film made of the Democrats is that they did attempt to cherry-pick by requesting recounts only in heavily Democratic counties, rather than requesting a statewide recount:
The Democratic Party had the three foremost experts in recount law in the US working for them. Two of them advised us on the film, including Tim Downs, who we interview in the documentary; they wrote the book on recount law. You wouldn't think that's an industry, but these people make a living at it, going all over the country, advising candidates from dogcatcher to the President of the United States.
These guys advised [the Democrats] from the get-go that the only way to do this correctly is to do the whole state [of Florida] -- all overvotes and all undervotes...but [Gore campaign manager] Bill Daley nixed the idea because to count all the votes would open up the opportunity for more Republican votes to surface. But they were told that the only way to do it correctly was to count all the votes, and then, if you lost, you lost fair and square. [The Democrats' decision to demand recounts only in heavily Democratic counties] tells you about the motivations that the Democrats had. They were trying to steal the election in their own way. But it was kind of a feeble attempt. They didn't have to steal it.
Just goes to show you that the folks in our local volunteer government are better behaved than those at the Federal level. It's something to be proud of. Good on you, Mr. Corbett.
I'm tracking down a comment spammer: how I'm doing it
Last night I was listening to some folks on #joiito talk about comment spam. This is when spammers take advantage of your comment feature to spread spam about the usual topics. The folks on IRC were discussing The Comment Spam Manifesto. I read it, and the supporting document Preventing Distributed Comment Spam, but I still didn't really understand what to do to take action against a spammer. I mean, I know how to delete comments, but that doesn't do much to stop a spammer from spamming me and everybody else all over again.
Fortunately, Dear Husband has shown me the ropes, and I am going to pass the information on to you:
Find the spammer's IP address. I use a third-party commenting system called Blogback. When I get a piece of comment spam, I log in to the "control panel" of my comment system and there I can see the offending user's IP address. (Uh, what's an IP address?)
Find out which ISP uses that IP address Next, you have to find out what ISP uses that IP address. Dear Husband showed me the following way to match IP addresses to ISPs: In Windows XP, click Start > Run. You will get a dialog box. Type in command and you will get a command line that looks something like C:\Documents and Settings\Default>. Type in nslookup. At the next >, type in the IP address. Voila! you will get the IP address followed by a domain name. If you notice that the IP address now has dashes instead of dots separating the groups of numbers, this means that the ISP at that domain name is using dynamically assigned IP addresses. More on this later
Go to the ISP's domain and look up their terms of service Most ISPs have terms of service that ban users from using the ISPs service to spam people. Copy the relevant portion, you'll need it.
Write the ISP a letter. Include everything you know about the spammer, including the IP address they were using, a copy of the message, and any other identifying information such as email, alias, time the spam was left, etc. Now, about those dynamically assigned IP addresses. Most ISPs don't have enough IP addresses to assign a unique one to each of their users -- but everybody needs one to get online. So they just assign one from their pool randomly to a user when they sign on. That means if I ban an IP address, I could be banning innocent users of the ISPs service. Usually an ISP cares about whether or not behavior by one of their users reduces the usefulness of the service to other users. If there's a lot of spam from their domain, I could also choose to block all users coming from their domain, which means bad behavior by one of their users means none of their users can visit my site. To ratchet it up even more, I could submit the IP address or the domain to a distributed blacklist so that other bloggers could ban those users from their sites.
Here's a copy of the letter I wrote to the spammer's ISP. In the original letter I included a copy of the spam, but I'm taking it out here for two reasons -- one, it was tasteless, and two, spammers use Google to look for previous instances of spam and then use those to spam those sites again (Another reason it's important to delete comment spam).
Howdy,
I'm receiving comment spam from one of your users who is posting off-topic comments to my weblog looking for or spreading information about illicit drugs. This person uses the alias of "Robin Stowers" and when this person last visited my site at 2003-11-15 12:56am they were using the dynamically assigned IP address 64.40.62.127. They are using the email address robinhoodwastheman@hotmail.com. I believe this behavior violates your Acceptable Use policy:
"g. Unsolicited commercial email/Unsolicited bulk email. Using the Services to transmit any unsolicited commercial email or unsolicited bulk email. Activities that have the effect of facilitating unsolicited commercial email or unsolicited bulk email whether or not that email is commercial in nature, are prohibited."
My spam policy is that after one spam I ban the IP address, two spams I ban the domain, and three spams I forward the domain to distributed comment spam blacklists that help bloggers combat comment spam. I would prefer not to ban all your users or to reduce their utility of other websites, but if it is not possible for you to identify or ban this problem user I will, because they are reducing the usefulness of my site for my legitimate visitors. For information about comment spam and distributed blacklist efforts to stop it you can look here: http://kalsey.com/blog/2003/11/comment_spam_manifesto/
Below is the text of the message that this user is leaving repeatedly on my site:
deleted
This message is being left on many different posts, and there is no material on my site where this would be an on-topic comment -- my site does not deal with illicit drug use. In the interim I have deleted the posts and banned the nocharge.com and ncplus.net domains from using the comments portion of my site.
I always like it when there's a brief bio accompanying a blog, and after three years I thought it was time I got around to having a link to one on my sidebar. From now on the "about me" link on the right will link to this post. My name is Lisa Williams. I was born in Norwood, Massachusetts, in 1970, the only child of two parents from working class families in Lowell and Lawrence who both had careers in the technology industry. As a kid I was very serious about school, which saved my parents some money when I was offered a scholarship to Emerson College.
After college I worked briefly at a regional daily newspaper, but found it tough to make a living and dispiriting to watch acrimonious School Committee meetings week after week. To make ends meet I had a variety of jobs including one carrying the bags for an executive recruiter who filled positions in high-tech and biotech, a night job as a backup tape-monkey in an IT department, and eventually moved from straight journalism to technology and business journalism, subjects that I grew up with and enjoyed. I always liked gadgets and hearing people talk about their jobs. I worked as an industry analyst at Daratech, where I wrote about computer-aided design technology used in things like making cars, aircraft, toys, and teapots. After three years at Daratech I moved to Yankee Group, where I became the director of their enterprise software research group.
In November of 1998 I made the smart move of marrying Java aficionado and renaissance man Evan Williams. In August of 2001, we had our first son, Rowan Williams. We're going to have a second son in January of 2004. I worked part time after the birth of my first son but found the direction the company was moving in wasn't where my interests were, and the high face-to-face quotient of the job made it incompatible with the intensive experience of parenting an infant. I miss it, but I also enjoy what I'm doing now -- writing a satirical novel set in the year 2035 (outline; excerpt). I have maintained this website for six years and began this weblog in May of 2000. Some of you may be interested in how the weblog got its name, and you can read about that here.
I can never resist a good story about a pig. Like playwright Melinda Lopez' family, my family used to have pig roasts. There's a (probably apocryphal) story about my father and his brother George getting a whole frozen pig in preparation for a roast and driving home, during which drive they encounter the siren song of a bar. They park their car in front of the bar, which has a big terrace out front where men are drinking beer in their swimming trunks. They wrestle the pig into the driver's seat and put a hat and glasses on him, and spend a few happy hours watching patrons emerge from the darkness of the inner bar, spot the driving pig, and develop confused expressions on their face -- how many Manhattans did I really have? Was it really only two? Lopez reports her own traveling pig story in an excerpt from her play:
Then at about 2 in the morning, someone starts screaming, "El puerco! El puerco se escapo! The Pig! The Pig is escaping! The lights go on all over the house, and couples stumble out of bed to see -- What happened? A dog? A fox? And the men wish they had their guns. Then someone's calling, The Pool! The Pool! And we all run out to the pool... and there's the pig. Floating on a raft. In the middle of the pool. Wearing sunglasses.
Ay, ay, ay, the party-party has begun!
What will people do to get a job writing about pork roasts, photographing homemmade altars, or writing jazz tunes? The damndest things.
"It's a complete crapshoot." -- Shirish Korda, composer and jazz musician
I grew up in Uganda, East Africa, of Indian parents. I was very interested in music in high school and started playing jazz; I wanted to go to the United States and study music. My parents wanted me to study medicine, engineering, law... just as all my students do now because that's all they can imagine a middle class man doing. Well, I flunked out after a year of business school and so my parents said, "Well, okay, what do you want to do?" and I said that I wanted to go to the US and study jazz; and they said, okay, you can do this for one year and we'll pay for it, and then you're on your own.
For me there were two moments -- one was that I saw Louis Armstrong in an open air amphitheater in Uganda; and the second was that I was in high school and I was in a band, and we were playing around at a jazz club -- we were playing the Jobim piece Desafinado, and I was playing this song and at the end of the song this guy walks up, and he says, "Hi, I'm Stan Getz." and I think, oh, Shit!. He was in Mombasa recovering from TB, and he encouraged me to go to the United States and study jazz.
Because I am teaching it's very hard to set aside time to write, and usually [what gets me to finish] is, it's fright -- there's an upcoming deadline that can't be put off. There is a tradition in Indian classical learning called chilla which means that if things are not going well, you set aside four hours of practice time for forty days without stop -- you might play two or three pieces, or spend that time each day improvising, until something happens.
I always think about the way a dog might circle a spot ten times before sitting down, and I do that too, but I really try to reduce the number of times I circle.
As a musician you end up doing a bunch of things to make money, and that sometimes means playing in contexts...well, as an example, I was playing in a club in Revere. It was supposed to be a jazz club, but they really wanted to play funk...Anyway, the next day I went to pick up my check and the place had been burned to the ground by gangsters."
Today Korda makes his living teaching and sometimes seeks money for projects through grants. He remarked, "On A professor of mine at Holy Cross said to me, You know, it takes as much effort to raise $200k as it does to raise $20k; it's true, sometimes people will give your more money for a more ambitious project. "
"And then the train set came..." -- Mari Seder, photographer
When I came back to Worcester I had three children, and I had to stay up late after they went to bed. I always had a studio for my home; back then I had space in the basement, but then the train set came, and I had to move into a spare room and then another child came and so I took over the kitchen. It was always a struggle and I'm not sure how I did it.
Well, I did try wedding photography and bar mitzvah photography. I knew it wasn't for me -- I lost sleep for two weeks before the bar mitzvah that I had to do, and then the bar mitzvah boy hid under pews to get away from me. He hid under tables, and finally he ran into the mens' room, where I guess he thought, here's a place where you can't get me. And I thought, "This is the last bar mitzvah I'm ever doing."
"My comedy is like: The dog dies." -- Melinda Lopez, playwright
I still remember my last day waiting tables, which I haven't had to do for awhile. I guess you just get so grateful when you get to the day when you can teach what you know.
Lopez comments that she does try to channel her efforts into a marketable end-product, but that the unruliness of creative endeavor often ends up determining what gets written. "I keep trying to write that great three-character play, one room, a set that has nothing in it, I sit down I'm going to write my marketable, easy-to-produce, funny, uplifting, aren't we happy we're here play. But in the last couple of years I despair because what I've been writing is so dark -- I mean, my comedy is like, "The dog dies." Part of me wants to take care of business, but in there, there's Something Else. About six or eight months after my daughter was born, I was getting back into the world, I had written my one-woman show that was very successful, the kind of show that you want to repeat, and I was all ready to write a show about motherhood, but everything I wrote was about children falling off boats and death by electrocution, and it just kept coming. I still don't understand what that was, but I finally decided that I just had to write it and get it out and hope that something else would come along."
here the author (Jody) uses the products of capitalism to produce “her own mundane cultural forms and her means of communication”
in both medium and text, Jody is decidedly middle brow in her tastes
of little interest to scholars who would look for resistance and transgression in either the text (Fiske) or the medium (Mele)
It would be funnier if it weren't completely clear that the author of these notes actually takes all that pretentious blather seriously, as opposed to, say, fodder for a good game of Academic Lingo Bingo, with squares for "Foucault" and "semiotics." I took particular exception to this passage, apparently a direct quote from the professor:
“Jody does not just want to share her tastes with others, she wants others to use them to communicate with her – to embellish them, to embroider the mundane with more mundanity”
Once you take away the fifty-cent press-on philosophical veneer here, this is the same nakedly sexist criticism of the distaff side of the blog-house: that women's blogs are Mundane and not about Important Things. To which I say: what Jody does makes what you do possible, twerp. (I'm willing to dial this back to "pipsqueak" if you are in fact an associate professor who's teaching at three schools and has no health insurance, a situation that could parboil anyone's intellectual faculties).
A bit of advice to the author of the notes, if you are a student:
Your professor is taking you for a ride. You probably can't ask for your money back, but you can choose more wisely next semester.
Learn HTML and get a blog, for godsakes. Looking at "View > Source" is an embarrassment: You're using Microsoft Word to make web pages? Please! Talking about blogs with no understanding of how to write even simple HTML or set up a basic blog defrauds your intellect, as if you were trying to become an expert on cars by deconstructing paint and upholstery options in the brochure. Pop the hood if you don't want to be just a poseur.
Further thought on this post made me realize that there are plenty of real academic efforts, both on the content and technology sides, that *are* in fact worth knowing about. For instance: The NITLE Weblog Census. This one sets off my jargon alarm but still might be of interest. We'll all just have to wait for Kaye's masterwork.
Blog play-by-play of full 30 hours of Senate filibuster, going on now!
I remember during the playoffs when David Pinto would fill up the entire Boston Localfeeds page with posts just from his own blog, and I thought he was rebuilding his blog and republishing a month's worth of posts at a time that just happened to show up on Localfeeds.
Then I realized he was doing live play-by-play of Red Sox games on his blog, making short posts every few minutes, sometimes fifty or sixty during the course of the game.
Well now I direct your attention to an even more ambitious blog-stunt: blogger Rob Sama is blogging the whole 30 hour Senate filibuster live. He's gonna stay awake through the whole thing. He's up to sixty short posts on comments from and about the filibuster on his blog. Go over and visit.
I really like Christmas music. Do you have favorite versions of Christmas songs? If so, please leave a comment below to let me know about them!
Last year's Christmas album was a big hit with friends & relations. I really enjoy Christmas music, and it was a pleasure to share my favorite versions of Christmas songs with others. I'm wondering if I can follow it up this year and make another "mix tape" style album that I think is as good as last year's.
Yesterday when I was at Izbestia Bye, I noticed that a big display of Christmas compilation albums had been put up at the front of the store. Browsing through the racks, I found a number of CDs that looked like they might yield promising versions of classic or original Christmas songs:
Maybe This Christmas, which signals its hipster cred by having the Paul Frank monkey on the front and features Coldplay and Sarah MacLachlan;
Ella Wishes You a Swinging Christmas; however, I included her version of Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas on last year's disc, and I wonder if there is anything on this album that I would like better;
Smooth Carols, which I'm unable to find at Amazon, but contains versions of carols from Johnny Mathis, et.al. and looks to be the kind of stuff I heard on the radio driving from one relative's house to another on the holidays;
This is one area in which online shopping has it all over shopping in person at a store -- you can listen to clips from the albums. I found myself wishing at the store that there were listening stateions so I could determine whether or not a particular album was any good or not; with Christmas compilations it's a real tossup -- sometimes they're really unlistenable, or have only a few good tracks and the rest is filler from some college choir that the producers got for ten cents.
One thing I may do in support of this year's Christmas album is to download the iTunes Store for Windows so that I can lower my risk by buying individual tracks from albums to listen to all the way through to see if I like them. So far I have a few candidate songs in mind, including Diana Krall's version of "The Man With the Bag," and a song I heard last year over the PA at Macy's while I was shopping for presents called "Driving Home for Christmas, which I remember as being by a guy named David, but is listed here as a song by Chris Rea; and maybe Kenny Chesney's version of "I'll Be Home For Christmas." We'll see.
Signs of health from the Iraqi region of the blogosphere
Jeff Jarvis of Buzzmachine brings us the welcome news that the brother of Iraqi politics and society blogger Zeyad has started a sports blog. If you can start a blog that doesn't talk about politics or war, that's a great sign.
We interrupt this blog to bring you breaking news from the world's foremost Zoroastrian weblog, Sucks/Doesn't Suck, where Meg and I keep the blogforce in balance with perfectly even numbers of posts on Things That Suck And Things That Don't Suck: we've got new posts on CSI vs. CSI Miami.
We realize that a post on why CSI:Miami sucks is like shooting fish in a barrel. But sometimes shooting fish in a barrel is fun, dammit -- and we're all for fun around here.
Words fail me here, as what is truly great is always awesomely difficult to describe. This post at John & Belle Have A Blog expresses so much of what I have thought about the modern American right in politics but haven't been able to gather the words to say. Namely, the hard-to-put-into-words feeling that the insurgents of the right use the shrinking of the government not as an end in itself but as a means to a sort of civil utopia, and that the zeal with which they pursue it, and the way ideas that don't fit their thesis simply bounce off as they would, to a cult member, conveying the fact that their guru drove a gold-plated Rolls with the proceeds from their begging bowl...well, it all gives me the shivery feeling that in fact what a good part of the American right is pursuing is a religious crusade. And to what end? To create a twisted City of God in which everyone knows their place, especially women, the poor, and those who don't pass the paper-bag test, and everyone in that city is picturesquely engaged in work to feed a priestly class, perhaps singing a happy tune as they do so. Each time I see a person who makes less than $200K a year vote Republican I swear I could hear that eerie music of the Happy Slave drifting up from the very ballot box that, of course, would be Unneccessary in such a utopia, where no one will ever have to question who the leading class is with something so crass as regular elections.
It's had such an influence on me that I've added John Stuart Mill to my Amazon Wishlist and to dig out my copy of Emerson and read his essay The Conservative. Now that's strong stuff.
Better Living Through Office Supplies: Best Pen, Best Pencil
Like a lot of people who write I take an intense interest in office supplies. I've been this way since childhood: I remember the great pleasure I used to take in receiving the pirated office booty my parents would bring home -- big pads of green ruled columnar paper; plastic templates with shapes to draw data flowcharts (my dad was a programmer in the E.B.V or Era Before Visio), or even just plain old reams of white paper. Mechanical pencils were a special treat, as in my childhood they were much more uncommon than they are today.
Fisher Space Pens were developed as a universal refill for popular ball-point pens of the 1950's. Wanting to make a better refill that didn't leak or clog, Fisher came up with the idea of packaging the ink inside the cartridge with a small amount of nitrogen gas. Because the ink was under a constant gentle pressure towards the tip from the pressurized gas, the pen would write upside down, in freezing temperatures, in the desert, and in the rain. Because it also didn't rely on gravity to move the ink towards the tip, it would also work in zero gravity -- which is why it was chosen to be the pen US astronauts carry in space, beginning with the Apollo 7 launch in 1968. There's even a story -- one which might be apocryphal -- that features the pen's cap being used as a spare part on the Apollo 13 mission to replace a switch that had broken off in the command module.
As a writing instrument here on earth, the Space Pen's main advantage is its reliability -- it will write anywhere, under any conditions. The pen comes in many, many varieties from fancy to plain, including a sleek, compact bullet pen; they range in price from around $5 to $200. As a person who loses things a lot, I really like the fact that there's a relatively inexpensive version of this pen that, if I lose it, doesn't annoy me more than the loss of a pen should. The economy version of the pen gives off a simpatico 60's vibe -- it's a pen you can imagine showing up in the suit pocket of a guy with a Rotary tie-tack and one of those narrow-brimmed fedoras.
My favorite mechanical pencil is the elegant Pentel Sharp Kerry, a mechanical pencil design they have been producing continuously since 1971. The most unusual aspect of this mechanical pencil is that it has a removable cap that covers the tip when not in use. Anyone who uses mechanical pencils on a regular basis knows how sharp the thin metal ferrule that holds the lead can be -- I've put my mechanical pencil in my pocket and had it stab me, ripping right through the fabric of my pocket and into my leg as I sat down. Ouch! When you're using the pencil, you put the cap on the non-business end, and a metal tab makes it into a clicker to advance the lead. The pencil comes in different barrel colors -- black, red, blue, and brown, each with an anodized metal cap and matching metallized plastic lower portion. A wide chromed aluminum band circles the center of the pencil. It's nice to look at.
For the past year, I've been dealing with the challenge of my Dad's estate. I was very close to my father -- I'm an only child, and my father raised me from the age of 7; we also traveled to and lived in places where we did not speak the language and we were the only people we knew who spoke English. He died late last year at the age of 61 of a heart attack, and I am not certain I will ever get over the experience of finding him dead in his house.
As the one-year anniversary of his death approaches I find myself increasingly impatient with myself over getting his affairs in order, but handling -- I mean physically handling -- his things fills me with such an intense dread that I think I would honestly more easily acclimate myself to handling a colony of sewer rats. Each Wednesday I try to chip away at household business, including the multitude of forms involved in any death except those of the poorest pauper. My father was profoundly organized, and all of his papers -- deeds, titles, insurance policies, will, etc., he kept in a plastic filebox. Opening it and seeing his handwriting all over the folders and the papers is; well, there aren't words for it. I've developed such an irrational hatred of that filebox that I had to move it out of my office and into a back stairwell leading to our basement so that I wouldn't see it unless I had to.
Going to his house is much worse. If I were a rational actor, I would sort out his things, sell those that had monetary value, donate the rest, and merely walk the rest of the stuff the few yards to the Dumpster in the parkinglot of the condo development. But who is a completely rational actor in such circumstances? Nobody I'd want to know, I think. Instead I called a disposal company who will come to his house today to simply cart off the remainder of his stuff -- largely unused stuff, much of it new as he had recently moved to his new house -- and they'll throw it out. Who knows, maybe they will sell it or give it to friends; in a way, I hope that they can do with it what I was unable to do myself. The time and attention it would take to figuring out what each individual item's optimal place would be is just too much for me. I feel about it approximately the same way I would feel about standing next to a large radiation source: it will certainly give me some awful disease and I should get away from it before there's a tumor where my soul used to be.
What are you supposed to do when you clean out a loved one's house? Do you just sit there and watch as they carry off all the stuff, a macabre comic-opera replay of a funeral with a stream of coffins piling out the door that just happen to be shaped like couches, end tables, and coffeepots? How are you supposed to remain dignified and attentive in front of the moving and disposal guys, who are, after all, just trying to do their job and get through their day and are looking forward to a steak and cheese sub eaten in the truck on the way home and in no way are licensed as social workers?
Answer: I wimped out and sent my Dear Husband instead. I feel like such a weenie. He says that I will probably feel better about being over there after his stuff is gone and the place has a new coat of paint, and doesn't look so much like his place. I think he's right about this. He also says that because I think that normal people would be able to do such things themselves that I am comparing myself to some idealized version of normal people who have more in common with Superman than actual people. This is comforting but I'm not so certain about it. I still think I should just strap on my Stiff Upper Lip and go do everything myself, and I am just the recipient of unearned luxury.
Full-text searching at Amazon makes workaday search less useful?
Amazon's highly acclaimed plan to offer full-text searching has gotten a lot of press, but I've found that it's actually reduced my utility of the site -- because when I type book title into the Search bar on the front page, I now get way too many hits because Amazon is looking for that phrase within all the books.
Undoubtedly this will get fixed. Two fixes I would like: one, prioritize titles over text within a book, so if a user is using the simple search box, phrases that match the title of a book come up first; and two, make it much easier to get at the Advanced search page. As far as I can tell, there is no link to Advanced Search on the front page -- you have to use the simple search box and get nonsensical results before you are offered a link to it.
Journalism teacher and blog-researcher Kaye Trammell asked a few different bloggers how they came up with their blog's name. If you ever wondered where Makeoutcity came from, or who, exactly, the Dowbrigade is, now's your chance.
I volunteered an explanation of the name of my blog, too, which Kaye kindly reposts. But I can never resist a good expanded blog entry. I used to have a boss I liked a lot -- Bruce Jenkins -- who would, after having received an overlong news-note for the technology newsletter I worked for, say "I do not have the time to write you a short letter, so I shall have to write you a long one." Thus, a brief -- but not too brief -- history of the name of this weblog.
What's Nixon Got To Do With It?
During the setup process, Blogger asks you to give your blog a title. For many years I had had a private paper diary. Sadly, I also had bad boyfriends, at least one of whom would steal it and use the contents to bully and embarrass me. I dumped him, but I had "learned the lesson of Nixon," that is: Don't Make Records. Each time in the intervening years I sat down to start a new journal, I found the whole project still reminded me of being mad about having my privacy violated, and I never felt that I was truly alone sitting there at the blank page. Blogging, I realized, gave me a solution -- I could stand the problem on its head by simply making a blog *everyone* could read.
To me the most confusing aspect of the whole Nixon/Watergate debacle was the fact that Nixon seemed to feel compelled not only to do bad things but to make recordings of himself while doing them. In this sense the title is ironic, because as I sit behind the keyboard blogging I'm doing the same thing he did: making a record of my crimes.
Now this all sounds like a lot of thinking, but it's important to recognize how provisional the circumstances were, and how really off-the-cuff the original decision was. The fact that I have a blog at all came about because of a chance process. It just so happens that the founder of Blogger and my husband have the same name (Evan Williams). One day three and a half years ago I plugged my husband's name into Google while slacking off at the office, and noticed that there was this *other* Evan Williams who had written this neat tool to automate updating your web site. Now, I had already had a website for for several years, and I thought, well, let me play with this thing. I set up an account and ten minutes later I was able to post "hello world" to a page on my website. I chose my title on impulse -- all I've been doing for the past three and a half years is not changing it.
I suspect that many people reading the title may have a number of mistaken impressions about my blog. For instance, they may think it's a politics blog. They may go further and think that I'm a political observer of the type who wants to rehabilitate the non-Watergate legacy of President Nixon, when in fact I am slightly to the left of Mao Zedong and think the best thing that Nixon did was to revivify health services and tribal self-governance for Native Americans. They may infer, furthermore, that I care a lot about President Nixon, who, in fact, I'm too young to really remember (the first President I have conscious memories of is President Carter). This last is probably the biggest "mistake" embedded in my blog's name, because I think there are plenty of people for whom the mere word "Nixon" is a provocative one that brings up a host of references to history, politics, and culture that my blog simply isn't about.
I'm pretty sure a quick read of my site will dispel most of those ideas, and in my blog I don't feel compelled to smooth off the rough edges or confusing bits for the reader, because I feel that if they wanted pre-packaged stuff that's been checked for consistency, well, they'd go to the professional media for whom it's a point of professionalism to try to ensure that the products they produce are logically consistent and clear. Part of the allure of blogs are the unanswered questions you find on encountering a new blog, which on their first pass are often quite mysterious. What is this thing? Who is this person and why are they talking to us? That's not what you think when you pick up a newspaper, where there's a widely shared consensus on what the paper is and what it's purpose is.
Thanks for the nice gesture of making my site Feed of the Day at Feedster. I feel like I just finished a box of Cracker Jacks and the prize was a Palm Tungsten C instead of a temporary tattoo of a kitty!
For those readers who are unfamiliar with Feedster: Feedster is a search engine that allows you to search the RSS feeds associated with weblogs. While there are other search engines specific to weblogs, I often use Feedster because it's very fast. As an added bonus, Feedster produces some tools that are handy for a weblog owner, including the ability to have a Feedster-driven search box on your own site so that visitors can search for stuff you've written within your weblog. Some folks offer "search this weblog" features to their visitors by using services like Picosearch or Atomz, but I suspect using Feedster to search your RSS feeds rather than the raw HTML is going to be faster and lend itself to more sophisticated searching -- like search by date range -- in the futurel. Also, Feedster can help you have a neato Table of Contents feature (one of those things I should implement here).
GPS vs GeoURL -- why do I get different coordinates for my house from each?
I'm not sure why, but when I type in the longitude and latitude coordinates I get from my Magellan SporTrak Pro handheld GPS unit into Terraserver, it tells me I am living in a nature preserve near the Blue Hills -- about 11 miles from my house. Yet when I use EasyGPS to view those same waypoints online, I get accurate maps showing my location.
Recently my Dear Husbandadded RSS feeds and GeoURL geolocation tags to his site so that you can see sites nearby. Until I scrapped my old GeoURL tag with the coordinates I copied from my handheld GPS, the GeoURL page for my site showed me as living 11 miles from my husband, although we live in the same house (I assure you it's just a modest little cottage, no hallways 11 miles long here. We're a little short on closet space, too).
So: these are the coordinates I get from my GPS unit when I fire it up in my house and let it find the satellites:
Latitude 42.36648
Longitude -71.1605
These coordinates use the WGS84 standard.
And these are the coordinates that Evan has in his GeoURL META tag:
Latitude 42.21976
Longitude -71.09623
And when I type in my full street address into the GeoURL Geocoder, I get:
Latitude 42.36677
Longitude -71.16006
If anyone can explain the discrepancy I'd be very grateful. Is it because of different standards of expressing and estimating longitude and latitude (WGS, NAD27)? Or is my GPS busted? Since I bought it to be able to accurately report my position in case I get in trouble in my sea kayak, I really want to know whether or not my GPS is accurate.
Over at Halley's Comment, a paean to D'Agostino's Deli, one which I can only second. She mentions their Arlington location, but there's another in Winchester as well. Highly recommended.
Dr. Parker of the medblog Cut To Cure invited me to comment on this issue, which is exceptionally generous, especially after I jammed my foot into my mouth up about up to my ankle responding to an earlier post on his blog.
GruntDoc, The Bloviator, and Cut To Cure are all batting around this article, which looks at some of the issues surrounding the death of a young woman, Ann Marie Simonelli, following gastric bypass surgery.
GruntDoc's post and Cut To Cure's followup focus on whether or not it is a good idea for Brigham and Women's Hospital to try to blame the stapling device used in the procedure for the failure that may have led to the woman's death. I'm not a doctor, but Dr. Parker's hunch that a leak of stomach contents was not the cause of death is probably correct. He guesses that the death may have been caused by a pulmonary embolus -- a blood clot that travels to the lung. A big pulmonary embolus, or PE, can cause immediate death. Blood clots are a risk factor after nearly every surgery.
I'm not a doctor, so I'm actually not going to comment on the medical aspects of this case. Instead, I'm going to focus on the one line in the Boston Globe article on the case that stood out the most to me: the quote from Ms. Simonelli's father:
Simonelli's father, Arthur, told WBZ-TV he thought the hospital was partly to blame for his daughter's death. "I think it was negligent," he said.
Sometimes people die unexpectedly in hospitals. In those terrible cases, what makes the difference in whether or not the family feels the medical care their loved one got was negligent? There's a clue in another part of the article:
Another of Lautz's patients complained to the board late last year about his handling of her obesity surgery. She developed complications after surgery and complained she could not reach Lautz despite repeated phone calls, according to board documents. The board sent him a letter saying "communication is a key to any successful patient-physician relationship." In that case, Lautz said a staple gun misfired on him, and the patient also developed a stomach leak.
The italics are mine. If you have two families who suffer the loss of a family member, one who sues and one who doesn't, I suspect that on closer inspection you may find that one of the major risk factors that contributed to a malpractice suit was how well the doctor's "voice mail system" worked. Whether or not the surgeon was actually "negligent" in the strict medical sense of the term may make little or no difference to the family, whose sense of "negligence" comes from the fact that their doctor doesn't return their loved one's calls when they have symptoms that make them afraid.
Let's use me as an example. In June of this year, I suffered a pulmonary embolus. Mine was small, so I was still walking around. But, I was short of breath and coughing up blood. I was pregnant at the time, and I placed dozens of calls to my obstetrician's practice, and to my general practicioner's practice reporting these symptoms. In no case did I ever actually get to talk to my doctor, nor was I granted an appointment to see any doctor or nurse practicioner despite my requests. When I was admitted to the hospital and finally did speak to my obstetrician, I found that he had never actually been told by anyone in his practice that I had called or that I was reporting these symptoms. Worse, receptionists and nurses attempted to diagnose me over the phone, with one telling me that I was probably experiencing bleeding from my gums. My doctor's administrative staff was getting in the way of him being as good a doctor as he could be.
I didn't die. But if I did, would my record of those calls I made make excellent fodder for a malpractice attorney? You bet. Would the sense of being ignored and mistreated fueled my family's desire to retain a malpractice attorney if I and my baby had died? You bet. Would any of the things that my doctors did be considered malpractice or negligence in the strict medical sense? Probably not. Nonetheless, while my husband is not the litigious sort, my parents would have filed suit about fifteen minutes after the final blessing at my funeral Mass, and the doctors involved would have been paying out either legal fees or higher premiums, and dealing with the not inconsiderable stress of a lawsuit, in very short order.
The lesson here might be this: if you are a doctor, your risk of being sued by a patient will go up if you don't have good enough administrative staff and administrative systems to ensure that your patients feel you are listening to them.
Some thoughts on a remedy
In today's tyrranical HMOsphere, however, everybody recognizes that there's just not enough time for doctors to return every call. As a result, the person who picks up your phone has to pick up the slack for you. Ask yourself: have you ever reprimanded or even spoken shortly to the person who picks up your phone for bringing you messages that you felt you didn't have the time to return? Do you make comments that might give the person who picks up your phone the idea that you, their superior, would prefer it if they made sure you got fewer messages? Your input as their superior -- especially if you are literally their boss -- is always going to be more influential than J. Random Patient calling on the phone with a question or to report a symptom. But are you comfortable with patients being diagnosed by your receptionist? Undoubtedly not! So the question is, how can you give guidelines to your support staff that maximizes the following desired results:
Making sure that patients with serious symptoms don't fall through the cracks
Making sure that patients feel that your practice's response to them is predictable, thorough, and caring, rather than unpredictable, slipshod, and unconcerned
There probably isn't a perfect way to handle "customer service" in the medical industry where those two goals are met 100%. But improving how the phone gets answered may end up being important enough that it's worth spending a little time on to make sure that the working conditions of your administrative staff aren't hampering your ability to be the best possible doctor you can be.
Epilogue: After my stay in the hospital, I changed doctors. I called my old doctors, both of whom I liked and respected. I ended up speaking to the very competent nurse practicioner at my old OB's office and telling her of my concerns about how their administrative staff may be gatekeeping to the point where dangerous situations may be ignored. "Do you feel you have enough administrative staff?" I asked. "No," she said. Thinking of my visits to their office, I remembered that five young women on the administrative staff were crammed into a space obviously meant for two. When I visited, the expressions on their faces looked stressed and hostile. Often the metal gate that closed off the window patients were supposed to stand at to speak to someone had been rolled down, so if you wanted to speak to someone about an appointment or a bill, you had to go through a narrow hallway stacked with patient records and other file folders in boxes or piles on the floor, going past a sign that said "Staff Only." I felt bad for the women who worked in this office, and I knew that the conditions they worked in made it harder for patients to get routine services from the office, and for doctors to provide good care. I offered to write a letter to the hospital their practice's budget was partially determined by to support the practice getting more administrative staff and better technology to handle incoming patient calls. Just as with my requests to talk to a doctor when I was sick, my letter was never responded to.
posted by Lisa Williams 11/10/2003
Supercalendars: aggregating your own entertainment event listings
I'd like to start working on adding some events to my friend Sooz's alternative events site, Exploit Boston!. One of the things I really like about this site is it captures informal events that end up being below the radar for the listings at The Boston Phoenix or The Globe's weekly Calendar section.
Sooz's own adds to the Exploit Boston calendar center around music and informal social events. What I'd like to bring to it is some of the sheer richness of what I lovingly call "egghead events." Boston may have more academic lectures and book readings per week than anyplace else on earth. You can get your neurons carwashed any day of the week with a talk on anything from biotechnology to cutting-edge pedagogical techniques, and then follow up with a palate-cleansing poetry reading.
As I contemplated my project, though, I thought, it's a lot of work to manually go to all the sites I normally visit for event listings of that sort and then retype them over at Exploit Boston. I probably can't recreate *all* the calendar listings from calendars that I watch for the whole week at Exploit Boston. Isn't there an easier way? (Links to those calendars I scan, by the way, are on this page in a sidebar just below the blogroll on the right).
What came to mind was a question: I can see all the recent posts from blogs I read on a single webpage in a news aggregator; why can't I see all the recent events? Is there a way to use RSS to make it easier for me to discover and promote the kind of events that I like to attend?
It seems that it is coming down the pike. I spotted this entry --RSS and Calendars -- on Greg Reinacker's weblog. He notes:
Lots of talk recently about RSS, calendars, PIM's, and the like. Ray Ozzie wonders:
Has anyone built an RSS aggregator that can aggregate multiple calendar RSS feeds into your Outlook or Notes personal calendar?
I can't go into details yet (sorry)...but I can say this is just the tip of the iceberg of what will be possible with the next version of NewsGator.
Sounds like just the thing for collecting them. Once I am able to aggregate the links somewhere for myself, I'm relatively optimistic I'll be able to find a way to share those links on a web page. There are a few issues still, of course -- like, for instance, I doubt that a single one of the calendars I read publishes an RSS feed for their event items. But if there is a way for them to do so I could always write them a nice note encouraging them to add RSS to help spread the news of events more widely. For those folks who aren't able or are too busy to move their listings into a new format, or publish an RSS feed for them, maybe there is a way I can kludge it together. I recently learned about MyRSS, a tool which takes a regular HTML page and tries to whack it into an RSS feed even if the page's creator hasn't enabled RSS. I don't think MyRSS would have any way for me to treat the "items" it makes as calendar elements with dates, though, but it would save me at least one manual step even if it didn't.
Bitter-Girl will be participating in The Virtual Book Tour for the book Urban Tribes. The idea is that for each day in a week, a book will be featured at a given blog whose author agrees to read and review the book. What a great idea! Apparently Sooz helped Kevin Smokler set it up.
posted by Lisa Williams 11/10/2003
Your face might freeze like that, Governor Dean.
I've decided I'm going to vote for Howard Dean in the upcoming Democratic presidential primary, so this criticism comes from a place of support.
Will somebody tell him to stop making that face?
Do you know the one I mean? In the debates, when another candidate says something he doesn't like, Dean gets this horribly unattractive expression on his face. Dean has a nice smile, but when he gets irritated his mouth purses up in this prissy moue of disapproval that makes him look like Dana Carvey's The Church Lady just before she launches into her Superiority Dance.
Governor Dean! Your face might freeze like that!
Please, somebody tell him that a neutral expression is probably the best policy when others are speaking at the debates.
The importance of explicit shared rules in online communities (and everywhere else)
One of the difficulties in online communities is that problems crop up because there are no explicit shared rules that are readable by all. This "authority vacuum" can lead to situations where one user in a community attempts to censure another for behavior that they believe is out of bounds for that community.
I think if there is going to be censure in an online community -- whether it's deleting posts, or posting messages that prohibit a behavior after a user in a community has engaged in it -- there have to be explicit rules that everyone can read. There is another option -- that is, no rules, no censure, and some communities operate this way.
Humanity took a huge leap forward when laws were written down and posted in public places. We might not think much of Hammurabi's Code of Laws today, containing as it does over 14 crimes whose punishment is to hack off a hand, but it was still a major advance. Why? Because it meant that laws were no longer simply the whim of the king or the provincial magistrate. They were known to all and the same to all. When laws are secret there can be no justice, without justice there can be no trust, and without trust there can be no community.
When Blogger Pro went away, Basic Blogger users got many -- but not all -- of the features that were once available to Blogger Pro users. One of the things that didn't get passed on to all Blogger users was the ability to add an RSS feed to their weblog. Right now, you can't sign up for Pro, so even if you would be willing to pay Blogger money to get an RSS feed, you can't.
I don't work in a conventional setting these days, but back when I did, workplace stress and job dissatisfaction were things I had to manage, just like everybody else. A friend introduced me to the idea of a "Gratefulness List," in which if you just can't seem to stop thinking about how bad your job is but you can't leave quite yet, and you've gotten bored with the resentful thoughts about your workplace that you wish you could just stop thinking about them, you could try mentally composing a list of things you're grateful for. She's a better person than me, so I'm sure she really meant that I was supposed to make a list about how I appreciated nice sunsets and the free market's ability to supply me with a startling variety of chocoloate products. I, of course, started a Desideratum of jobs that inspired me to gratefulness because they Weren't My Job, Thank Christ!
My prototypical Job I'm Thankful I Don't Have is the person who collects tolls in a tollbooth. Boring, lots of exhaust to breathe, broiling in the summer and freezing in the winter. But the last time I was looking for a job, about six years ago, I was looking in the want ads and wedged in there was an ad for a job entitled Remedial Construction Supervisor. My immediate impression was, what, is that for the guys who need help getting up to speed on their nail-driving literacy? No, no, no.
Much worse.
This job was to supervise toxic waste cleanup at Superfund Sites.
That's a job I'm Grateful I Don't Have.
Along these lines comes The Worst Jobs in Science, including Carcass Cleaner, and Prison Sexual Assault Researcher. These are merely the tip of the iceberg of a rich vein of workplace humor stemming from experiences at Bad Jobs. There's Disgruntled, an anthology of bad workplace stories...oh, and who can forget The Santaland Diaries, David Sedaris' hilarious account of what it's like to be an elf at Macy's Santa Pavilion, as collected in Holidays on Ice. And there is Meg's account of Being Help Desk In Hell (scroll down after hitting this link as I am still debugging a problem with permalinks on this page).
This extroardinarily forthright and insightful post from Tacitus --Failure of nerve describes his experience with depression, antidepressants, and his honorable but wrenching discharge from the military on medical grounds. It made me sad, but it also made me want to stand up and applaud him. He did the right thing and paid a high price for it.
Being depressed is hard. Making the choice to get treatment and be honest with friends (and when necessary) co-workers and in this case the world is laudable.
If you're depressed, you probably know it. Treatment does work -- please try it. Talk to your doctor, or, if you don't have one, look in your phone book for a local counselor or mental health service. You're not weak for seeking help -- you're brave. All you've got to lose are the blues.
For the last few weeks I've been talking about our local elections here in lovely Watertown, MA. I thought I'd issue a report card that showed election results compared to the endorsements I made a few weeks ago. Endorsements aren't predictions, but it's interesting to note what your "winning percentage" is.
The electorate of Watertown agreed with my endorsements (or non-endorsements) for 76% of the candidates (I made 13 yes/no recommendations, and in 8 cases, election results agreed with my endorsements, and in five cases they did not).
The electorate of Watertown returned incumbents with contested seats to office in 66% of the cases.
I endorsed incumbents 44% of the time.
Here is the complete rundown:
Candidate
(incumbents bold)
Office
Lisa endorsed?
Did they win?
Clyde Younger
Town Council President
No
No
Pam Piantedosi
Town Council President
Yes
Yes
John Portz
Town Councillor at Large
Yes
Yes
Kevin O’Reilly
Town Councillor at Large
Yes
No
Stephen Corbett
Town Councillor at Large
No
No
Susan Falkoff
Town Councillor at Large
Yes
Yes
Mark Sideris
Town Councillor at Large
Yes
Yes
Kenneth Rand
Town Councillor at Large
No
No
Marilyn Pettito-Devaney
Town Councilor at Large
No
Yes
Tony Paolillo
School Committee
Abstain
Yes
Eileen Hsu-Balzer
School Committee
Yes
Yes
Allan Gillis
School Committee
Abstain
No
Bill Oates
School Committee
No
Yes
John Bartley
School Committee
No
No
Anita O’Brien
School Committee
Yes
No
Since I endorsed new candidates over incumbents more than the town did, you can probably guess that there were fewer changes at the top. In general, Watertown voted to change the face of the Town Council more than they voted to change the composition of the School Committee, which is surprising given last year's controversies and the fact that Watertown lags nearby communities in terms of test scores. Apparently the town is taking a "wait and see" position on the schools while giving the green light to newcomers on the Town Council.
The biggest surprise to me was the ouster of Clyde Younger, Town Council president, in favor of newcomer Pam Piantedosi. I endorsed Pam, so it was a welcome surprise. Another candidate I endorsed -- Susan Falkoff -- also got the town's nod. I have heard, though not from a definitive source, that Ms. Falkoff won in a squeaker, coming in across the finish line with only four votes more than she needed to secure a seat and that there is currently a recount going on. Falkoff hasn't claimed victory on her website yet, either. Since the town had four Town Council at Large seats up for grabs this year, only the top four candidates in terms of votes would get a seat. Here is the current tally in that race:
Marilyn Devaney 2677
Mark Sideris 2522
John Portz 2351
Susan Falkoff 2192
Steven Corbett 2187
Will They Blog Now?
I would love to see all my elected officials have their own weblog. The compressed space in the TAB -- as evinced by the laughable 75 word limits on candidate statements -- means that residents simply don't get enough information on what their elected officials do, and how they came to decisions. Blogs allow people in public service to enter into a conversation about what they're doing and what's important to them without the need to compress everything to fit between the ads at the TAB. Perhaps just as important, elected officials can use blogs as a new mechanism for feedback from their fellow citizens -- it's not a one-way medium.
I wonder if Ms. Piantedosi or Ms. Falkoff would be open to having a blog of their own? Out of the 23 candidates for elected office in Watertown, only 4 had websites, and Piantedosi and Falkoff were 50% of that number. Even though she wasn't elected, I'm still interested in hearing what Anita O'Brien has to say, and if she had a weblog, I'd read that too.
My local pharmacy is helping to stop bad diseases, and I think that's great.
I just had the most surprising call from my local Target Pharmacy. At first, I looked at the Caller ID and I wondered, "Why is Target calling me?" So I picked up the phone, and it was the pharmacist asking me how I was doing on Trimox, the antibiotic I was prescribed a week ago to help me with a sinus infection.
"Fine," I said. "Can I ask why you ask?"
"We always call on the antibiotic medications, to see how people are doing -- if it worked, if it made them nauseous -- we want to make sure it helped and let them know it's important to take all of it even if they are feeling better."
"Oh! You're trying to stop the development of antibiotic resistance!"
"Yes, and make sure if people have problems we can help them figure out how to fix them, have them go back to their doctor, or whatever."
"Well, that's great! I'm fine, I feel a lot better, but I'm still taking the Trimox through to the end because I don't want to be a walking laboratory for drug-resistant bacteria."
[Laughs] "Okay."
Do you know about drug-resistant bacteria? Basically, if you don't take all your antibiotics -- even when you are feeling better -- you may end up killing off weaker bacteria and leaving stronger ones behind -- ones that have learned how to survive the antibiotic you've been taking. You'll get sick again, and you'll have to use another, stronger and probably more expensive antibiotic. If you pass on your infection to others, they'll have the same problem. Antibiotic misuse and overuse has led to a dangerous situation in which there are some bacteria that are so smart that little or nothing we have in our drug arsenal works on them. So I keep taking my antibiotics even when I feel better. I have to keep working on my mother, who sometimes tries to "save" antibiotics that she "doesn't need now" in case she needs them later. Obviously, you should take all your antibiotics, you shouldn't hoard them, and if you have "extras" lying around your house, you should throw them out. If you're sick see a doctor -- don't self-prescribe. For example, how do you know that your new cold isn't a virus? Antibiotics do nothing to viruses, and your improvised short-course of self-prescribed antibiotics might just turn some bacteria that were lurking in your system but not doing anything bad into SUPERBUG! Not to mention it won't do a darn thing for your viral cold.
Well, I have to say, I think that's just great. Undoubtedly, Target's pharmacists don't have to encourage people to use antibiotics safely -- such activities do nothing to improve the bottom line in the short-term context that public companies are judged on. It's an important and laudable effort.
Some comments at tonight's Berkman meeting got me thinking about something: is it possible to build communities that are supportive without being exclusive?
Two comments by Dave got me thinking about this. These are paraphrases, so any errors, obviously, are mine:
My entire career, people have been telling me, "You can't do that." You're a small company, or you don't have the right credentials. So many people just want to say, No, you can't do that. And so few people will stand up and support you..
A second story he related was one in which he remembered an incident in which he made a mild criticism of someone who was receiving a service from a company or group that he was helping to run. The person responded by jumping to the erroneous conclusion that Dave would act to take away the service and "act like a big policeman."
The first phenomenon that Dave describes is the phenomenon of people building communities to support themselves that have as their foundation exclusivity. These are communities that wall themselves in with walls of jargon, degrees, and money. People trying to get in from the outside and participate are told, "You can't do that."
Building communties based on exclusivity starts very early in life. I see it among children when I look at preschools for Rowan. Knots of children center around a game or popular toy, and there are always one or two children on the outside, asking to play and being told, "No, you can't play." There's something old, fundamental, and atavistic about this phenomenon, perhaps going back to humans' roots as tribal beings who survived by creating small, exclusive, self-supporting bands, and acting with ruthlessness to those outside the tribe.
What this made me think of was the maxim of Vivian Paley, a kindergarten teacher who formulated a simple yet surprisingly radical rule for her students:You can't say you can't play (she wrote a book on what happened after). Dave immediately pointed out that You Can't Say You Can't Play is the "philosophy of the web," -- everyone can play, and everyone can link. But not without struggles, he noted, as the controversy over deep linking -- whether people outside your company or your group could link to a document inside your website -- attests to. People within a powerful group would attempt to say to other Web users, "no, you can't link to me, you can't play," and similar dramas are enacted all the time on the net.
The second comment reminded me that the human impulse to circle the wagons, to create communities of exclusivity that ostracize others is that that phenomenon also controls and constrains those who are "insiders." Insiders are expected to have a high degree of loyalty to other insiders, and even small percieved infractions of this are often seen as threats to the group or threats to expel an individual from the group.
Looking around, this ethos of Insiders and Outsiders -- Us and Them -- is so pervasive that people who don't recognize those barriers as legitimate or significant are always going to be at the center of controversy. The Christ story can also be read as a story about a person who wouldn't listen to society's rules about Insiders and Outsiders. No only did Christ hang out with gentiles, prostitutes, and tax collectors, when his own family, including his mother tried to see him at a public event, he rebuffed them, saying, "Who is my mother and father, and who are my brothers and sisters? These are my brothers and sisters," pointing at the "strangers" around the table. The equality of all people, high and low, is the central insight of many religions and politcal movements. It is the heart of Buddha's compassion. It is Gandhi's decision to live in a compound together with Untouchables. Most people understand and find these efforts laudable, but what's more difficult is accepting the idea that treating everyone as your family and your friend means revoking the exclusive privilege that your own family and friends enjoy today, and perhaps losing some of the benefits that investing in that exclusivity has gained you. I, for one, would have a very hard time with the notion of not treating my family better and with more care and exclusivity than other people. My moral universe looks something like this:
Now, contrast that picture with Jesus' moral universe. Everyone's equal. Your mother doesn't get more rights than the leper. You're friends with people who hate and fear one another, and this causes both of them to think that if you had principles you'd take sides, and pretty soon neither of them wants to associate with you. You've undermined and subverted the Insider/Outsider foundation of society.
Frankly I don't know what to think about this. I'm not sure I would be able to demote my friends and family by breaking the bonds of exclusivity with them, and I'm not sure I would want to. My other thought is that when someone chooses to break the bonds of exclusivity, their motivation Really Matters. Even though there's a lot of hostility to the idea of getting rid of the Insider/Outsider system, people are always excited by it too, aren't they? Look at the glee with which many people greet the hope of the Dean campaign replacing large donors and PACs with many small donations from ordinary people. Look at how often the "underdog" story is told and retold in every possible medium. But what if someone attacks the Insiders merely to replace those insiders with a new crew of Insiders? Or even to install themselves as The Insider? Sometimes when I look at libertarian-leaning nerds (including myself), I think, do they really believe in equality for everybody, or do they just think that in a libertarian society they would be the new Geek Kings, having dumped the country-club/Fortune 500 crowd off the throne so that they could sit on it themselves?
When you break the bonds of loyalty, do you do it because it benefits you, or because it benefits everybody?
Up until this point, I've felt curiously unmoved by any of the presidential candidates. I didn't feel as strongly moved by any of them as I did by Bill Bradley during the 2000 Democratic primaries, for example. I wanted Anybody But Bush, but I felt curiously detached from the candidates, even as I realized that many of the candidates were doing remarkable things -- notably, Howard Dean's grassroots blog-based campaign, which was providing before my eyes a proof-of-concept of a way to break the hold of big-donor schmoozefests on presidential politics.
But something's tipped me over the edge: Dean's support for a human mission to Mars. It's just goofy and human enough to make me feel like I know something about the guy, and I find it endearing. Dear Husband forwarded me the following from the Mars Society email newsletter:
During an online national town meeting conducted by the Washington
Post and Concord Monitor, Democratic presidental hopeful Howard Dean
today called for the United States to launch a humans to Mars program.
Dean's statement came in response to a question from a citizen from
Dallas. The transcript of the exchange reads as follows:
Dallas, Tex.: "If elected President, what are your plans for NASA and
the Space Program? Do you think it's time to retire the Shuttle and
move on to bigger and better things, such as a human mission to Mars,
or returning to the moon?"
Howard Dean: "I am a strong supporter of NASA and every government
program that furthers scientific research. I don't think we should
close the shuttle program but I do believe that we should
aggressively begin a program to have manned flights to Mars. This of
course assumes that we can change Presidents so we can have a
balanced budget again."
This is good news. I had hoped that the recent Chinese successes in space would reignite a space race in the US, there was one problem: Chinese officials never dragged out a soapbox, mounted it, and threw down the gauntlet the way it was once typical for the USSR to do. In fact, their first manned launch into space did not have a single press conference preceding it, the precise time and date was not announced, and the press was not invited to the launch. It was so secret that the news that it had succeeded came as a surprise to observers worldwide:
Much secrecy has surrounded this significant event and security is reported to be very tight around the Jiuquan Space Launch Center. Word had been circulating for sometime that China was going to send men to the Moon. In recent months, reports have been flowing across continents that China has successfully conducted as many as four test launches of unmanned capsules. Each of these missions reportedly orbited the Earth successfully for nearly a week before parachuting back to China's northern grasslands. Finally, last week, word came that the launch would take place sometime between Wednesday and Friday. Dewspite the early reports of China's space activities, he launch yesterday still caught many by surprise.
From Where The Hell Was I? comes Blue's Clues Explained, which I think captures a lot of the charm of the animated childrens' show. Now that I have kids I find I really enjoy the kind of gentle, sweet entertainments that I end up sharing with my two-year-old son. For example, before I had kids, I never would have gone to a petting zoo, but now I realize I was missing out on many happy hours because I was too busy being Grown Up.
Student film on location at Lincoln's DeCordova Museum
I've always enjoyed the sculpture park at The DeCordova Museum in Lincoln. Via Views of the Northeast, I come across a link to a (student?) film set in part at the museum: Eternal, a story about how love might transcend even death. Nice concept, and the name of the production company was fun, too: RandomFOO Productions.
Is that a box-cutter in that g-string, or are you just happy to see me?
The Patriot Act turns out to be a useful tool for all sorts of things beyond, oh, tracking and prosecuting terrorists. Like the story of the North Carolina meth dealer charged under terrorism statutes for manufacturing illegal drugs, authorities found the Patriot Act's loosening of search, seizure, and surveillance statutes mighty handy in their investigation of Nevada strip-club operator Michael Galardi's alleged involvement with a plot to bribe elected officials on the Las Vegas city council. Bored with those hum-drum old statues, the Feds go for the gusto with those shiny, sexy, new Patriot Act ones:
Further on in the story, Nevada congresscritters that voted for the act are shocked, shocked, to find that FBI investigators are using it to prosecute crimes completely unrelated to terrorism:
Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., said Congress intended the Patriot Act to help federal authorities root out threats from terrorists and spies after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
"The law was intended for activities related to terrorism and not to naked women," said Reid, who as minority whip is the second most powerful Democrat in the Senate.
"Let me say, with Galardi and his whole gang, I don't condone, appreciate or support all their nakedness. But having said that, I haven't heard anyone say at any time he was involved with terrorism."
Rep. Shelley Berkley, D-Nev., said she was preparing an inquiry to the FBI about its guidelines for using the Patriot Act in cases that don't involve terrorism. The law makes it easy for citizens' rights to be abused, she said.
"It was never my intention that the Patriot Act be used for garden-variety crimes and investigations," Berkley said.
Sounds like a bad case of the Unintended Consequences -- even if they weren't exactly Unforseen Consequences.
Over the past few weeks I have really enjoyed hanging out in #joiito, an IRC channel started and presided over by Joi Ito, the gentle and thoughtful blogger/entrepreneur from Japan who has been committed to thinking about community formation for many years.
In addition to the company, which is lovely, #joiito the channel is unique in my experience of IRC because it has been around long enough to acquire a startling array of bots and functions added by the programming-capable segment of #joiito regulars. The bots often serve a community-building function, helping users of the channel know about the other users of the channel and prompting us to greet friends when they sign on. For example, jibot is a heralding bot that gives a brief introduction about a user when that user joins the channel. When I sign on to #joiito, I and other people in the channel see jibot say:
cadence90 is Lisa Williams and blogs at http://www.cadence90.com
If you are new to #joiito, jibot helps you match names to nicks and may also allow you to visit the website of a person to learn more about them if you wish. For those who aren't new to #joiito, jibot makes sure you know when a friend joins the channel.
itochump is a chumpbot -- that is, a bot that saves URLs that people in the channel type and publishes them to a webpage. It will do this automatically if you type a URL on its own line. You can also give your URL a title by using the letter itochump assigns the URL. For instance if you type in a URL and itochump responds
itochump: E: http://www.google.com from cadence90
You can give the URL a title by typing E:| The best search engine. If you want to see what URLs people in the channel have been talking about, you can go to #joiito chump to see a list. As one #joiito regular said, "It's my new Metafilter."
B-DiddyBot allows users to tell it about the RSS feed for their weblog. Regulars may invite a newer member to "teach" B-DiddyBot the URL of the RSS feed for their blog. Once B-DiddyBot "learns" your RSS url, it adds it to the Joi Ito Roll, a webpage which gives links to RSS feeds of channel regulars and shows a brief rundown of recent posts from their sites. Today, the jiroll has over 120 feeds.
I don't know enough about IRC to know if this is a rare or common function, but #joiito also has a "seen" function that allows channel participants to find out if a friend has been online recently and what they last said in the channel. If you type .seen cadence90, the xena bot might say, "cadence90 was seen in #joiito 4 hours ago saying "bye all!"
Hecklebot is a unique bot -- it transcribes what you type onto a scrolling LED sign in Joi's office. So if you type !heckle Happy Birthday Joi!, your message will be forwarded directly into his office and start scrolling across the LED sign there.
Lots of #joiito lore and knowlede is collected on the #joiito FAQ.
posted by Lisa Williams 11/5/2003
What's for breakfast in Heaven? It's Panettone.
Although I like a nice pancake, and appreciate a bagel with the Sunday paper, I know that that's not what comes with the continental breakfast at the Afterlife Hotel. That spot is reserved for Panettone.
Panettone is a light, sweet, yeasty cake that has the texture of bread. Often it is studded with candied fruits or chestnuts. Panettone is the platonic ideal of fruitcake -- it's what fruitcake would be if it were any good: not a dense, indigestible brick, but a light, airy confection that needs to be tethered to the table lest it float away. Traditionally, it is an Italian christmas favorite that originated in Milan, and this page has a story about its creation:
Traditionally, panettone was Milan’s Christmas gift to the world. And for centuries, the heavy cakes have been associated with this industrial city. Just as there are many varieties of the traditional cake recipe, there are also numerous myths and mysteries surrounding its origin.
By far the most romantic of all the panettone tales is that of a Milanese baker named Toni di Borgo alle Grazie. Toni, so the story goes, ran his shop with a stern hand, as he did the life of his young and beautiful daughter, Adalgisa. Because of this, his faithful employee, Ughetto della Tela, knew that he would never receive Toni’s consent to marry Adalgisa, despite the love between the two, unless he could somehow raise his status from that of a "low-life" kitchen hand.
Thus, to win Adalgisa’s hand, Ughetto worked feverishly after hours creating a bread that would be sweeter and richer than anything the city had ever had in the past. Through word-of-mouth, friends of Ughetto soon came into Toni’s shop asking for the special bread containing flour, sugar, candied fruits and grapes. The bread became an instant success. But rather than taking the credit himself, Ughetto gave the fame to Toni. And soon all of Milan was asking for "Toni’s bread" or "pan ad Toni." The true inventor of the new treat did not mind, however. You see, he soon became one of the family - Adalgisa was his forever.
Panettone is one of those foods that appears on my plate with such perfection and mystery that I confess that it never crossed my mind that you could make one yourself, but a brief trip around Google yields plenty of recipes, including this one. I was first introduced to Panettone by my husband's family, who, like most Italian-Americans who have it as part of their family tradition buy a few loaves of Panettone for the holiday. I have had good experiences with the Panettone from Perugina, but every year a few weeks before Thanksgiving Evan's mom sends us a Panettone with candied chestnuts from Sorini. While Panettone is available mail order, I highly recommend the experience of hunting the ambrosial loaf in the wild. If you have a "Little Italy" in your region, visit a salumeria (traditional Italian grocery); sometimes Italian bakeries also sell imported Panettone around the holidays. Wherever you find the Panettone, stop and look around carefully -- you are likely within arm's reach of a dozen wonderful things to eat that you may never have seen before. Bring money!
Of course, if you are in Boston, try Dairy Fresh Candies (they have mail order and will send you a Panettone, too); and when in northern New Jersey, visit the Panettone epicenter -- Corrado's. Corrado's sells so many loaves of Panettone each year that they have a special bulk deal with producers. If you're willing to forgo the fancy packaging and grab your loaves in simple cellophane wraps, you can get a loaf for as low as $4, which is about 1/3 the price of entry-level packaged Panettone.
Blogging has attracted so many talented developers because it gives developers so many ways to develop useful and unique tools and services atop the "platform" of blogging tools and the blogs that are published with them. The fact that so many developers donate their time towards creating new and useful tools for bloggers is a testament both to how many developers value blogging and want to create better blogging environments for themselves but also the excitement of knowing that there are millions of potential users who could use and appreciate these tools. As a developer, it's always fun to see something you created become widely used.
Here are some more things I'd like to see become widely implemented and adopted parts of both blogging tools and RSS aggregators that I believe would enrich the experience of blogging and reading blogs:
A weblog can be your online identity and by commenting on another blog, rather than commenting on your blog and linking, you are cutting yourself and leaving that part somewhere.
Indeed! The blogosphere has a parallel universe embedded within it -- the "commentsphere." On some blogs, for every blog post there are dozens of comments, some of which are very well-thought out. What I would like is not only the ability to have an automated way to post my comments on another's site on my own site -- perhaps a sidebar "commentblog," with recent comments and links to the posts they respond to, but also the ability to see comments by a single poster across different blogs. There are many potentially interesting "views" of the largely undiscovered universe of the Commentsphere.
Pushing geolocation forward: As I've said before, I'm a big fan of geolocation services that enable me to see local blogs (Want to see who's blogging nearby? Try Localfeeds and GeoURL). It would be great if RSS readers enabled their users to "instantly assemble" a local "blogpaper" within their aggregator; such efforts would be an invaluable support to citizen journalists who want to perform a civic service by reporting on local news and events via their blog, because geolocation technologies essentially create a distribution channel for their work. Even more interesting would be combining RSS, geolocation, and the WorldKit developer toolkit for mapping to allow users of an RSS reader to visualize their blogs on a map if they wished, in addition to today's views by lists of posts in reverse-chronological order.
RSS for calendars. I'm fortunate to live in a city where you can have your neurons refreshed at a public lecture on everything from science to politics to poetry every single day of the week. Each week, I have one evening to myself, and I frequently scan the sites of local universities, foundations, and bookstores for interesting events (if you're local, or just curious, take a look at the sidebar that's beneath my blogroll for links to the calendars I peruse for these events). What I would really like, however, is for the calendars of these institutions to have an RSS feed that would automatically update my own calendar, or allow me to assemble a selected list of events to be reprinted on my blog. My Dear Husband assures me that there are in fact XML schema standards for calendar information, and all that stands in the way is adoption -- in this case, this would mean easy tools for the publishers of calendars to use, and adaptation of existing calendar, email, and RSS newsreader/aggregator software to provide useful views of these to users.
What ties all these efforts together? Metadata. The term "metadata" is still jargon to most, so a brief definition may be in order. Literally, metadata just means "data about the data." The cover of a book is metadata -- it's data bout what's inside the book. This webpage contains hidden metadata -- for instance, it contains metadata about the geographical location where I write my blog that enables services like Localfeeds to place my posts on the Localfeeds:Boston page. Taking the broad view in his brilliant post Toward Structured Blogging, Sebastian Paquet notes that blogs and blogging tools can be a launching pad for all kinds of metadata that make the experience of writing and reading blogs deeper and richer. Post a book review on your blog? What if your blogging tool allowed you to easily structure and export it so that a reader could easily see all reviews of that book across the entire blogosphere? If you wrote the review, how much more often do you think it would get read if there were an easier way to find what you wrote? If you wanted to read reviews of a book, how much more would you value being able to easily locate and read reviews that just happened *not* to appear on Amazon.com? What if you could find your favorite book-bloggers and have your own personal Times Book Review, assembled daily according to your personal tastes and specifications? Supporting metadata in blogging increases the impact of what the blogger writes and the utility of what the reader reads.
Earlier this week I posted regarding delisting a blog from my blogroll. While I still disagree with the points expressed in this post, I'm amending my response to it as it contradicts with the kindness provision of the editorial policy I am currently developing for my site (and apparently not a moment too soon!). If I disagreed with Dr. Parker, I should have disagreed with his points and not allowed my displeasure to devolve into an unduly personal response.
Any reader of blogs will routinely be exposed to many different opinions; my blogroll, by and large, contains plenty of persons whose positions on various topics I don't share. This is in fact a Good Thing, in fact one of the best things about the blogosphere -- it is all too easy at home to read the newspapers, books, magazines and watch the television shows and choose the friends whose opinions are comfortably congruent with your own. The blogosphere does not allow a reader such pernicious comforts. My takeaway? An opinion that you find disagreeable is never more than a mouse-click away -- but try to refrain from blogging until your blood pressure has regained normal levels. Let this be a lesson to you, O readers. It certainly has to me.
From The Kicker, we have this moment-by-moment account of a publicity event devoted to the launch of Lou Reed's new book -- an excerpt:
8:48 - Friend points out tiny yappy dog running around leather art gallery furniture. "Who brought their dog?" friend asks. Dog is summarily scooped up by Lou Reed. Realize that Lou Reed has a tiny yappy dog. Lose tiny bit of respect for Lou Reed.
The rest is even funnier. Do go read it.
Yappy dog ownership aside, Lou Reed is one of those musicians who could probably take up residence in Disneyland and not be any less rock-n-roll for the experience. It's just indelible. Still, it's funny.
Reading about The Long Now Project -- whose centerpiece is to build a clock that will be accurate for 10,000 years, as a way to get people to think about long-term issues for the human race -- was one catalyst for the book I am currently writing (outline; excerpt). Thinking about the Long Now combined two of my major intellectual passions -- finding ways to preserve access to the ideas and spiritual goods of ordinary individuals over time (see my story The Thousand Year Project, and Backing Up My Soul), and the shortsightedness of current public policy in the US which I feel is turning the country into a two-tier society of the rich and poor that many fled their own countries to escape to the US' "land of opportunity." I'm deeply envious of anyone who lives in San Francisco and has the opportunity to attend one of the Long Now Lectures. I'm considering writing to them to offer to pony up some money to support webcasting or other recording of them.
Tomorrow's elections sneak up on you? Need help finding where to vote, or information on candidates?
Tomorrow, Tuesday Nov. 4, is election day in 49 cities and towns in Massachusetts, including Boston, Cambridge, Watertown, Medford, Somerville, and many others. Here's info on where to vote, candidates, and whether your town is having an election tomorrow:
Is my town having an election? Check this list at Boston.com
Where's my polling place? Plug your address into this form at the Elections Division of the Secretary of State's office to find out your polling place.
How do I find out more about the candidates?
Probably the best place to look is on the website of your local paper. Here are some starting points:
Those of you who love political writing should look at the difference between the endorsements at the Watertown Tab and the Somerville Journal. The Journal's are zingier, fun to read, and to paraphrase the South Park Movie's subtitle, they're Bigger, Longer, and Uncut. Using a big portion of a local paper's ink budget on campaign coverage including commentary shows good editorial judgement. The Watertown Tab should start showing that their heart is in it when it comes to local politics. Just goes to show you, even at CNC where journalists are crammed into an editorial page-limit box that's the moral equivalent of a veal pen, there are people who can do better with what they've got than others.
My vardlist buddy Dan Berger wrote to me recently to ask how to find blogs of interest to read. I wrote him an email which I asked him if I could repost here, as I had never collected all this information in one place before, although I've undoubtedly linked to much of it here and there among separate posts before:
Hi, Dan,
Well, these days it’s easier than ever to find weblogs that you’d like to read, because many weblog hobbyists with some technical skills have put together aggregator sites that sort weblogs in a number of useful ways. For instance, you can look at “people who blog near where I live” with services like GeoURL and Localfeeds, or “what is the most popular topic being written about in the blogosphere (excuse the jargon) today” with services like Daypop and Blogdex, and you can use Technorati to see the most popular blogs, blogs that are “hot” (eg, many people have linked to them in the past few days), and to see who links to blogs that you already like. So, you can start exploring here:
Blogs by geography:
GeoURL by city: here
GeoURL’s blogs near Atlanta: here
Localfeeds: here
Localfeeds Atlanta: here
The World As a Blog (this is an animated map of the world in which little links pop up in bubbles as people all over the world put something new on their weblog): here
Blogs by topic/what’s being talked about in blogland:
Daypop Top 40: here
Blogdex: here
K-Collectors: here
Blog search engine/find topics discussed on blogs:
Feedster: here
Most popular blogs/blog “social networks”/hot blogs
Technorati: here
Technorati Top 100: here
Technorati “Newcomers” (eg fast-rising blogs in terms of % of new links to it) here
In addition to all of these, there are countless "mini-aggregators" that serve particular narrow geographical areas or areas of subject interest. Some local papers have started online columns that show notable blog-entries and news items from local blogs. Some are “machine aggregated” – meaning the page you see is the result of a program going out and “scraping” a predetermined list of sites; others are put together by human editors who read lots of blogs and then pick notable links to present to you. The Denver Post has The Bloghouse, and here in Boston I read Boston Common. Because I like medical weblogs (they’re like ER without the crappy acting), I like to read Medlogs, which is a page that aggregates recent news items posted to weblogs written by doctors, nurses, EMTs and the like. Eventually you will stumble upon “nodes” that are of interest to you too.
One of the things I think is particularly interesting and laudable about this list is that as far as I can tell, every site is an amateur effort -- in the best and highest sense of that word. Most of these vital services to the blog community were created and are maintained by a single person or a very small group of people for no pay. I encourage you when you visit these sites to click on the various "About" links and learn about the people who created and maintain them.
The World as a Blog is the brainchild of Mikel Maron.
K-Collector is the brainchild of Paolo Valdemarin, Matt, and likely some others whom I was unable to identify in my cursory surf of the k-collector site.
Thanks, guys! Three cheers for all of you and may your projects succeed beyond your wildest expectations.
Now, it's entirely possible that these sites were developed and are maintained by more people than those I listed above -- I just did it to the best of my knowledge. If you see this message and I left you out, please do drop me a line so I can put you on the honor roll, ok?
Today I delisted a couple of blogs from my blogroll. I thought I'd comment on why, and give them a farewell link. I delisted a medlog, Cut to Cure, because I got tired of its cheerleading for the "patients are lazy, patients are greedy, patients are stupid" wing of the medical weblog universe. This attitude saddens and angers me and I don't want to pass it on to my readers anymore. Okay, CUT! let's try that again...
I delisted another blog, Open Book. This one is more problematic, because I am largely delisting it for the behavior of commenters and not for the content of the posts as presented by the author, who I regard as insightful, fair, and welcoming. The blog discusses issues in Catholicism. Sadly, anybody who expresses any difference of opinion will quickly run into a commenter whose solution to anybody's struggle with faith is to tell them, well, if you can't complete *my* Catholic Checklist, you should just leave the church. Oh, but they don't call it *my checklist,* no, they claim it is the Church's Own checklist, and if you counter that, well, they try to dope-slap you with their interpretation of some encyclical or bible passage. They see somebody struggling and their response isn't "let me help this person, let me befriend this person." It's "get this person away from me, they are Unpure." Nice. Well, I'm not biting. Sorry. I was baptized and confirmed just like them. Last time I checked no one has bothered to excommunicate me yet, and if I feel like warming a pew, I'm gonna. I'll be hornswaggled if I'll leave the church to such humorless mumps.
I can't wait for some commenter to make the "you've left the church already if you don't believe X, you just haven't left it physically" argument, because for each incidence I'm going to give $10 to Commonweal, a lefty mag that probably gives neotraditionalists of the "get out of MY church" stripe heartburn.
Links to NY Times articles that don't break three days later
Do you occasionally want to link to a New York Times article but hate it when the link breaks three days later because the Times wants to charge for reprints? Dave Winer discusses the Times' current exception to this policy for weblogs that want to link to the paper in his mini-article New York Times Archive and Weblogs. Thanks, Dave!
...was the (presumably unintentionally) funniest line of dialogue from the most recent episode of L.A. Dragnet, Dick Wolff's update of the classic television show.
After a season of being a very straight homage to the original show, complete with deadpan dialogue, the show was revamped in response to lackluster ratings. Lieutenant Friday's sidekick, played by Ethan Embry, was dumped, and a roster of actors who bring to mind a bad ethnic joke (an Asian lawyer, a black detective, and a Latino detective walk into an interrogation room) were brought in. Jokes aside, the new actors are good, although the revamp does not include the small but satisfying role for Lindsay Crouse, a former frequently casted actress in David Mamet's early films including the wonderful House of Games.
In response to my earlier post, Kaye Trammell reminds me that she was on the education panel at Bloggercon, not the Journalism panel; and helpfully adds that she originally heard about Jeff Jarvis' comments that bloggers are not reporters through listening to a clip of him on the website of the (fascinating sounding!) documentary-in-progress Blogumentary.
How Should Citizen Journalists Introduce Themselves When They Cover News on their Blog?
Earlier this week I had my first experience as a citizen journalist. Although I do not work for a newspaper, radio, or TV station, I went to a public event with a notebook and a tape recorder, asked questions, and wrote a story about what I saw and heard, publishing it here on my blog.
After I finished my story -- a discussion with documentary filmmakers Joan Sekler and Richard Ray Perez on their film, Unprecedented!: The 2000 Presidential Election, I sent them an email thanking them for doing the event and putting a pointer to my story. I realized then that although I asked questions as a member of the audience in the lecture hall/theater where the movie was shown, I never identified myself as a journalist. Was that unfair? I felt a little uncomfortable about it in retrospect. Yet, I thought, isn't introducing myself as a reporter a little self-aggrandizing and misleading too? Cadence90 is not exactly the New York Times -- it's my hobby and decidedly nonprofit (in fact, enthusiastically and consistently anti-profit, as my credit card statements can attest).
I wrote to journalism professor Kaye Trammell about my quandary. How should I introduce myself as a citizen journalist? I met Kaye at Bloggercon; in addition to teaching journalism, she is currently planning on writing her dissertation on weblogs. She wrote me the following email, which contains all sorts of helpful ideas for the citizen journalist:
...I actually saw your post & was elated to see your announcement that you
announce yourself as a citizen journalist up at the top. In fact, I was
going to blog about it then got side tracked :)
You are 100% right that you wouldn't be truthful in identifying yourself as
a reporter. This also goes at the heart of the "are bloggers reporters"
question (of which I am on the "no" side for reasons similar to Jeff
Jarvis'1). However, all bloggers feel the desire to get permission to blog
events, conversations, etc.
So here is my list of what I, as a journalism instructor, think is right:
If in a large lecture & you ask a question, then that is a public event.
No need to identify.
If after a large event you ask a question to the panel (going up to them
after they are done "public speaking"), then you do want to identify
yourself as someone who will blog this/citizen journalist.
If you e-mail someone questions with the intent of blogging their
answers, same ID deal (yes).
If you call or approach someone (interpersonally) with the sole intent of
blogging, then yes ID yourself.
I think the difference is whether or not the comments were made in a public
manner. I think that even comments made among a group of 5 or so people is
not "public" enough. However, any university lecture series or meeting
(regardless of size) would be.
The struggle of what to call yourself is a real one (& the point of your
e-mail in the first place!). You could say that you write an online column,
or blog, or even are a citizen / participatory journalist. I tell my
students that they are columnists & thinking of their blog as an online
publication (heck, RSS is called a subscription no less!). The idea of
using the term citizen journalist is nice because then it gets you involved
in a further conversation for those who don't know what it is. So,
freelance writer (you get paid in fan adoration from people like me), small
columnist, blogger, cit jou, etc. is good.
Additionally, your identification to your readers that you were acting as
citizen journalist was right on as well. Good work. It actually provides
you with a higher degree of source credibility & made me more interested in
reading what you had written because it would be different than your normal
fare. I "trust" you more than I would the normal media (if that makes
sense).
Of course, you are hereby granted permission to blog any of the above
non-sense I tried so hard to make sound comprehensible at such a late hour
:)
Take care,
Kaye
So, my takeaways from this are as follows:
Tell readers what they are reading When you post an item to your blog that you feel is a citizen journalism effort, identify it as such so that your readers can distinguish it from news commentary or other items that you put on your blog. This is a good point, and the one that surprised me the most from Kaye's email. It's a good point because many blogs are heterogenous in nature -- they contain links, personal material, commentary, and jokes. A reader might not neccessarily know that you made the effort to actually get out from behind your computer and gather the information in person, rather than pointing to or commenting on stuff you read elsewhere on the net, or experienced as part of the normal course of your daily life.
Whether or not you identify yourself as a citizen journalist depends on how public the context is. I infer from the guidelines that maybe even The Big Guys/Gals -- that is, people who get paid to be reporters -- aren't generally required to identify themselves as reporters at a big public event because the speakers are making comments in a public place and are thus fair game to be repeated in another public forum -- be it a blog or a newspaper. The smaller or more "private" the gathering, the greater the need to tell people that you might blog it. This makes sense and is congruent with common courtesy.
Business cards It occurred to me that it might smooth the awkwardness of introducing myself to someone I'd like to write about on my blog if I could piggyback on a familiar ritual -- exchanging business cards. "Hi, my name is Lisa; I'm a citizen journalist and I want to blog this event," will often get a reaction of "citizen journalist"? "blog"? "who is this nut"? But the same sentence delivered with a business card has a subtly different effect -- the recipient now has my contact information and a way to confirm for themselves that I do indeed have a website that they can see and evaluate for themselves when they get home.
Footnote: I was not able to find a reference for Jeff Jarvis' take on whether or not bloggers are reporters; it is possible that this derives from remarks Jarvis made during the journalism panel at Bloggercon, which both he and Kaye were on. Here's a more general take from Jarvis on the issue of blogs as journalism.
At the end of my bed a gruesome coterie stands, their feet a few inches off the ground. The estate law demon snacks noisily on a bag of corpse rinds. The wraith of medical fears plugs her respirator into a wall outlet beside my bed. The great shambling golem of Paperwork scratches his flaky skin, each leprotic inch shedding a trail of triplicate forms onto the floor.
They are not gone during the day, but it is easy to dismiss their presence in the daylight, when the dim glow from their red eyes is blotted out by the sun, and the day's sweet babbling flow of life's distractions drowns out the harsh rasp of their acrid breath.
The problem is the nighttime.
Those moments between the time you turn out the light and the time you fall asleep are, for Monsters of the Closet and their brethren, the Things Beneath the Bed, prime-time. There, in the sensory deprivation chamber of your bedroom, with its dark and its quiet, is their stage and cathode-ray tube. Lying there in the dark, what I wouldn't give to trade with my fellow humans who suffer from Attention Deficit Disorder, who I wish could charitably donate a bit of their ability to move on to the next subject to those of us who suffer from a morbid oversupply of focus. I desperately want to change the channel, and, in the dark, I've lost the remote. I think Something Under the Bed has grabbed it.
Last week I got one of those phone calls every parent dreads. Actually, there are a number of phone calls that parents dread. This one was somewhere on the seriousness scale between "send money" and "send lawyers, guns and money".
The specific sort of call involved was the "I'm getting married" variety.
Thus begins one of the funniest posts I've read in a month, from the always-acerbic Dowbrigade.
Furthermore, he was marrying a young Peruvian woman named Cuci (pronounced "kooky") - who happens to be his first cousin!...
Upon hearing the details, I broke out laughing, obviously not the reaction young Joe was hoping for. "Why are you laughing? I'm serious."
"Just be prepared for your children to be mongoloid idiots. It's not so bad, take it from me."
Medpundit has a post on a new drug to replace Coumadin, the most common blood thinner in use today. You'll have to scroll down after hitting that link as Medpundit's permalinks are chronically broken. Coumadin is a literal lifesaver for many people who need blood thinners (including many people with cardiovascular disease), but it's a problematic drug in many ways, and has to be constantly monitored to make sure that patients blood doesn't get too thin and cause internal bleeding. Patients have to visit their doctors frequently to have blood drawn to keep tabs on this medication, and many patients may take this medication for years, which means years of twice-monthly blood draws.
I'm taking a blood thinner too, but I take a drug called Lovenox, because Coumadin is not rated as safe to take during pregnancy. The downside of this for me is that I have to give myself an injection. On the other hand, it seems to me from my reading that the drug is a lot easier to control and thus a lot safer. Some studies show that Exanta (the new drug) reduces the incidence of blood clots after knee replacement surgery -- sadly, those same studies don't show it to be safer than Coumadin in terms of unwanted bleeding.
Hopefully we will be able to find better drugs for what is a common problem. I often wonder why Coumadin is prescribed over Lovenox or Fragmin, because it doesn't seem to me that Coumadin is safer or more effective. Is it just because Coumadin can be taken in a pill?
I always like it when there's a brief bio accompanying a blog, and after three years I thought it was time I got around to having a link to one on my sidebar. From now on the "about me" link on the right will link to this post. My name is Lisa Williams. I was born in Norwood, Massachusetts, in 1970, the only child of two parents from working class families in Lowell and Lawrence who both had careers in the technology industry. As a kid I was very serious about school, which saved my parents some money when I was offered a scholarship to Emerson College.
