Comment spam assault underway. They’ve really got to think I’m stupid if they think what they’re trying right now is going to work. I don’t know if they think if they fill the air with missiles, one has to make it through or what, but it seems like they test it with one or two, then launch a barrage.
Sigh. I was about to wish they’d finally get a clue, then I realized: if they had a functioning brain cell, they wouldn’t be spammers.
Went out to see Josh McDowell speak Thursday night. Have to admit a little trepidation: listening to one man speak for three hours can be daunting. But the time flew; the man is good at what he does.
He spoke of a thing he calls Relationship Apologetics, the main idea of which is that it’s the relationship you build that lets you get listened to. It goes deeper, but that’s the surface view.
If you get the chance to hear him in person, do it. He’s a very entertaining speaker, and if you’re not careful, he just might slip enough meat into the soup that you actually learn something as well.
I started the domain transfer process with more than sufficient time to complete it before the expiration date.
1) The domain was locked against transfer. I have no recollection of receiving notice of this, nor can I find any evidence of it anywhere in my email logs, which go back 2 years or more. (I’m kinda anal about things like that.) I do have evidence that the registrar I’m transferring it to asked me, and left the decision to lock the domains up to me. That’s one of the reasons I’m transferring all my domains to it. It’s about service, not about the less than $10 annual price difference. I’ll spend the extra $10 if I get the service.
2) I went in to unlock it, but only the registrant email address could do that, and it didn’t work anymore. I’d updated the admin contact, but not the account address. (Note for those curious: I didn’t open this particular account. It was opened by the hosting company I started the domain with back in the day. I had updated my email address with my hosting firm, and it never occurred to me to update it at the registrar as well; all my previous transfers from other registrars had gone fine with only using the admin contact, which was correct and up to date.)
3) It took some days to get that particular mess straightened out. So, eventually, I unlocked the domain.
4) It took about 24 hours for the unlock to actually take effect. I reinitiated the transfer at about 18 hours (basically, I unlocked it in the afternoon and reinitiated it the next morning) and it was denied, again. Another email exchange with their tech support, who assured me the unlock only took a few hours. I noted it had been considerably more than a few, and they responded it was unlocked now. (And it was, at this time slightly more than 24 hours had passed.)
5) I re-initiated the transfer (for the fourth time, now) and it was going along, but it was going to run close to the expiration date.
6) Two days into this part of the process I received the first of three email messages which again raised my blood pressure. They were generated by the registrar and sent to me via my hosting service:
Note the sequence: first, we’re gonna charge you extra if it expires, second, we’re gonna make sure it expires before you can transfer it, and third, pay us some money and we won’t let that happen. The cynic in me saw a large gent in dark glasses walking into a china shop with a baseball bat. Perhaps the sequence was unintentional, but it couldn’t have been better designed to produce that impression. (And, just to add another insult to it, the special offer link they emailed me wouldn’t work. It was rejected with a “bad ID” message.)
Through it all, they steadfastly maintained that everything was my fault. I won’t deny some of it was, but I can’t accept all of the blame.
Now, here’s what happened with the hosting company throughout this whole affair.
I will note that during this process I never once threatened the hosting company with anything; I didn’t even suggest I was going to leave them over this. (I’m small potatoes, so it wouldn’t be much of a threat in the first place, but I never do that, anyway. Once you threaten, you have no more options. You either make good on the threat or you look like a petulant child.)
The storal of my mory is this, children. Guess which company keeps my business? Customer loyalty is for sale, but the price tag doesn’t come with a currency symbol. You rent customers with money; you buy them with attitude.
Now I note the darling of the talk radio jocks (I need hardly preface that with “right-wing”, do I? It seems redundant these days to do so) for AG is under investigation for misconduct.
The same Jocks, when the current AG screwed up, went on the warpath for weeks, even months. A good case could be made for their boy’s screwup being worse than the one they were complaining about, but even if you don’t buy into that, there’s still a burning question to ask:
Why the silence? Can you say “Double Standard?” None of them have had the guts to stand up and say, “I was wrong for supporting him for AG. He would have been a bad choice.” And what’s worse, no one’s called them on it.
Charlie (your silence bothers me the most; I’ve always respected you even when I disagreed with you), Jeff, Mark: Next time you want to start raising your voices in outrage at misconduct in office, I have three words for you: Pot. Kettle. Black.
(Disclosure time: I am acquainted with the current AG, before she became AG, through her son, whom I’d often meet at chess tournaments. The acquaintenceship, however, probably only goes the one way; I doubt she could pick me out of a lineup. And this acquaintenceship did not keep me from agreeing that she screwed up.)
Ah, yes, I hear the sound of an election approaching. I can tell because my phone’s ringing. Three times in the last 18 hours, Elizabeth Burmaster has called me (no let’s be fair, twice it was a recording of her, the third time it was a recording of Herb Kohl urging me to vote to re-elect her as Superintendent of the Department Of Public Instruction).
Don’t know if you follow school politics here, but this is another one of those races. The Dems and the teacher’s unions are lined up behind her. The Reps and the businessmen are behind Underheim.
Underheim says the DPI “has been a captive of WEAC for a quarter of a century,” and he will put an end to it. This is Republicanspeak for a Very Bad Thing, I guess. I don’t understand why this is necessarily a bad Thing, but then I don’t understand why the fact Wisconsin ranks last in spending on school breakfasts, something Burmaster pledges to end, is such a Bad Thing, either. I’ve never once confused a school with a restaurant.
Who do I support? Well, let’s see. Burmaster comes from madison, where they concentrate all the resources for supporting good students in one high school, then restrict access to it so other particularly gifted children in Madison are shut out. Underheim has some good points, such as the one about the DPI Super helping to spread the “best practices” from all around the state, but I can’t bring myself to back someone who wants to end 4-yr-old kindergarten and backs the state arrogating to itself the power to control how local governments pay for their operations. (Let me make this clear, I’m for a property tax freeze, I’m against a state-mandated property tax freeze. I say the state should keep its nose out of local governments. I know, there are a number of chuckleheads who say if you’re against the state mandating a local tax freeze, you’re against a tax freeze, but since they obviously don’t have very many functioning synapses — of course they don’t or they could understand simple sentences like the above — I don’t see a reason to worry about what they say about it. The entity that collects the taxes gets to set the rate; what gets me the most about those chuckleheads is that when the state mandates the local government should spend something, they howl in anguish. Please, get your story straight; if it’s not OK for the state to spend the local’s money — and I don’t think it is — then it’s not OK for the state to tell the locals how much money they can tax, either. Goose. Gander. Sauce.) Besides, can you really support someone for DPI Super whose name means “underworld?”
Meaning I’m leaning towards Todd Stetzel. Even though he comes from Black Earth, a horrible place whose football team beat mine back in the day, an event which comes to mind every time I see the Wisconsin Heights football field as I drive down Hwy 14. Why? He’s a teacher who realizes that the student’s needs also count, and who’s willing to look at trading some salaries and benefits for teaching programs that have worked, but are currently undergoing funding difficulties. You want fiscal restraint? He’s capped his campaign spending at $350. Considering all the PAC money flooding into the Burmaster/Underheim pockets, that’s excellent. And you gotta love anyone who says the current way money is distributed in the education system is “wacky.”
Been working with the Mambo event calendar, and its decidedly lacking. I’m going to look at “fixing” it (the words is in quotes, because I’m sure the developer team involved doesn’t think this particular part of it is broken) but I may not be able to and keep it compatible with the distribution version.
The problem is it will not allow events to be in multiple categories, which to me seems nothing short of silly. For example, this post is categorized as General, Technology (because it deals with computer software) and Web Design (because it deals with a component of a content management system — and if you’re just now joining, I’ve already made my opinion known in prior posts that all CMS’s, Open Source and propreitary/closed, suck; feel free to check the archives for some discussion on the subject).
Events on a calendar should also be allowed to be found in multiple categories. Alas, I suspect the design of this compenent rests upon the design decision that all events must belong to one, and only one, category. If I’m wrong, I’ll note it, but if I’m right, before I go out and reinvent the wheel, anyone know of one that doesn’t insist on such a silly constraint? It’s a pain to have to enter the same information in multiple categories.
And, with the previous post, you’ll note that I’ve now discovered how to turn my long essays into short snip plus “read more”. My apologies to my readers up to this point for my stupidity. The front page will from this point on, look less imposing, I promise.
I’m going to start getting into this topic a bit more, because, frankly, I’m tired of hearing about it from the mushy-minded who believe everything they’re told, as long as it’s derogative of the Bible:
“xxx (name your favorite idea) was dropped from the Bible because the church leaders were hostile to it.”
Let’s talk about the editing practice that went in to the current books in the Bible. We’ll leave out the Apochypha, because the original council didn’t grant them full scriptural status; that didn’t happen until the brew-up with Martin Luther about a millenium later.
Since Erasmus compiled the Textus Receptus (all six different editions of it) we’ve uncovered a boatload of manuscripts from all over the region, giving us looks at the 66 books at various stages going back, in the opinion of one scholar, 1900 years, and in the opinion of a majority of scholars, going back 17-1800 years. Is there even one documented case in the manuscript record of something substantial being dropped?
(more…)
…thy name is Peter Paul Koch. His recent article in A List Apart on script triggers contains a concept that is nothing whatever short of brilliant! It’s one of those ideas I Wish I’d Thought Of, and if I had, I’d have spent the rest of the day congratulating myself over it.
Well done, lad. Take a handful of kudos from petty cash.
one of the silliest spammers I’ve met. A long list of drug websites and “Don’t like us posting in your blog? Email me at xxxx.”
This message is silly on so many different levels:
1) Name one person who does like it when idiots post comments which are nothing but a string of URL’s having nothing whatever to do with the blog.
2) The address is, no doubt, a fake one.
3) It assumes they actually did post in my blog, which they didn’t.
thechessmill.com is back to being in my control again. Now it’ll just take a day or so to get my blood pressure back under control, and we’ll be Ready For New Things.
The business grows, and is about ready for some new capital investment. And most of the roadblocks in front of me are getting removed as I write this. Things are looking up.
Still no progress in getting It’s Our Domain And You Can’t Have It to cough up my domain. It really defies belief how people can operate this way and still remain in business.
I shall never do business with It’s Our Domain, excuse me, It’s Your Domain again. Getting them to do anything at all is like pulling teeth. I’m trying to move a domain, mine, that I bought and paid for two years ago, and they have locked it down and are insensitive to my attempts to control my own property.
They’ve made my “Black Hole” list. If things go in, they will never come out. Now I have two choices: pay their ransom (well over double the going rate for domain registration services) or abandon the domain name I’ve spent the last few years building up name recognition for.
I can barely believe this was even raised as a potential issue. You choose in the child’s favor. End of story. If you can’t do that, and especially if you can’t do it without feeling resentful about it, then it’s long past time for you to suck it up, get over yourself, and seriously consider therapy.
said Eric Meyer. One of the rare instances where I had to seriously expend effort to avoid leaping to my feet and cheering as I sat there reading it.
The context of all this was parents who write about their children, having to choose between their writing and their children’s honor and privacy. I can believe a narcissist like Erica Jong would have a problem doing this (no, actually I’m surprised she felt it was a problem; probably a testimony to the power of motherhood that she even stopped to think about the issue at all). What I can’t believe is that someone in the same area code as reality would have a problem doing it.
My kids are grown, but while growing they entered into bits and pieces of my writing, but never in any manner they would consider intrusive, and usually only their good traits. You want a good example, take Lyn Johnston, the artist behind “For Better or For Worse.” It occurred to Lyn long ago, and she coped; the characters gradually moved away from her real family, and she added ones that didn’t have a real life analog, to maintain her family’s privacy.
Eric’s right, you do what you have to do. I wrote for print magazines long ago, and I write for websites now, and I can tell you: writing is just words on paper; the kids are real flesh and blood. If there’s any conflict at all between the two and you have to spend more than five seconds thinking about it, pack the kids off to a foster home and sign their adoption papers, you’re not fit to be in charge of future adults. Period. No weasel words there, and never going to be.
Your duty to yourself, your goals, your ambitions ends when you end. Your kids will go on past you. If you can’t put their best interest ahead of your own, don’t reproduce; we need you out of the gene pool, and I mean now! I’ve given up several of my own dreams because of the little ones entrusted to my care, and while occasionally I’ll spend a few wistful moments wondering “if only…” that’s all they are, idle daydreams. Because I wouldn’t trade one second of what I did with and for my little girls for years of living out whatever that dream was. And that’s what I did. I traded those dreams in for their dreams, because that was the Right Thing To Do. And if you ever resent doing the Right Thing, it’s time to make a reservation in the big house with padded rooms; you’re finished with reality, it’s time to move into that castle in the air you’ve been building.
(Sidenote: It still amazes me, in the light of the extreme popularity of the Lord of The Rings trilogy, that words like the above still need to be written. I mean, the entirety of the saga can be summed up in “No matter the cost, Do The Right Thing.” Even in Peter Jackson’s watered-down — but still excellent — movie series you get Gandalf’s great line: “all we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.” There are circumstances beyond our control in all our lives. So what? We’re not responsible for them, that’s what “beyond our control” means. We’re only responsible for how we respond to them. The whole essence of the series is in Gandalf’s phrase, and the question it poses us all: What to do? Frodo takes his point; you do what is right and while it’s OK to dream about not doing it, in the end you do it, willingly, simply because it *is* the right thing, and the tradeoff, to do the wrong thing in exchange for any perceived personal gain, is, in the end, unthinkable. Because when you look back upon it, all that really matters is the Right Thing. Oh, you can invent all sorts of rationalizations to make you feel better about doing what is more comfortable instead, but, as Tolkien points out, that path leads inexorably to Mordor. Sauron’s final weakness was he couldn’t imagine anyone doing the right thing simply because it was the Right Thing, as Frodo did, and that was his undoing. Is it a sad commentary on our times that we’ve apparently become so much like Sauron in our personal/professional lives that a newspaper article can be written from his viewpoint and be taken as a serious look at a “problem”?)
Reality requires of us that we make choices. And with every choice I make, I trade something for something else. I take up the one, and leave the other behind, to quote the wise philosopher John Hartford. I choose to have a Strawberry Yogurt for breakfast; this means I do not have a Raspberry one today, and it means I cannot have the Strawberry one tomorrow. It’s stupid to resent the consequences of the choices I make; it’s like resenting gravity because when I lifted both of my feet I fell on my butt.
Ecclesiates 3:1 says “To everything there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven.” There is a time to chase your own dreams, to indulge yourself. But there is also a time not to. And that time is when doing so comes at the expense of your kids. Or if you want a more earthy and direct phrasing for it, I’ll turn you over to an engineer friend of mine, a guy I admire greatly and who was heavily into auto racing (yeah, Rudy, I’m talking about you). He always had a sign up in his office: “When the green flag drops, the BS stops.”
The green flag dropped the second that child landed in your arms, parents. It’s time to stop your BS.
OK, you know I’ve taken to bi-weekly reports on my visits to the land of organization. Today I have two major discoveries to report:
a) Those TV shows cheat. They have a place to take everything out of the room to before bringing only the Right Things back into the room. Real people, like me, have to “organize in place” for lack of a batter term. The secret appears to be to mark off a section of the room and spend your time on it today, then mark off another section tomorrow, etc. A journey of 1,000 miles begins with but a single step.
b) ….but it’s not a journey unless you keep stepping. The upside of that is, however, that this can get contagious. If you create a small patch or order, and maintain it, areas which seemed perfectly fine will slowly start to annoy you. The desire festers within you, and soon you find yourself unable to accept the level of chaos that used to be “normal” in your world.
Progress report: well over 2/3 of the floor cleared normally (this ebbs and flows as I create piles of things to be taken to other locations in the house or disposed of entirely) and most of my desk (same story, as I create piles on it of things that need to be computerized or otherwise acted upon before going away).
Other discoveries:
I have roughtly 40 linear feet of chess books in this room (this is separate from the chess club library that I keep in the basement, as those books technically don’t belong to me). Add in the theology shelves and they amount to more than half of the occupied shelves in this room. And the interesting piece: I don’t have enough of either!. (If you don’t understand that, you’re not a Book Person.)
If keep a copy of one or two episodes of neat on the DVR, I can gain energy from one of them wherenever I get bogged down.
Carla Ulbrich, if I wasn’t happily married, you’d have yourself a stalker. Anytime your touring takes you to the frozen north, give a holler. Beatutiful, smart, and she plays guitar better than I do. If you’ve not experienced her music, you’re far the poorer for it.
And, this just in for you Poddies, she’s at the iTunes Music Store. I’d list the tunes I’d recommend, but it’s simpler to just say, get’em all. Yes, kids, she’s that good.
No commercial affiliation, BTW. I get nothing if you buy her songs except the warm feeling that I’ve introduced someone else to the kind of humor that makes the earth quake. (And you always thought it was a fault line!)
At least the spammers are getting erudite, or feigning it. Now I’m under assault by a spammer who is peppering his posts with either an aphorism (found via dictionary-style lookup fromthe post’s subject) or a full paragraph of pseudo-intelligent babble. Heck I was almost willing to cut the poker reference from a couple and then post them. In the end, I decided not to, on the theory that he might think he’d actually found a way past the filters and it would just encourage him.
I’m a member of two web development mailing lists (which two I won’t specify, the identity isn’t necessary to the tale) but I haven’t posted to either list often of late; in fact I think it’s been a year since I was heard from on one. Why?
I was arguably among the most active on both lists for years, then suddenly I disappeared. My lack of participation struck me this morning as I looked at the email folder from one of the lists which contained well over a thousand unread messages.
Then I opened the folder and looked at the subject lines, and I remembered why I hadn’t participated for a long time. Of the first four screens of messages I saw nothing except requests for solutions to problems that have been long known, and which can be found with a few seconds on a competent search engine, and requests for site checks (people wanting you to fire up your browser and look at their site).
I remember the day when mailing lists were useful tools for learning from others. You could pick someone’s brains and find out what you needed to know. But you also felt responsible for using their time, and tried first to find out the answer on your own.
Today it seems the majority of people I run into on the net want everything handed to them in a nicely wrapped bundle, and are unwilling to expend any effort on their own. In fact, they act insulted if you dare to suggest they could have found the answer on their own by simply typing the exact question they asked into the search box at Google, DogPile, Teoma, or wherever.
It’s this attitude of entitlement that has driven down my participation. The fact that people seem to feel they are somehow entitled to my expertise, and that I’m a Rotten Human Being if I don’t drop whatever deadline-challenged work I have in front of me and do precisely what they want me to do for them, so they can take the credit and even earn the money for completing their project.
Maybe I’m just getting curmudgeonly in my old age, but I’m no longer inclined to do that. When there are 16 sites readily available through searching that have the exact details of the problem you have, I’m really not inclined to stop what I’m doing and lead you by the hand to them. Show me you’re willing to expend some effort learning, and then we’ll talk.
I stopped doing site checks for all but certain people when the people requesting the checks started arguing with me about it. I mean, if you’re going to ask my opinion, don’t jump up and down on me for giving it. You surely don’t have to fix everything I might happen to think is wrong, but if you aren’t willing to listen to the criticism, why bother to ask?
So if you’re on one of those lists, and you’re wondering where I am, I’m still there. I’m just not interested in saying much of anything, anymore. There’s too much noise and not enough signal.
Well, maybe “hate” is too strong a word. Let’s go for “dislike”; perhaps even “feel contempt for.”
I deal with a mixture of city kids and suburban kids. True, some of the city kids can be a problem. But they don’t hold a candle to the suburban ones. once they learn the rules, most of the city kids I deal with are willing to play within them, and most of the ones who don’t follow the “OK, guv, it’s a fair cop,” school from the english cozies. The kids from the suburbs, however, don’t think they did anything wrong unless they’re caught, and when caught spend the next hours/days/weeks/months whining about how nasty you were to catch them in the first place, and not simply overlook the infraction because they’re such angelic children.
Case in point (names and other identifiers excluded): In chess there are some rules that you either call on yourself, or can only be enforced if your opponent catches you at it and appeals to the director. A suburban child breaks such a rule. After the game is over, I suggest to him, politely, that he should learn the rules of the game if he plans to continue playing in tournaments. (I do this for his own good, because there are some folks who play chess who can get very outraged — and outrageous — if you transgress the rules while playing against them. They probably wouldn’t break your fingers over it; at least they haven’t yet.) Indignantly, he tells me he knows the rules. Further, he obviously didn’t do anything wrong, because his opponent didn’t complain.
OK, I can see trying to get away with breaking the rules, especially if, as in his case, he was going to lose if he didn’t break the rules. I can see trying it, although I can’t condone it (and if one of my players tried it on, he wouldn’t be one of my players for very long). But to stand there and claim there was nothing at all wrong with what he did? You’ll only find that attitude in the suburbs, dear. City kids would at least be embarassed about trying it.
Cities can be rough, I’m not trying to dispute that. But there’s an honesty, a forthrightness, in the roughness that I’ve grown to appreciate. Yes, life in the city can be mean, but the meanness is right out there in the open, not trying to disguise itself.
It’s in the soul-stealing suburbs that your friends get pulled over for DWB. (Driving While Black, for those of you who may be naive about things like that. It a suburban road hazard every black male has to deal with, especially after dark. If you’re behind the wheel of the car, and dark-skinned, you must be Up To No Good.) Where the kids can, with deliberate intent, break the rules and then be amazed that a simple “Sorry” doesn’t wipe the offense out completely. Where actions and words are not allowed to have consequences. Where we just can’t admit anything happens, where we hide all transgressions under a flood of money. Oh, some misdeeds surface despite all the efforts to hide them, but they’re just the visible tip of the iceberg. I’ve lived in small towns, large cities, and suburbs. I’ve faced power-take-off shafts and guns. I’ve no intention of ever living in a suburb again. Those people are scary.
I’ll leave you with the thoughts of the Great Detective Himself:
“You look at these scattered houses, and you are impressed by their beauty. I look at them, and the only thought which comes to me is a feeling of their isolation and of the impunity with which crime may be committed there… They always fill me with a certain horror. It is my belief, Watson, founded upon my experience, that the lowest and vilest alleys in London do not present a more dreadful record of sin…”
“But the reason is very obvious. The pressure of public opinion can do in the town what the law cannot accomplish. There is no lane so vile that the scream of a tortured child, or the thud of a drunkard’s blow, does not beget sympathy and indignation among the neighbours, and then the whole machinery of justice is ever so close that a word of complaint can set it going, and there is but a step between the crime and the dock. But look at these lonely houses, …. Think of the deeds of hellish cruelty, the hidden wickedness which may go on, year in, year out, in such places, and none the wiser. Had this lady who appeals to us for help gone to live in Winchester, I should never have had a fear for her. It is the five miles of country which makes the danger.”
Local Talk Radio mavens are happy: For weeks (months) they’ve been howling with rage because our local police force hadn’t arrested someone for slashing some Republican tires on election eve. Even though no evidence whatsoever was brought forward in support of the claim, it was trumpeted as Siginificant Vote Tampering, rather than simple vandalism.
One could ask where the voices of outrage were over the failure to make arrests for the dozens of rapes and other serious crimes that went unsolved. If mentioned at all, they didn’t get even 10% of the airtime that this vandalism got. For that matter (to compare apples to apples) what about all the slashed tires that happened in the wake of the 100th Harley celebration? Guess it only matters when the victims are Republicans.
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