My writings, photos, music and links
Something to consider: we are not at war in Iraq, we won the war a long time ago. Rather we are in the midst of an occupation. Iraq’s government and military have been dismantled and rebuilt, all the major cities have been taken over, and the violence is that of resistance to occupation, not two countries battling for supremacy. The important distinction is, you don’t “win” an occupation, you end it.
I spent a couple hours today helping restore, upgrade and secure a friend’s website. It was harder than it should have been, in part because of inconsistent configurations and undocumented changes his ISP made to partly restore the site before I go to it (though their customer support was surprisingly responsive and helpful) … but in all it went well and it feels good to have helped a friend. Reminder to all Wordpress users out there, WP is a huge target for attacks because of its popularity, you must stay on top of upgrades! Using Subversion to manage your WP install makes this really easy.
This was news to me:
http://www.google.com/a/help/intl/en/admins/domains.html
I am listening to Arcade Fire’s album “Funeral” right now for the third time in a row and feel like I’m finally grokking (and really enjoying!) this music. I’d listened to them some before — mostly “Neon Bible” — but without getting much out of it; they got such rave reviews from critics and fans I respect that I tried, and felt I’d given them a fair shake, but I just never got into it. Now, I think I was lacking a context. When I hear something new and don’t have a reference point I can’t really understand it. I know this intellectually, in the abstract, from studying cognitive psych and human perception in college, where I learned that absent the proper framework or paradigm humans can’t perceive even the most common objects (e.g. a Himalayan climber coming across a rocking chair at 20,000 feet would stare at it befuddled for a long time before recognizing it, because it’s so out of place) … but this is a good example of this principle in personal experience. Anyway I was listening and suddenly realized I was getting some old-school Bowie, maybe some Velvet Underground, and some vibes of Yo La Tengo and even some Pink Floyd … and it kind of fell into place. Now I’m paying rapt attention and it sounds perfect. Before these associations came (late) to mind, I had conscious and mixed reactions to the timbre of the singer’s voice, the key changes and mix of rock and alt and art and other styles, and any number of other characteristics of the music taken in isolation, and remained detached from the listening experience. But armed with these (invented — but hey, this is all an internal experience so indulge me — ) reference points, my resistance fell away and I started to really, really enjoy it. Anyway I am always interested in not just what I (and others) think and perceive, but also how, and why, and in this case I think I understand the transformation in my reaction to this work of art.
People tend to ask where we got the name “Harper” for our month-old daughter, so here’s the story. Shawna first mentioned it about three months into the pregnancy and it immediately resonated with me. I started thinking of her as Harper and was never really able to envision her with another name. In talking about its meaning to us we realized there were many positive connotations. Here are the ones we’re conscious of:
- My first date w/ Shawna was Oct. 26, 1996, when we saw Susan Tedeschi play at Harper’s Ferry
- I’m an amateur but passionate musician, so the musical connotation is meaningful
- Harper Lee wrote the all-time classic To Kill a Mockingbird (we both love to read and enjoyed this book)
- We wanted her to have a unique name
- We don’t mind the neutral association w/ the old magazine Harper’s Weekly, I kind of like it actually.
Anyway “Harper Elise” just rolls off our tongues, I love saying it, and now you know where it came from. 
The Cost of Empire « Jon Taplin’s Blog.
This might be the most complete and informed account of the current mess we’re all in I’ve seen. Too broad and too rich with insight to paraphrase easily, but its closing serves well enough:
It will be our task to imagine a way to free our country from the grip of a permanent war economy.
It will not be easy, but it must be done.
Please read it.
Those of us who have been playing w/ the web since the early days have a special relationship with the HTML <blink> tag, having suffered through its noxious heyday. Today, thankfully, few sites I care about still employ it. However there is a chess openings web application which I use pretty frequently, which uses <blink> on every page, right next to the practice board. Since chess requires concentration, and the blink tag is explicitly designed to attract your attention, it’s one of the worst UI design decisions I’ve come across. Since there’s little chance of convincing the site’s web developers to change their code, I decided to take matters into my own hands and write a Greasemonkey script to strip the annoyance out myself. For those new to Greasemonkey, it is a browser plugin that lets you alter the markup in any given page or pages to modify its styling or behavior. Of course it only modifies it for *me*, but that’s all I selfishly care about. So, in case anyone else out there hates <blink> the way I do and wants to make use of this simple script, here it is. You’ll want to change the UserScript section to suit your specific needs of course.
// ==UserScript==
// @name blink tag removal
// @namespace eudesign.com
// @include http://www.eudesign.com/*
// ==/UserScript==
var allBlinkTags, thisBlinkTag, spanTag;
allBlinkTags = document.getElementsByTagName('blink');
for (var i=0; i<allBlinkTags.length; i++){
thisBlinkTag = allBlinkTags[i];
spanTag = document.createElement('span');
spanTag.innerHTML = thisBlinkTag.innerHTML;
thisBlinkTag.parentNode.replaceChild(spanTag, thisBlinkTag);
}
Things went smoothly last night updating from a very old Wordpress version to 2.5.1, so when I realized today that WordPress had just released 2.6 (ahead of schedule) I went ahead and upgraded again. Piece of cake! Subversion sure makes things like this easy. 2.6 looks like a good product so far.
Hi
Later tonight I’m going to finish updating wordpress (the blogging software I use for this site). If it goes awry, the site might get hosed for a bit. Wish me luck…
UPDATE: After about an hour it’s basically done. Most of it was painless, and I’m glad to have hooked up w/ the Subversion repo to make keeping the core software up to date (and thus more secure). Just two issues:
(1) Extreme slowness of admin pgs. Wordpress forum suggests RSS support in 2.5.1 is the cause, so I’ve turned it off for now.
(2) The only other glitch was with the “wpg2″ plugin I’d customized for image management… but I was pretty unhappy w/ it anyway so I’ll probably use this as an excuse to figure out something better. But not tonight.
Well it took over 5 hours (during which time my phone was completely unusable), but v2.0 is finally on my iphone. The “Remote” app alone makes it worth the wait. With airtunes nodes in a couple different rooms, I can now access all my music and control where it plays in the house, from my phone. Sweet! Looking fwd to exploring more features this weekend…
