Monthly Archives: December 2005

Stuff and nonsense

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For those of you hoping I might get away from the politics and back to the library, don’t worry.  I have lots in the hopper.

I still have a few previous posts from a couple months back that I should finish up.  I recently read an article that takes an historical view of note-taking. (found via if:book).  From it I tracked down an article on the concept of "information overload" in the Early Modern Period, along with a few other interesting looking ones in Critical Inquiry.  As one might imagine, I’ll take a different view of the article than that of Lisa Lynch at if:book.

Of course, I have my entry for the upcoming Virtual Librarians Journal Club next Friday.  Have you got the article yet?  Seeing as it’s me, I also read another article on the same topic that I’ll either comment on there, or here, or both.  Gouge, Marianne K.  "Blogs as a Means of Preservation Selection for the World Wide Web."  Found via PomeRantz 23 Nov 05.

I think I still have something to say about the new Cowboy Junkies CD.  But it’ll be political seeing as the CD is. 

There are so many more things to read, but I’m almost afraid to start on them as I already have so much to write about.  I know, I know.  I don’t have to write about them all; and I don’t.  But what better way to really glean something from them?  I already knew it, but even the article on note-taking agrees.

I have no internet this morning.  Seems Insight caused an outage themselves per the nice lady on the phone.  I’m sure glad I don’t have any finals or papers still that require me to use the net or I’d be really pissed off.  I still don’t like it much.  I mean, I’m sitting here practically snowed in after yesterday’s storm with close to a 1000 books, and probably well over a 150 pdfs on the computer, and I want my internet. 

I know it’s kind of pathetic, or at least I think so.  But then I haven’t been able to check my email yet today.  And I have an email from the prof I am coding web pages for about fixing one last thing in the last page,  but I don’t know exactly what it was.  So I can’t fix it—and be done!  Oh well.

I guess I’ll find something to read.  Or there’s dishes to be done.  After I have my 2nd breakfast and finish the coffee I’ll be able to venture out into the Winterwonderland and run a few errands.  As best I can tell, the streets look reasonably clean, but the apartment management has yet to shovel the sidewalks, and besides it’s blowing and drifting.  One of my errands is to go pay my storage bill and get the Christmas stuff out, along with retrieving the snow shovel.

Later in the day.  Post-errands.  Guess what?  No shovel!  I could’ve sworn I had it here last year.  <grrr>  And of course, the dude with the snowblower didn’t come until after I had gone out and come back.

TypePad and Bloglines, but especially TypePad, are acting screwy again.  And pissing me off highly.  They really are working on losing my business, particularly since I just remembered that I can get a pro-rated refund of what I paid.  I think I’ll spend the holidays talking to some folks and researching.  If I can move everything easily and get reliable service I’ll be ecstatic.  Oh, it is just those two as everything else is as snappy as usual.

I had lots of other things to add, but since making this post is becoming such an issue I think I’ll just go with it as is now.

Oh, in Insight’s favor this morning, they called me to ask me to check if the net was back on just as I noticed the modem lights looked normal.  I still had to re-reboot the cable modem and the router but it was all good then.

Will I or won’t I?  That is the question of the evening.  May even be my last chance….

Hairshirt Humanist

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Found at The Itinerant Librarian, "What kind of humanist am I?"

Hairshirt

Excuse us, could you just put down that hammer for a minute and listen. You’re so busy getting things done you rarely take any time out just to relax. In fact, you’ve probably forgotten how to relax. That’s because you’re so anxious to prove that it’s possible to lead a good and moral life without religion that you have built a strict and forbidding creed all of your own.

You keep a compost heap, cycle to the bottle bank, invest in ethical schemes only and the list of countries you won’t buy from is longer than the washing line for your baby’s towelling nappies. You admire uncompromising self–sacrificers like Aung San Suu Kyi and Che Guevara, and would have liked the chance to be incarcerated for your principles like Diderot or Nelson Mandela.

You would never cheat on your partner, drink and drive, accept bribes or touch drugs. You never waste money though you give lots to charity. Living a good life? You’re a model to us all. But it wouldn’t hurt you to try a little happiness once in a while. Loosen up.

What kind of humanist are you? Click here to find out.

Now this is a mixed bag, as usual.  Relaxing?  What the heck is that?  Well, it is possible to lead a good and moral life without religion.  What’s your point?  Strict and forbidding?  Whatever.  Some things just aren’t right and, to be honest, the most repressive parts came from the early Protestant indoctrination. 

I don’t have a compost heap; I don’t have a garden because I don’t have a yard.  But, OK, I would if I could.  I don’t invest (much).  And I had to look up Aung San Suu Kyi.  But OK, I’ll respect a Nobel Peace Prize Winner who said, "It is not power that corrupts but fear. Fear of losing power corrupts those who wield it and fear of the scourge of power corrupts those who are subject to it" [Wikipedia]. Amen, sister!

That last paragraph—well  I certainly would not do a few of those things.  It’s a bit too late for the others.  And while I do give money to charities, I also waste quite a bit of it.  More importantly, if this is the good life then I am in serious trouble.  But.  I am still searching for it.  And the journey, along with recognizing what is not the good life, is the most important thing a soul can do.

And a little hint, most of what your society tells you is the good life is a complete and utter lie.  Always has been; always will be.

On moral authority and civil servants

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Current events shed light on the extent to which language games are played in our society and by our government, and  how the denial of wrongdoing can be based on accusing the the questioner of "inappropriate … second-guessing."

European ministers may be satisfied by Secretary of State Rice’s statements that "US interrogators are banned from using torture at home and abroad," [BBC] but I am not.  I have to say that listening to her statement on the radio only makes me even more convinced.  She lies as badly as I do; clearly transparent.

But even more important is the practice of extraordinary rendition.  It is bascially the kidnapping of someone and taking them to another country to be imprisoned and interrogated, and most importantly, to be removed from any international oversight.

There are several ethical problems with this practice, as I see it:

  • Kidnapping.
  • If someone is to be arrested and charged with a crime then that is what should happen.
  • They should be arrested and detained by local authorities, until we can legally extradite them.
  • It should not be legal to forcibly remove someone from one country to another without some legal protection for the accused.
  • Why are we rendering people to countries such as Egypt, Jordan, Syria that we know torture?
  • If this is an acceptable and necessary tactic in the war on terror, then why are these people not rendered to the US?

One answer is that people of little conscience, such as Secretary Rice, can address the world with a straight face and say that "US interrogators are banned from using torture"  Because we are paying others to do it for us.

The practice of extraordinary rendition is a moral failure of the highest kind.  And while it may in some sense be legal, if it is, it is only through a supreme act of extra-legal perversion.

I also love how US Ambassador to the UN Bolton can say that it is "inappropriate and illegitimate for an international civil servant to second-guess the conduct that we’re engaged in [in]
the war on terror, with nothing more as evidence than what she reads in the newspapers" [BBC].

Keep in mind that this "civil servant" is none other than the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Louise Arbour.  Well, Mr. Bolton, according to my understanding and my dictionary, you are also no more than a civil servant.  So hurling what was no doubt supposed to be a disparaging epithet will do you no good.  This is not a 2nd grade school yard.  You may supposedly be a diplomat, but then so is she, along with being a former Canadian Supreme Court Justice.

If Louise Arbour claims that America has lost its moral compass and that "the global ban on torture was becoming a casualty of the US-led "war on terror"" [BBC], then I for one am agreeing with her Mr. Bolton.

Another interesting aspect of Mr. Bolton‘s claim that it is "inappropriate and illegitimate for an international civil servant to second-guess the conduct that we’re engaged in [in]
the war on terror" is the fact that this is exactly this international civil servant’s job.  If the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights is not going to question US policy on these issues, who will?  Please, tell me who will.

And somehow I doubt her comments are based solely on "what she reads in the newspapers."  Mr. Bolton, we already know your views on the UN—that is one of the main reasons you were given the job by an administration that is also hostile to the UN.

So this administration and its flunkies can keep spinning words so that they mean nothing except what they want them to mean and they can defuse questions of the utmost moral concern by attacking the questioner, even when the questioner does so in the performance of their official duties.

I don’t know if any of the rest of you are bothered by any of this, but I am deeply ashamed of my country.  I sure hope Microsoft gets their Xbox 360 production and quality issues resolved in time for Christmas.  There’s an awful lot of people needing an awful lot of distracting.

 

"all i want is some truth
just give me some truth"

Follow my heart…

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Tonight someone important to me told me

You just need to follow your heart.  You’re a good guy.

If only….

 

If we’re lucky, we feel our lives,
Know when the next scene arrives,
So often we start in the middle and work our way out.
We go to some gray sky diner for eggs and toast,
The New York Times or The New York Post,
Then we take a ride
through the valley of the shadow of doubt.

Dar Williams.  "The Hudson."  My Better Self.

The literary tattoo

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Just finished an interesting article by Margot Mifflin, "A Blank Human Canvas: The Literary Tattoo Leaps From the Page to Living Parchment."  Found it in the Dec 2005 / Jan 2006 Believer thanks to 3 Quarks Daily.

The article discusses the intersection of literature and the tattoo.  It begins and ends by discussing Shelley Jackson’s 2,095-word short story, "Skin," which is only being inked one word at a time on individual human bodies. 

It discusses Hawthorne, Melville, Bradbury, Oates, and several others.

There were instances,” he found, when his needle “unwittingly delved down into a soul and struck upon meaning, then confidential matter came up, unstemmable as arterial blood or gushing oil, and customers confessed the reason behind the art… the tales were revelatory and awful and enlightening… to tattoo was to understand that people in all their confusing mystery wanted only to claim their bodies as their own site, on which to build a beacon, or raise a rafter, or nail up a manifesto, warning, celebrating, telling of themselves.

[u]nless brought to him howling and bloody and immediately from the canals of their mothers at birth, there was absolutely no such thing as a blank human canvas.

from Sarah Hall’s The Electric Michelangelo.  Emphasis mine.

Speaking of Jackson’s Skin project:

Another participant says her tattoo—“words,”—incarnates a lifelong relationship that has been paramount for her as a student and teacher of literature. Until now, she says, “I existed and interacted outside of the word itself. Now I am a word. Who is going to read, consume, and interpret me? Who is in my sentence? Am I part of an independent clause or a dependent clause? Is someone my adjective? Who verbs me? Would I like the other words in my sentence? Will I ever meet them?”   Mifflin

"Who verbs me?"  Wow!  Everyone of those questions.  Wow.

I have four tattoos.  None of them visible when I am dressed.  All of them where I can see them.  One of them is over 27 years old.  The others are all under six.

None of them are particularly literary, except for being metaphors, but they all nail up a manifesto, warning, celebrating, telling of themselves, reminding me of important ideas—ideas that literally keep me alive.

Will I get more?  Probably.  There is one I promised myself a few years ago that I still want.  But there are no artists near me, and this would require a true artist.  I know this kind of work is being done nowadays as MFAs move into the world of skin art, but they tend to be in places like San Francisco and New York, not in the corn fields.

I probably won’t get many more though, as I don’t see myself changing my mind about only getting them where I can see them (and take care of them).  That rules out almost half of the body and, of course, a few other locations are out by default, leaving less than half an already small body.

But.  It is my body and I have, and still am in the process of claiming it.  "[T]here [i]s absolutely no such thing as a blank human canvas."  For some of us, this is a literal as well as metaphorical truth.  And for some, the literal is literary as well.

Trackback problem update

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If you happen to get a weird trackback from me, especially if it is a few/several weeks old, then I apologize.  TypePad is acting stupid and not sending my Trackbacks, especially if I sent multiple ones in the same post.  Now most of these were to my own posts, but there are certainly some to a few other folks.  Particularly since the problem is far worse than I thought.

I’ve worked my way back to Oct. 23rd "Another Voice Silenced" so far, but that one still has an unsent trackback and there are others further back.

Here is part of the reply I received in response to my trouble ticket:

Thanks for your note. It sounds like you are entering the multiple TrackBacks correctly.

TypePad only has a limited amount of time to send the TrackBacks in
and does not wait indefinitely while sending TrackBacks. This is to
keep server use down. It also means that if one of the TrackBacks you
are trying to send is having problems, for instance the receiving
server is slow, then not all of them may go through in the time allowed.

In this case, you may need to try sending again by saving the post a second time.

Well, well.  Guess whose blogging service has been having server issues lately?  So, I’m doing it right, but because you can’t keep server response acceptable I have to work harder.  Well, guess what folks, some of these posts I had to resave over twelve (that’s 12) times in a row just to get it to send one trackback this evening.  I gave up on the above mentioned Oct. post because I was getting very tired and sore clicking and scrolling, clicking and scrolling,…, just to find out that it had failed again.

My subscription goes until about the third week of February now thanks to the one month free extension I was given recently due to server issues that seriously disrupted service a month or so back.  I am taking recommendations on other blog software/hosting services and may just give myself a birthday present when this runs out.

I am officially putting you on notice TypePad.  I am actually a pretty simple guy to keep happy.  But when I have to work this hard to accomplish something that I am doing right, I get upset.  I was almost ready to accept saving a post three times if I wanted to send three trackbacks, but I am not willing to accept saving 20-30 or more times to send three trackbacks.  Just. Ain’t. Willin’.

Note:  This has 2 trackbacks; any takers on how many times I’ll have to save to get them both sent?

Update:  12 minutes later.

Seems someone is having server response issues currently.  I have literally just saved this post 12 times; I ticked them off on a piece of paper each time.  Not a single trackback was sent although every time the software reported both were being pinged.

Call me unhappy.  For starters.

Whoa.  Thirteen’s my lucky number.  Let’s see if we can force the 2nd one to be sent on trial 14.

Update: 6 Dec 5:20 PM

Well, it turns out I have unsent trackbacks going all the way back to one of my very first posts on 30 Jan 2005!  I was able to force several to finally be sent today, but many others will not go.  Maybe folks have turned off trackbacks at this point to prevent trackback spam, who knows?

I guess this could also explain part of the reason I have not been allowed into some conversations over the last few months; the other people didn’t even know I was talking.

Some of these are to TypePad blogs and some to others.  I have no doubt TypePad will claim the others are not well formed trackbacks, but I know other people have sent trackbacks to most of these people, and I have even been successful on occasion.

There are at least 7 still unsent after multiple attempts to save these posts and force them to send.  And I didn’t appreciate having to go back through 350 posts to check them all either.  Nor all the extra scrolling and clicking and failing….

Semester almost over

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Well, I got my Collection Development paper finished and my presentation ready for tomorrow. 

I used Eric Meyer’s kindly contribution to the public domain, S5: A Simple Standards-based Slide Show System for the presentation.  That is a sweet little presentation system.  Maybe over break I’ll have time to dig into the CSS and play with customization.  If that is half as easy as filling in content I’ll never use PowerPoint again, unless forced to.  Come on, my presentation will fit on floppy disk, if anyone had one anymore, and it’ll work on any computer with a reasonably current browser.  What more could one ask?

Last week I had to loan my laptop to an instructor because a student had done her distance ed presentation in PowerPoint and none of our studio machines had Office or the PP reader on them.  The poor student is on the phone talking the class through her presentation and the instructor can’t even see it.  So I did the ‘right thing’ and loaded it up on my laptop and handed the laptop to the instructor.  But don’t expect it to be a habit kiddies.  The university makes a wonderful accessibility converter for MS Office products which we use to make fully accessible web documents from.  Prior to class time, please and thank you.  Anyway, we got the student’s presentation converted and placed in her web space and put a link to it on the bulletin boards for the class.  Of course, this was after half or more of her classmates were unable to view it during the actual presentation.

So, tomorrow I give my Collection Development Operations Investigation presentation.  Not exactly sure what I’m going to say.  I have 7 very basic slides with an 8th providing "on my knees, bowing down before the deity that is Eric Meyer" credit for the awesome S5 system.  I’m not too worried about what to say though.  I only have 10-12 minutes and these are my friends I’m talking about after all.  I looked at the Science and Technology floor of Milner Library at Illinois State University.

After the presentation and turning in the accompanying paper tomorrow, all I have left is a reflection paper for my Pragmatic Technology class.  It isn’t due until 14 December.  Woohoo!

In other fronts, I’ve really been wanting to blog about the new Cowboy Junkies CD I got.  I also went annd saw Kate Hathaway again Friday night, along with Meg Allison who was down from Chicago.  Meg, another ‘girl with a guitar,’ has a new CD out, Missing Piece.  I think I liked her better solo and in person, but it’ll grow on me.  And it was only $10.

Last week we finally got our statement out about the emeritus faculty issue and how it affects us as current and future students.  That was a huge load and I worked with 2 very dedicated students to get it done. 

Today I got 2 e-invites for holiday parties.  These darn ‘kids’ are going to give me a big head or something if their not careful.

There are many other topics I would like to discuss, but they are far lengthier.  It is now after 10 PM and I really should get away from this machine for a bit and relax before it is time to go to bed.

Pets, the new black?

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Just got back from the grocery store where I noticed something strange. 

I spent over $100, which is odd for me, but that is not the strangeness.  A growing boy needs his milk, juice and ice cream after all.

The grocery store I frequent has been rearranging, redesigning and remodeling lately.  They are still rebuilding the outside front but I think they’re done with the internal restructuring for now.  So, I’m kind of wandering the aisles to find things again.  Completely missed the cookies last time I went, and I needed cookies.  I found them today.  They are now with the chips, nuts, popcorn and related snacks.  Check.  Even makes sense.

I decided to wander down the baby food and baby products aisle as who knows what’s hidden there now.  OK, maybe I’m completely out of touch, seeing as my children haven’t needed anything from that selection in over 20 years, but what kind of fool would put the baby products in the same aisle with the pet products?  That’s it.  The whole aisle.  Baby food and products and pet food and products.

I know some people really love their pets and for some people pets are their children.  But really?  If I had children young enough to need products from that aisle I would be offended!  Actually, I am offended.  It just doesn’t matter much to me as I can completely avoid that aisle.

Pets are important.  Children are important.  But they are not equivalent by any stretch of the imagination.

Is this a new trend or is it something you see at your grocery store too?  I guess it doesn’t really matter.  It is just another example of how much of this society I simply cannot wrap my mind around.

Test of Trackbacks from PC

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This post is simply a test post and will probably be deleted eventually.

Conditions:

Multiple trackbacks are not working from the PowerBook.

Instructions for sending multiple trackbacks verified.

Hypothesis:

TypePad is not interpreting the Enter/Return key as a carriage return on the PowerBook.

Test:

Attempt sending multiple Trackbacks from PC.

Do they go through?

Pings sent to following:
trackback/3748906   What Do You Call It When?
trackback/3747670  Thanks Walt
trackback/3747037  CSS and TypePad

Browser used for both tests is Firefox.

Update:

While posting, TypePad reported pinging all 3 posts, jsut as it does on the Mac.

trackback/3748906  Received
trackback/3747670  Not Received
trackback/3747037  Not Received

So, it seems to me that TypePad is not interpreting the Enter key as a carriage return in the Trackback box.

Ooh, interesting.  There are only 2 trackbacks listed/still listed in the Send a TrackBack to these addresses.  And the one missing is the one received.

Am going to try separating them by an additional ‘carriage return.’  It’s possible, even if inconceivable that it is registering a < br > vs. a < p >, although neither are really a carriage return.

Extra return added.  I now see a blank line between them.

Update 2:

Reported pinging both but only one came through.

trackback/3747670  Received
trackback/3747037  Not Received

So, I have no idea what the instructions are trying to claim.  But it does not work in what seems to be a correct manner. 

Open to trouble ticket.