Chris.Weekly.org - A Web Space

I haven’t gotten really excited about the Olympics since I was a little kid — and frankly I’m more interested in the NFL preseason than most of the events in China — but I have to say, the amount of high-quality footage available on http://www.nbcolympics.com/ is remarkable. There’s nothing on TV to compare to this (including on demand, Tivo/DVR, whatever), and it’s about time. This is what the web is all about: finding what you want when you want it, and finding interesting things you didn’t know you wanted. For example, with TV I never ever would have recorded — let alone sat through ads to watch — the men’s 4×100 free relay swim event. But watching this http://www.nbcolympics.com/swimming/news/newsid=194272.html#smashing+performance+u+s after reading the accompanying writeup sure got my adrenaline flowing.

In most contexts I dislike nationalism, it’s too fascistic, too easily used as a tool for harming people of other nations (see e.g. the etymology of the word “Nazi”) … but for these Olympics I’m temporarily putting aside my concerns about our Imperial ambitions and all that. Our kids are putting on a show and giving it everything they’ve got, and I’m psyched to be able to see it on my terms. So, go USA!

I wrote a lengthy comment in response to another great post from Jon Taplin here:
http://jtaplin.wordpress.com/2008/08/03/anthrax-the-lure-of-big-military-money/
and wanted to share it.

I agree there’s no chance McCain would do anything to correct the many egregious changes we’ve seen in our government’s relationship to the Constitution during the Bush administration. And like you I think this country badly needs Obama and the change his candidacy generally represents. But I’m also deeply disappointed in Obama for his recent vote on FISA. See http://getfisaright.net/

Even if an Obama administration conducts itself with orders of magnitude more integrity than the current one — as I believe it will — this kind of erosion of civil liberties and privacy are like a ratchet, they only change in one direction. So while Obama’s administration might not abuse its power, at some point in the future there will likely be other terrible, even Bush-like presidents who will take every opportunity to do so. At that point, if the constitutional mechanics of checks and balances have already been dismantled or reconfigured to grant essentially kingly power to the executive branch, and we’ve all gotten used to the idea that it’s ok for the government to spy on all of us all the time, we’ll be in even deeper trouble than we are now, when there’s still at least some outrage at this illegitimate, illegal, un-American, fascist behavior of our so called leaders.

Perhaps Obama will reconsider when he becomes president; he did express concerns about the bill and certainly seems interested in listening to his supporters (virtually none of whom support the position, and nearly all of whom, if aware, oppose it). We need to pressure him to do exactly that.

I also have some hope that our maturing collective ability as citizens to use similar tools of transparency to shine a spotlight on what our elected representatives are actually doing, to turn the tables and essentially “spy” on our (supposedly open) government, will help. Jon Udell’s recent writings on GovTrack and MAPLight are relevant here, see e.g. http://blog.jonudell.net/2008/07/23/kudos-for-maplights-visualization-of-congressional-activity/
and the Change Congress movement founded by Larry Lessig http://change-congress.org/ is a force for good… but given the public’s lack of outrage against Bush et al, this may not be enough. If those of us paying attention do nothing, it certainly won’t be. So:

Write! Talk! Take action!

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.

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.

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…

To my friends with iPhones: WAIT TO INSTALL 2.0!

Apple is doing a remarkably bad job with rolling out version 2.0 of the iPhone software. I made the mistake of “upgrading” this morning, and my phone is now bricked. It looks like the cause is server load issues at the itunes store; apparently connecting to the store at the end of the download/install/verify process is required, and since the connection times out the phone remains unusable. This is being widely reported so I know it’s not just me. Come on, Apple, get it together!

Anyone trying to call me today, please use my home phone.

A massive movie studio is going to be built in my town, Plymouth MA. I knew about months ago (there was a voting referendum on allowing its construction which passed with overwhelming support) but I didn’t know many details. Local friends shared conjecture but noone seemed to have the whole scoop so I finally looked into it. I am thrilled by what I found.

In a nutshell:
- 2x bigger than Paramount studios!
- 2,000 new jobs
- includes a theme park/attraction, new restaurants and stores
- *not* religious movies per se, as originally discussed
- construction starts early 2009, should open in 2011
- this plus recent movie industry-friendly tax changes in Mass means a TON of movies will be made here

I am *psyched* about this!! Both houses I own are in downtown Plymouth, so here’s hoping property values skyrocket after this recession is over. Given all it has to offer: History, ocean, beach, forest, cranberry bogs, horse farms, restaurants, new coffee roasters, new brewery… and now this… the “cool” factor of Plymouth is going through the roof.

See this CapeCodOnline article for more detail.