I’ve shifted blog tools from Typepad to WordPress in pursuit of that illusion: control. Slowly over the next few months I hope to evolve a new format and use more tools better. Tagging is one of the tools I must master. Using Oddiophile’s Rather Fab Technorati Tag Bookmarklet I may make inroads into the wonderful world of tags. Or so Lorelle says.

I like rocketboom, so I’ll probably love rocketpost…

All aboooard!!!!

Update… posted from Qumana version three…

Wherein Mark reminisces about all the dogs in his life…

Like most beagles, Casey howled. Whenever we left the house, Casey would stand at the dining room window that overlooked the driveway, paws on the windowsill, nose on the window, and howl. But whenever we got home, she was asleep on the couch. So it was all for show. I often wondered how long she kept up the act after we left, but there was a bit of an observer-affects-the-observed quality to it because she would only howl if everybody left. As long as at least one person stayed in the house, she didn’t care. She was a Heisenbeagle.

Doc Searls ponders his next camera. He’s looking at digital SLRs. I have a Canon EOS Digital Rebel and I really like it. One drawback is the built-in flash which provides about as much light as a lightning bug in heat. Balancing that is the “shoe” on top of the camera that will hold the functional equivalent of a klieg light if you really want it too. “I’m ready for my close-up,” she said, and we hit the lights and burnt her eyebrows right off her face.

I also have a Nikon Coolpix that is small enough to slip in a jacket pocket. I’ve enjoyed the Coolpix for snapshots over the last year or so. The Canon EOS is more of a production — from schlepping it around to changing lenses and dealing with the choices that the SLR offers in terms of settings.

Since there are so many good SLRs out there right now, I’d ask the professionals what they use and see if I could afford one of those. Since there so many professionals to ask, Doc ought to be emailing Niek and Heather and Derek and Shelley for their advice, and not relying on anything he hears from a shutter-putterer like me.

Today, Niek writes about Reality and Myth in a mud wrestling contest… interesting to ponder. Derek has an essay that has some tangency to Niek’s… Design for Selfishness. Go for the photos, stay for the writing.

Update:  Voting for Kevin Marks’ neologism, “Wifired,” this morning I discovered a word that just calls out to be used (if not precisely as defined by the neologger):  Technorazzi — “Doc’s one of the guys with cameras at technology events.  He’s one of the technorazzi.”  Update-update…  it looks like Kevin won!

I am the proud owner of a brand new Sta-Rite Signature 2024 Stainless Steel Series 4″ Submersible Pump. The old pump was installed in the old well in 1984 and moved to the new well in 1992. Today it died. I pitched it behind the mock orange next to the well. Someday I’ll recycle it.

Tonight Beth remarked that the water pressure was low. I checked the breaker box and indeed the pump circuit was tripped. First I called an electrician, but the electrician was an honorable man and told me to call the pump guy. The pump guy is Leo Fahey from Brooklyn, Wisconsin. Fahey has been in the pump business for forty-three years, since his early thirties. My cellar is a shameful mess of course. A dirt floored, damp, cobwebby place with a single 100 watt bulb somewhere. You enter through a cellar doormuch like the one in Wizard of Oz, only not as accessible. When you get to the bottom step you have to get on your knees and clamber through a hatch. After a long step down, if you are over 5′6″ you have to bend over in order not to hit your head on the floor joists above you. When we scuttled out of that pit back into the light of day, I asked Leo if he was glad all his customers didn’t have cellars like mine. He grinned.

“Keeps me agile,” he said.

Pete Jacobson used to service our well, but he’s retired. Actually, I think it was the snakes in the old pit well that forced him into retirement. Pete is younger than Leo. Leo says he’ll hang it up if he ever burns out, but he doesn’t see that happening soon.

Leo gets up between 4:30 and 5:00 every morning and he’s at his shop by 6am. He says he starts to get tired toward the late afternoon, but then he goes home for supper and gets his second wind. It’s right around dinner time that guys like me call with our problems and Leo is there, taking the calls and coming out and pulling the pump or whatever it takes.

thanks to RB for foregrounding the following link… it does grow on you.

Maybe this blogging thing is just a hobby. (Although I have it on good authority, or at least in comments from Bruce and Mike, that I am an okay writer). But here’s the point. Today has been a fierce day of WordPress foolery. If you look at the blue boxes at the top of the home page, you’ll see a box labeled “Links.” And if you click on it you will go to a links page that contains each and every one of the links I had in the blogroll of the Sandhill rel. 2.0 site. And wait! There’s more! I’m goofing around sorting the list into a bunch of different A-lists and some topical lists and maybe some lists of lists, and later, after everyone has gone to bed, I may even try to improve the typography. The learning experience is every bit as good as the distraction a model railroader enjoys assembling a layout of perhaps eleventy million little chunks of HO track on some awful plywood board covered with green paint and papier mache mountains.

A friend, a somewhat post-modern person and a bit of an academic but a friend none-the-less, sent me a brief paper she wrote. I didn’t know that “foreground” was a verb. In this paper she and her colleagues are continually “foregrounding” this and that. Now I flunked my freshman honors composition course because I had to get to North Beach and my travel conflicted with my final exam, so yes — there were extenuating circumstances and I was 18 and had strange priorities. I should be the last person to criticize (being a failure at freshman honors composition and all… but if you knew Cyrena Pondrom you might well understand why I would rather be driving some huge fucking Buick Electra from Chicago to Berkeley sucking down gas at gallons per minute as we redlined it all across the country only going off the road once on Highway 50 in Nevada where the shoulders are wide and merge nicely with the sagebrush covered desert and there are no fences so no harm done except perhaps for a little adrenaline rush and waking up my partners who needed to wake up anyway since we had been on the road over 24 hours and I was by god falling asleep and by the time we delivered that unit to the drive-away folks in Berkeley the V8 was pinging pretty badly from the redline abuse and the cheap fuel we’d been pouring in, but - you may have noticed - I seem to be off on a tangent here).

I found Cyrena to be something between a harsh task mistress and a humorless weenie, but I guarantee she would never have permitted the use of “foreground” as a verb in the essays she required of her Integrated Liberal Studies Honors Section of bonehead English.

If you’re a WordPressarian, you might notice that in the left sidebar I have a two item list of “Pages.” In WordPress-ese, a page is different from a post because it lacks the chronological dimension. It’s more a static arrangement of information and pages can be listed in the sidebar. Learning to SUPPRESS the listing of a page was my great thrill today. A simple PHP exclude statement did the trick. You’ll notice that “Links” appears above, but not in the sidebar. If I continue to progress as a codester, I’ll be able to quit the day job at McDonalds (where I would not have had to work if Cyrena had only relented and given me an incomplete as others were kind enough to do, but no-ooo…  So you might think this is all my fault, but those were the days before grade inflation, the days when an F was a failure and there was no way around it.  Would you like fries with that?
And p.s… if you’re in the old link list and haven’t appeared in an A-list on my new links page, don’t despair. All of my lists are A-lists. But just fyi, I have had to rename AKMA’s link to equalize the collation advantage he has so long enjoyed. You can now find him listed as ze AKMA right next to ze Frank.

Virtual Earth Day, maybe… Susan Crawford’s brainchild, One Web Day, will happen on 9/22/2006 and every year thereafter until sunshine is replaced by the cold glow of a zillion computer screens. I’m dusting off the Blog World Expo concept in preparation for One Web Day. What are you doing?

Another question… if it’s “One Web Day,” why is this guy holding up three fingers?

Suw Charman, at Corante, drops in a few links at the bottom of her left sidebar.

“Take a shufti,” says she.

“By all means,” says me.  “Just leave the shuftiscope at home.”

… of the chimp faced man, George W. Bush.  Assess the intentionality of his family’s complicity in violent acts of global warming from the destruction of oil fields in Kuwait, to the SUV craze at the turn of the century.  Capture a nucleic acid sequence from the maternal T cells, and mix with eye of Newt.  Shake, do not stir, and shake that thing again.  Sell esquimaux air conditioners long.

Ask again if global warming itself will further the imperialist ambition by opening new frontiers for exploitation of the mineral resources in the polar regions.  Encourage carbon conversion to greenhouse gases and invest heavily in upland real estate.

A second tier management consulting firm contacted me. They are looking for a project executive in Madison. “The project executive will need to be able to establish the structure and manage a multi-million dollar, multi-year initiative…” and so forth. Really they’re looking for a rain maker. They haven’t won that business yet, and if they do, the project executive will need to be pounding the pavement and pressing the flesh in an effort to shovel ever more contracts into the gaping maw of Moloch.

Wait. Somewhere my professional perspective slipped for a moment. No demons there, no Canaanite deities looking for human sacrifice. Just a few people trying to get by… I told them I was not a rain maker. Then to seal the not-a-deal, I dummied up. I forgot about similar efforts I’ve engaged in, modest successes…. In short, I couldn’t find the spizz to toot my own horn. Horn tootage was what they were after. I couldn’t play that tune with them even if they’d hummed a few bars for me.

They asked me how I thought of myself… as a solution creator, a demand creator, an integration leader, or a client service provider. They lost me at “or.”
When professionals gather, why does the air go out of the room? What is this thing about how we all have to behave like Samurai and scowl and say “Hai!” a lot? Why can’t we loosen the fuck up?

Bottom line, no offer was or would be forth-coming, and I felt really bad about that. I felt like I wanted the offer, even though I hadn’t asked for the opportunity. Once they had seen my shining light, I thought, there should be no reason for them to do anything but strew palm fronds and greenback dollars in my path.

It’s possible that I didn’t sell myself well, because I know how easily I can be bought, and damned if I wanted to work with a bunch of stiffs. When we parted it was the typical “Don’t call us, we’ll call you,” and I wanted to scream, “You did call me you buncha rack-racka-growly-monkey penises.”

All of which goes to the point of professionalism I guess. It’s about going after the win every time and sorting out the trophys later.

If you’ve been reading Betsy Devine, this link to the AP story on Republican phone jamming election crimes in New Hampshire will come as no surprise. In fact, Betsy has better content, I think.

It’s Beth’s birthday and my mind has finally snapped. I drove into the driveway tonight singing a placid little tune of my own devising with repetitive but enormously soothing lyrics, lyrics comprised entirely of the phrase “la, la, la — duck, duck, duck…” The tempo was allegretto, the mood was upbeat. There were two plastic bags on the seat beside me. One bag held dinner, the other an assemblage of birthday cards and a little plushy yellow stuffed duck named Daphne, my inspiration I think.

la la la, duck duck duck, la la la, duck duck duck

I parked the car and hauled the booty inside. I put Daphne on the table and arranged the envelopes around her. I set the table… two plates, two forks… two glasses of ice-water…

la la la, duck duck duck

I drew hot water from the tap and sort of melted the cubes.

la, la, la, — duck, duck, duck

Dinner was three containers from Whole Foods… a “blackened chicken salad”, some garlicy green beans that didn’t measure up to Chinese food, and “cranberry cous cous” that more than made up for the beans.

la la la, cous cous cous

Beth noticed that her ice cubes were kind of melty and her water was… warm. Sensitive to the fact that I had after all brought home the bacon, well - the chicken - and of course the duck, she was kind enough to freshen her own glass and hold the chiding to the lowest level of disdain. I pretended my water was just right.

She opened her cards… Valentines Day has come and gone, and since then April Fool’s day. Our 20th anniversary is coming up and this is just another one of those damn birthdays with a five in front, so the cards were neither romantic nor uplifting. There was the obligatory Wisconsin cow card… something about having lost the cake recipe but perhaps we would enjoy pie. There was the obligatory cat card, signed by the pets and simply marking the passage of another year with a low key if smart ass remark. There was the traditional obscure but funny card, this year it was about combinatorial mathematics… something about measuring one’s butt size and adding one’s age and coming up with a honking big number (la la la, goose goose goose, la la la, cous cous cous). The last card was some kind of a humorous paean to incipient Alzheimers, but I forget what it said.

la, la, la — duck, duck, duck… the fun didn’t end there!

You see, there was the matter of the gift. While Daphne was charming in a tchotchke-esque kind of way, there was another gift in the front room. I’m not much on delayed gratification or surprises so we had already shared the wonder of this gift, but postponed fully unwrapping it until after dinner.

Earlier today I found myself at the mall, at Lenscrafters, paying twice as much as I should for glasses crafted half as good as they might be, and finally putting the finishing touches on a transaction that had lasted approximately 1500 times the average one hour turn-around time they so boastfully declare. But this isn’t about them, and perhaps a mellow la la la, duck duck duck is in order. The human heart beats between ninety and 108 times per minute. “la la la, duck duck duck, la la la” is a five second lyric, or exactly one hundred eight beats per minute. Coincidence? I think not! But let us get back to the mall…

Williams of Somoma is an interesting place to idle a while during another bout with Lenscrafters, particularly when one’s partner is celebrating her natal date and one has not yet actually zeroed in on a gift to help her through yet another awkward celebration with a five in it. There was this huge juicer… I wasn’t even tempted. Although I have to admit I was awed by the power of a unit that could take whole bunches of large carrots into its gaping maw and expel perfectly awful, if pure, carrot juice at a flow rate per minute that would humble an oil sheikh. They had a cookbook by Nigella, but I was sensitive to the issue of getting a present for her that is really a present for me.

We have some decent knives, but they have wooden laminate handles and over the last twenty years some buffoon has lazily run them through the dishwasher often enough that we have discussed replacing a few. I looked at knives, and where before, when last I had shopped for cutlery there were modest trademarks, a Wusthoff trident barely visible or a Henckels mark and a discretely tiny Solingen printed on the blade, now the blades are covered with logos, and though the polypropylene handles make them dishwasher safe, I was assured the advertising wouldn’t wash off.

What about a spice grinder, I asked? No, they didn’t really have a spice grinder, although we could order one from the catalog. I didn’t explain the immediacy of my need. I left the store and though that later I could drop into Penzey’s and spice things up appropriately.

la la la duck duck duck la la la … The Pottery Barn was right next door to Williams of Sonoma. And I still had time before the Lenscrafters doofi would be done with my order. An eagle eyed sales woman swooped on me as I entered, and I let her know I was just cruising and I’d come find her if I wanted to buy something. A few minutes later I did buy something and I hauled it home and it’s on the floor in Beth’s office upstairs even as I write this. Buying her a rug was a stretch for me. Risky. But it just seemed right.
rug rug rug, la la la, rug rug rug

I woke up thinking about “stuff.” There are monks who make do with four personal objects, one robe, two sandals and one bowl. All else is held in common. “Why the bowl?” I wondered. Why not a stack of bowls at the lamasery? If Brother Bob sleeps in and misses breakfast, fine… one less bowl to wash.

By the time I got up this morning, my list of necessities was quite a bit longer than “robe, sandals, bowl.” It included a pot to cook the rice, for example. For the monastic, a single large pot held in common at the monastery allows for the omission of same from the personal possessions list. Meanwhile, there is an abbot in an office worried about drumming up contributions for replacements of the cooking pot and the wash basin and the very benches and plank tables where the brothers sit to dine. The brothers are sheltered from these mundane concerns.

Which brings me to the chainsaw. I have, in the garage, the shack really, a hovel with ground hog undermined foundations and walls collapsing outward from disuse and disrepair, a shanty that would make PETA proud, given as it is to the unfettered existence of large rodents, a place where a woodchuck really CAN chuck wood… in that tumble-down shelter I have on a shelf a Stihl chainsaw with an eighteen inch bar. Yesterday, I went to the A-Z Rent-all Company and rented the very same tool so I could attack the mulberry trees that are coming up in the hedges, whack back the decades old growth of honeysuckle that is crowding out driveway and lawn.

The economics of the chainsaw are simple. Rather than give it a day of personal attention, a day of small engine maintenance, chain tensioning, sharpening and repair, I rented one that works. The morality, the ethics of the chainsaw are another matter. I need to have a garage sale before the garage collapses. The chainsaw should be in the hands of someone who will care for it and use it. Here at the hermitage there is no one who fits that description. Here we need a chainsaw only once every three or four years, and the intervals between usage make for a maintenance nightmare. Maybe I will donate it to the monastery.

Shelley was kind enough to link to Listics in a recent post of hers that welcomed Mark Pilgrim back to blogalalia.  The post pointed to a number of other bloggers, including Jonathan Delacour and Board-man Mike.  Jonathan and Mark both surfaced immediately in that comment thread, which tells you a little about how a lot of people track Shelley’s work.

Thank you for the link, Shelley.  I’m wondering where Yule is too.

I wonder if I have whacked the people who were already subscribed by turning on a Feedburner feed…

Publishing moved to the net in the early nineties. ‘zines flourished. Sometime in the next four or five years, blogs crowded out ‘zines. The interactivity of blogs led to the rise of social networking. The “Vanity Press” has been legitimized and the quality of self publishing is on the rise. Whole books published by major houses are released on the web before they appear in print. Cory Doctorow and Chris Locke are two authors who come to mind who use this model, each in his own way.

Writers are not a huge part of the population. Literacy implies we have the technical skills associated with both reading and writing, but to be a “writer” requires discipline, skill and intention. I have no clue where to find the data to prove this, but I believe that the keyboards and screens of the internet-connected have enabled a much broader class and a far higher population of writers than has ever before existed. This seems true both in real numbers and as a percentage of the population. Not all bloggers are good writers, but blogging itself is a means of getting them there. The immediate feedback of seeing one’s own work posted is an incentive to do more, to do better. The social feedback, the conversational aspect of others posting and linking and yet others commenting, provides further incentives to continue.

100 Bloggers is an experimental community of writers. Most of us maintain other blogs elsewhere. Our experiment has been underway for over a year. This posting by Robert Paterson describes early days and provides a link to the 100 Bloggers original blog. That blog provides a link to the next location, which provides a link to the new site. We’ve been sputtering along, finding a common vision and losing it, gathering like-minded people and watching them fall away. Troy Worman provides leadership in this growing circle. Contact him if you’d like to join us.

cross posted at 100 Bloggers

Wiliam Rivers Pitt says…

George W. Bush and his people lied with their bare faces hanging out about the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

They lied about connections between al Qaeda and the Iraqi government, lied about Iraqi connections to September 11, and further lied about the threat to America posed by Iraq.

They made a decision to invade that had nothing to do with those weapons, and even conspired with their British counterparts to goad Hussein into a war regardless of whether the weapons were there or not.

They used September 11 against the American people to frighten them into a fearfully subservient acceptance of the invasion.

They bypassed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act in order to spy illegally on thousands of American citizens.

They leaked classified intelligence information in order to destroy a political foe, and in the process annihilated an intelligence network run by Valerie Plame. That network, it should be noted, was dedicated to tracking any person, nation or group that would deliver weapons of mass destruction to terrorists.

Every time they broke the law, their cronies in Congress manipulated those laws to make the actions taken legal.