A move of sorts has begun. I'm tooling around with WordPress as a new platofrm for my weblog. You can view the new, very under-construction WebSlog 2.0 here . The chicken will remain the same and I'll work in the Gallery. At the same time, I'm thinking of having www.webslog.com default to the web log page.

For anyone who drops by, I'd love to have you leave a comment here or there

...lemme go on, I'm trying wordpress in the sun...

I'm really seriously considering leaving iBlog for WordPress and Ecto . The heavy lifting to get there is a little less intimidating having installed and implemented phpsurveyor for a client. And using Transmit makes moving files back and forth is a lot easier than I ever thought it could be.

I'm intrigued by the possibilities of emailing (from anywhere) and texting (from my mobile phone) entries to the blog. And while I'm happy with the current layout and much of iBlog's functionality, I'm also interested in the ability to play with every piece of the blog experience. Additionally, the ability of the app to auto-ping a number of the services when new content is posted is not unattractive to me (I don't think so, at least)

I realize that my posting has dropped to something of a blogtime low, but I'd be interested, if there are any of you out there still reading, if you have any thoughts/opinions either way? I know littlenemo has made the switch and never looked back. Several other early iBlog adapters have moved on as well. I wonder if it's time for me to do the same?

Microsoft has debuted a new information appliance called the Sensecam , a "a badge-sized wearable camera that captures up to 2000 VGA images per day into 128Mbyte FLASH memory. In addition, sensor data such as movement, light level and temperature is recorded every second.  This is similar to an aircraft “Black Box” accident recorder but miniaturised for the human body.  It could help with memory recall, e.g. where did I leave my spectacles or keys? who did I meet last week? by doing a “rewind” of the days event."

This does not inspire confidence. Microsoft can't figure out a way to keep four computers up, running and networked. What makes you think they can develop a small, user friendly and intuitive device whose utility outweighs the inevitable headaches that technology brings.

It was snowing. Son wanted a snowman. And I started out making a snowman. But somewhere along the way, the snowman wandered off to Cupertino and left this in his place. Yeah, I know. I'm a nerd. I'm comfortable with it. You should be too.

Maybe one of the more weekend-y weekends I've had in a long time was capped off with two Hebrew National dogs with mustard (the squeezy yellow kind) on steamed, white-bread buns. I wolfed one down as I left Home Depot yesterday afternoon. It was 70 degrees, a little breezy and I had just purchased a Fluidmaster Toilet Repair Kit to fix the LBJ (little bitty john) downstairs. The snap of the dog's casing as I bit down was punctuated by the high yellow tang of mustard from a 5-gallon plastic bucket and I thought "everything is right with the world."

I'd spent Saturday morning writing copy and the afternoon making my first real pot of spaghetti sauce. Wife, Son and Daughter were at church that morning and I decided to fix the LBJ which had developed a leak from one of the tank bolts. I ran up to Home Depot to get the fix-it kit, stopped by a client's and got my WinDoze machine re-networked and grabbed the hot dogs on the way out.

I've often said, upon reviewing a widely held fact that the average American ingests some 5 pounds of hot dogs annually that someone else was getting my five pounds' worth. I don't like hot dogs, most of the time. But the fact remains that for pure, unalloyed gustatory pleasure on a warm, late-winter afternoon, you can't beat a hot dog.

The end of February is like the arm-pit of the year. No blog entries seem forthcoming as I'm to to my eyeballs in managing a website redesign and sort of pre-occupied with that.

Here is my controversial opening statement to get you to read further.

Most libraries' websites look and work like ass in terms of usability and basic graphic design standards. This ultimately has an effect on how the sites are used and how the library itself is perceived in the community at large.

Offensiveness thus dispatched, we get to the heart of the matter:

I've begun doing some work with my local public library's foundation in the realms of marketing, board development and communications. As a part of that, I've been gathering examples of peer libraries' websites in preparation for what I'm sure will be a complete rebuild of the existing site. Library 2.0 would take into account all the new technologies that have emerged since the site first launched (CMS, SQL, yadda yadda) that would have a dramatic effect on the site's usability and would also begin to communicate more about what the local library is about.

Soooooo, take a minute to tell me about your library and the website is has. What kind of place is your library? How does it make you feel? How similar (or dissimilar) is the library experience to what you do or don't get on the website?

If you car to forward this link to a freind, I would not turn them away at the door.

Thanks in advance, WebSlog Army, for stepping up to the plate on this one.

VOTE. DO IT NOW.

Okay, so this has got my knickers in a freaking knot.

Watching the Grammys and just saw the :30 for "What'sTheDownload.com, " the National Academy of Recording Arts and Science's education site on the evils of downloading.

The spot shows a white-bread teenie-bopper downloading Pink's God is a DJ on a 14" iBook. The scenes cut between between said chick's iBook with a Photoshopped progress window and a club scene of people dancing. A "dink-a-dink" tone sounds, similar to iTune's rip-completed signal and she says "Got it," clicking as she does so and causing the lights in the club to go dark.

I think it's a) ironic, b) out-of-touch c) freaking asinine that the spot would choose to use a computer and visuals of the company that has figured out what seems to be the only successful model for LEGAL downloading (earth calling BuyMusic.com).

At the same time, I suppose the knife cuts both ways, as Macs make appearances in everything from MSN commercials to appearances in comic strips.

Still, it bugs the snot out of me that "Big Music" would lack the sensitivity toward Apple's role in legal digital downloads and show much of what downloading really is, 97 percent of the PC-using market sitting slack-jawed in front of their boxes, sucking down badly-ripped copies of Speakerboxx using Kaazaa. Screw you NARAS.

Kid Rock's use of an American flag in Sunday's SuperBoob halftime show has caused no small ruckus on Tennessee talk radio, where numerous veterans and others have called in expressing everything from disappointment to outrage at the Kid's use of the U.S. flag as a poncho-like wardrobe item.

Once he finished wearing it, he took it off with a swoop and held it up where one of his techs or back-up musicians could grab a hold of it. And while I'm sure that it was not properly folded tri-corn style, it was hardly set wrapped around an effigy of Pres. Bush and set afire. That however, is the level of outrage that's coming through the radio here in the buckle of the Bible Belt.

I know that while I was born in America, it takes work and thought to be a citizen of America and discharge the responsiobilities that come with it. I vote. I fly the flag at home daily. I pray for our national leadership. I beleive in much of what the U.S. stands for at a gut level. I correspond with my elected officials. I try to make my community a better place. Short of being a soldier/sailor/pilot/Marine, I think I probabably do for my country much of what the founding fathers had in mind.

All of that said, I'm still on the side of the fence that says that the flag is a symbol of ideas and hsitory rather than being the ideas and history it symbolizes. Part of what kicks ass about democracy, in my book, is the fact that we enjoy Constitutionally protected right (paid for by our Armed forces, taxes and collective belief) to not pay homage to the symbols of our country and its ideals. Democracy only guarantees that you won't be persecuted for your political beliefs, regardless of how inane or extreme.

So if Kid Rock wants to wear the flag as a rain slicker and Janet Jackson wants to get the Presidential Seal tattooed on her right boob, I wonder if the Founding Fathers would have a problem with that on a philisophical level? Would Thomas Jefferson call into a radio talk show demanding a Constitutional amendment prohibiting flag burning (and by extension wearing/using as a picnic blanket, etc.)?

Now, all of this being said, I wonder if my views on this subject would be different if I had served in the military? I can absolutely understand the anger of veterans, active duty military and others who must want to respond to displays of flag disrespect/ambivalence with an anger driven by the thought "Hey there, RapBoy, I (and by extension other military personnel) busted my ass to defend what that flag stands for and it shows me that you don't value any what goes into making that flag what it stands for."

I don't have an answer. Maybe you do?

Our Cub pack went to Cumberland Caverns in McMinnville, Tenn. About twenty kids and dads (and a Mom) went along for an overnight stay in the largest cave system in the Eastern U.S. I'll post pictures later but the highlights are as follows.

1) Son had his first Ho-Ho on the way down, which he calls Chocolate Cake Rolled Around a Creamy Filling. His Mom will be mortified.

2) Son and I both saw some amazing cave formations, though most reasssuring was the fact that the entire trip was exactly like it was when I went with my Scout troop in Jr. High/High School, down to the ghost story they tell just before lights out and the stories the guides tell as you pick your way through the caves.

3) Son's old man (me) failed the Box Test, in which one is required to crawl through a 11"-high X 28"-wide open-ended box to ensure you can fit through some of the tighter squeezes along the tour's Wild Route. Son however, braved up and went along without me.

4) We joined 300 other scouts and others in sleeping 300 feet under ground. Here's something worth noting. 55 degrees and 98 percent humidity causes any human over the age of 14 to snore. Loud.

5) Flashlights have been replaced with the advent of the glow stick. The impact of this only really becomes apparent when you bed down. Where the Ten-Acre room once was pitch black once the staff threw the switches, now the entire room is bathed in a diffuse green glow. I think I sort of prefer it the old way.

More later.

This is from a Lenten meditation booklet my church puts out. Don't get scared off by the "C" word that appears in graf 2. It's just a convenient (though politically loaded) way to place a fairly large portion of my spiritual beliefs at a point along the monotheistic continuum.


On Lamentations 3:37-58

Today's passage, written as a set of public dirges commemorating the sack of Jerusalem by Babylonian hordes, is unrelenting in its listing of horrors. In Lamentations' five little chapters, we see the temple destroyed, the aristocracy and priests turned out of their high places, women defiled, children brutalized ... a once-comfortable citizenry living on the edges of humanity.

It's typically at this point in reading the Bible that I as a Christian begin flipping forward in the book, looking for the dirge to turn the corner. Surely, I think, we're about three verses away with a good "But in you, Lord God, we seek comfort and find solace..." resolution. I expect, as a part of my "church experience," that everything has a purpose and there's a pat, God-ordained answer to every rough place. Guess what? Lamentations doesn't let us off the hook.

In fact, the writer flip-flops between throbbing rage at what has befallen Jerusalem and hopeful resignation that God commands everything, good, bad, ugly, and indifferent.

Who has commanded and it came to pass/
Unless the Lord ordained it?/
Is it not from the mouth of the Most High that good and evil come?
Lam. 3:37-39

And no more quickly does the writer resolve (and we, too, as readers) to "...test and examine our ways/and return to the Lord!" (v. 40) than he (and we) collapse back into the pity party we'd been throwing for ourselves earlier, complete with sullied princes, shriveled skin and infanticide (4:7-10).

So what can I take from this Little Book of Horrors?

I can draw hope and realize that confusion, anger and sadness are as much a part of my relationship with God as clear-eyed rejoicing is. Lamentations gives me an opportunity to see how a people can mourn and rage against the God that had brought them safe that far. The relationship survives. God can take it.

If they can survive the brutalization of civilization as they know it and still acknowledge the strength and fullness of their relationship with God, I think I can probably find the stones to push through whatever happens to be taking up unwanted emotional space in my life.

There's nothing like a little wormwood and gall to put things back into perspective.

28 Jan 2003, Franklin

515

Number of emails containing noVarg/MyDoom I received on the association's computer yesterday from association members. I've never been caught up in a worm tsunami before. It's scary and fascinating, like watching a hurricane's storm surge beat the snot out of a house on stilts along the North Carolina coast.

Where did the term "hokum" come from? For that matter where did we get "bogus," "boffo" or "strumtrellescent?" These are the things that keep me awake at night.

Here's what my week of work on a Win 2000/Win NT looked like, by the numbers.

2X
"Fell off" the network, becoming discoinnected from shared disks

14X
Cold restarts of the Windows machine required on Friday, 16 Jan 2004

20 min
Amount of time Walter the Computer Guy spent staring at the firewall interface trying to figure out what lived where.

0X
Number of times I was able to figure out how to enable file sharing on the Windows machine to allow my iBook to network with it.
NUmber of times I had to reboot my iBook.

7X
Number of days my iBook has been up and running without restart.

6 - 8X/day
Average number of daily tries to accomplish above.

15X
Number of times my iBook slept and woke up over the course of the week running between client's offices, my office and home.