Month: September 2004

Categories
Critters Places

Sound washing around you

My broadband is out this morning and I came down to Panera Bread (St. Louis Bread Company) for a latte and a small loaf of asagia cheese bread. I’m finding it pleasant to catch up on my weblog reading and email, sipping good coffee from a large, white china mug, and nibbling at my excellent treat. More, I’m enjoying the noise around me as I type away. I miss this by working at home–not the direct interaction with people, which is nice in its own right but is a different thing; the background sounds of people chatting, washing around you like a gentle river.

Yesterday, I spent several hours happily working on the CSS for a couple of different sites, discovering that I really enjoy tweaking and fixing other people’s pages more than my own. So many hours in fact that I was late to get out for my evening walk and had to rush down to the park in the twilight. When I got there, the last people were leaving, carrying flashlights to light their way. It wasn’t so dark that you couldn’t see the path but I cut my walk short to just the one path, and only one lap.

The nice thing about walking in the dark is that all the energy of your mind that’s normally directed to your eyes can get re-directed to your ears and you’re treated to a symphany of night sounds you just don’t hear when the lights are on. Various chirps and breeks and clicks, not to mention rustles of sound in the leaves and the bushes. An occasional something falls down, probably seeds or loose branches. I would never walk at night in the woods on uneven ground, but you’re okay in a park near the city. At least, this park, in this part of the city.

Except for the webs. In the dark you can’t see a newly spun web, and there’s few things worse than walking into a web. I brushed convulsively about me to make sure I had picked up no spiders and hastened my steps as if to get that much further from what is probably a teeny, tiny arachnid.

“Ewww, ewww, ewww, ewww!”

The late night forest sound of a woman running into a spider web in the dark.

Headed back to my car past the pop machines I stopped suddenly when I spotted a large racoon in front of me, it’s back to me as it snooped around looking for dropped food. It reached the end of the machines and turned back, spotting me as it turned. Its reaction was hilarious, as it tensed up and the fur around its neck fluffed out and its eyes popped. If a cartoon bubble had appeared out of nowhere above its heads with the word, “Eeeek!” in it, I wouldn’t have been a surprised. I shouldn’t have laughed, human laughter can be a frightening thing to an animal, but couldn’t help myself it was that funny looking. Scared the poor thing away.

This morning I was going to write about a couple of articles I found on the CBS memos and Iraq, the Missouri voters, and ‘man speak’, but there’s something about sipping a latte in a white china mug, listening to the murmer of happy, active voices around me, all against a background of soft jazz that just makes you want to write about something experiential.

No wonder poets spend so much time in cafes.

Categories
Diversity

The common enemy is…

Excellent find this morning through the Livejournal Reader’s List (something you may want to check out):

Ampersand re-posted one of his more popular essays last week, giving a list based on male privilege. It includes among the many items listed the following:

6. If I do the same task as a woman, and if the measurement is at all subjective, chances are people will think I did a better job.
…
10. If I have children but do not provide primary care for them, my masculinity will not be called into question.
…
29. I can be loud with no fear of being called a shrew. I can be aggressive with no fear of being called a bitch.

30. I can ask for legal protection from violence that happens mostly to men without being seen as a selfish special interest, since that kind of violence is called “crime” and is a general social concern. (Violence that happens mostly to women is usually called “domestic violence” or “acquaintance rape,” and is seen as a special interest issue.)
…
36. Most major religions argue that I should be the head of my household, while my wife and children should be subservient to me.

I agree with Ampersand as I read down the list, especially with many of the items that point out the double standard when it comes to what’s ‘acceptable’ behavior for men, but not for women, and vice versa. A double standard that can, all too often, lead to violence and complete denial of opportunity.

Still, I had issues with the list, as have others as noted by Ampersand. For instance if you have a man and a women asked the question, “What is your current job” and both answer, “I’m unemployed” the respect for the man will decrease. Men who don’t ‘work’ in a given profession, who stay at home to take care of home or kids or garden or whatever, are considered lazy; women who do the same, are considered traditional, but not lazy.

As for child care, I have known men denied custody of their children just because it’s ‘traditional’ to give such to the woman. Even if the father is emotionally or financially better equipped to raise the children.

Sexism is a two-edged sword, and it cuts both ways. As effectively noted by Yuki Onna who wrote:

Sexism is not a women’s issue, it’s not a men’s issue–it’s a human issue. And to list all the things that men have going for them that women don’t is to ignore that the gender system is just as harmful to them as it is to us. The line that men must walk in order to be considered men is as tight a rope as the one we walk in order not to be considered objects. It’s this kind of separation that keeps us from transcending such a system in the first place. We should be banding together to say “fuck all of this.” Instead we snipe at each other and draw lines in the playground sand.

She offers a counter-list, with items such as:

1. If I choose not to have a career, but stay at home with my kids while my partner works, my masculinity and my worth as a man will be called into question.

2. If I choose to embrace personal hygiene and show interest in such things as perfume, lotions, body hair removal, or any remotely scented product, I will be mocked. If I prefer clothing which is anything other than conservative and earth-toned, my masculinity will be called into question.
…
7. I am the target of endless marketing of products to keep me perpetually erect, and if I am not willing to have sex at any time, my masculinity and my worth as a man will be called into question.

8. If I am raped, I am even less likely to be believed than a woman, and very likely to be derided as less than a man. If I am the victim of domestic abuse, however statistically unlikely this is, I will probably be laughed at.

9. No matter what my personal desires, the only images of women I am presented with are unhealthily underweight and surgically altered. If I am not attracted to this version of femininity, my masculinity and worth as a man will be called into question.

Of course, when compared side by side, the threat of being stoned to death for having a child out of wedlock, or forced into wearing head to toe covering and not being allowed access to education or health care isn’t quite balanced by being forced into a perpetual erection or called effeminate for wearing a pink tie. Still, if you combine both lists into one, you can see the real enemy that’s common to both is sexism; something both of these writers would agree on.

What we all need to work toward is equal human rights for all. I am amazed, though, that in this day that we still have to fight this battle–that we still have to plead for equal rights for all.

Categories
Technology Weblogging

Some Gratuitous Weblog Software Writing

I’m starting to get a pretty good handle on what WordPress 1.3 will be offering, both from the code and forum discussions. I also found a link in the support forum for a WordPress 1.3 release wiki, which details the individual changes.

(From the wiki software used, I wonder if the WordPress documentation wiki is being moved to MediaWiki – the same wiki software used for Wikipedia. We can only hope.)

I’ve discovered some of these changes with the work I did for Doug, am doing for Steve right this moment (you can see the actual transform taking place here, as I migrate the HTML table layout to pure CSS), Tim (if he doesn’t lose his heart to Tinderbox), and might be doing for Loren (if he has a mind for this direction, now that he knows I’m not disappearing at the end of the month).

One big change, and one I adore, is pagination. With this, search results and archives are now paginated to list twenty or so entries at a time, with navigation automatially handled to go back and forth in the list. If you’ve ever searched my site on say, ‘flower’, my but you’ll kill both your and my bandwidth. Pagination will eliminate this problem.

The developers are also providing a Dashboard, I think for an overall linking mechanism to the site and the features, but it’s still under development–right now there’s nothing in the page. and you’re redirected to new posts. They’ve also packaging themes into their own subdirectory, and you can install and switch between themes just by coping the files into the directory and clicking a button in the administration pages. This will be good if you like to play around with your site a lot.

Architecturally, for the tweakers, the individual global values that you used to access in code previously have been added to a general object, but the old global values are maintained for backwards compatibility, at least for one release. The organization of the pages has changed, with a new header and footer page, which should help make the pages a little cleaner to work with. Recently when I talked about keeping your weblog tool independent, I mentioned about a split between the content of the page before the posts, the post listings, and the content after the posts. This is mirrored in the WP page split between wp-header.php, index.php, and wp-footer.php. I like it.

There’s also been function changes, and I’m still exploring what these are. From what I read, existing functions will be supported in a deprecated state for at least one software release. Good for those who have tweaked their pages.

Multiple blog support isn’t there, but an interesting announcement was made last week for what sounds like might be a parallel branch of development called WordPress MU. This isn’t a ‘fork’ in the code (i.e. a new and separate development based on original code) as much as it is a ‘wrapper’ around WordPress, from what I’ve read. The announcement about it says that it provides both Smarty template support and multi-user/multi-weblog support–in hosted environments.

The multi-user/multi-weblog capability should make WordPress more attractive for those who need a classroom solution to weblog hosting – a tool that can be used to create many weblogs for many different people, but administered from one spot.

As for the use of the Smarty template system, I am curious if this can be dropped into a regular installation of WordPress, for those who would prefer Smarty over the embedded function calls. If so, this would make a nice option to those who are uncomfortable messing with PHP code directly. Where before a person did the following:

<?php the_date(‘’,'<h2>’,'</h2>’); ?>

They would, instead, use a Smarty template tag such as the following that would resolve to the function call:

<h2>{$smarty.now|date_format:”%Y-%m-%d”}</h2>

 

The sidebar is also split off into a separate file. This does concern me a bit from a design perspective as this tends to enforce a specific type of weblog look, the two column look.

As an aside from a discussion of WordPress 1.3, when Movable Type announced it was providing a dynamic PHP-based wrapper around Movable Type, I thought that the company would take core bits WordPress and modify these to point to their own database so that WordPress plugins and templates would work with the Movable Type database. With this, though users would have lost the Perl plugins for MT, they would have gained the PHP-based WordPress plugins. At least, those plugins that deal with parameterized data, only.

This wouldn’t be all that complicated either. Smarty could have been used to transform tags for the traditional MT users; while others could have used the WordPress embedded function calls (and themes) if they wished. Licensing wouldn’t have to be an issue because MT could continue to license the MT ‘engine’ with associate Perl code, and GPL’d the code for the PHP wrapper. They would gain friends from the open source community, while the supported, proprietary, corporate Perl code would still be there for corporate types who get nervous around the word ‘open’.

And wouldn’t this have been an interesting way to mix proprietary and GPL code?

Categories
Events of note History

The 1989 Hare and Hound Race

The program for the race yesterday featured a story about the 1989 balloon race, the only one where the balloons actually took off and landed in the same place (lack of wind). The story was so funny that I re-printed it here…with a photo. Of course.

A small issue with balloon “races”–of the Hare and Hound variety, such as the Great Forest Park Balloon Race–is that spectators rarely get to see both the beginning and end of the event. The balloons tend to fly away.

That wasn’t the case in the 1989 race. In fact, the balloons never left the park–they just flew from the Balloon Field to the eastern edge of Forest Park, near Kingshighway. Winds were extremely light. Hare pilot, Ted Staley, rightly judged that the balloons would never clear the city, or even make it to the Arch grounds, it was so calm.

The Hare landed across a lake. The hounds gently floated to the target. Some, literally. The ingenious pilots tried it all: Steve Lohr used the Slighshot Approach, with his crew swinging the basket of his flying seven-story balloon across the water to the ‘X’. Gene Grace tried the Cleopatra Crossing. His crew swam the lake, haulted the tethered balloon lines across, then pulled the basket to the target.

The race was contested greatly. Some heated exchanges were recorded. Then all were reminded that the trophy was a broken toaster, and protests weren’t allowed anyway because there is no protest procedure for the Great Forest Park Balloon Race (as noted by Ballooonmeister Henry Fett at the pilot’s meeting every year).

The result: Grace was awarded the win because of the damp effort of his crew. One balloon ripped through the trees, hit near the ‘X’ and was cited for second place and dim judgement.

I think you can see now why I enjoyed this race so much.

Categories
Weblogging

This is wrong on so many levels

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

As Matt Mullenweg said recently in comments about another post, this is wrong on so many levels.

Both Biz Stone and Robert Scoble have a ‘How to Win the Blogging Game’ entries, except their posts are titled, Promoting your Blog and How will your blog get discovered. There is much in what both write that I can agree with; but there is an underlying implication with both writings that the act of having our participation discovered is more important than the act of participating, itself.

Wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong.

I do agree that webloggers can help themselves be discovered by pinging the recently updated services such as Pingomatic or weblogs.com or Technorati. Unless you’re writing for a closed audience, and aren’t interested in new readers, you’re going to want to ping when you post. Same can be said for making your site search engine friendly, though many of us are taking a closer look at the viability of this.

I also agree that comments are a wonderful calling card for other webloggers. I think that almost all of the people I read now I met at one time or another through links in other weblogs or through comments: in my weblog or other weblogs. I still think this, and links to specific posts, are great ways of connecting with new people.

I also see the benefit of putting your weblog on your business cards or email signature, or attaching it as part of your profile – if you want the extra visits (not everyone does). And of course, providing interesting material is always helpful if you want readers.

But Scoble talks about linking to other weblogs just to get them to notice you, and that reminds me of the kids we all knew back when we were young who would bring candy in so that the other classmates would be friends with them. And I also think this is much of a reason why many of the top webloggers are in the A-lists – because they have buzz and people want in on that buzz, not necessarily because anyone is that interested in what the person is saying.

He follows this with a suggestion to ‘hang out with’ the bloggers you want to connect with, such as Glenn Reynolds, or the gang that ended up at FooCamp. Leave aside that geographically, webloggers live in cities other than Boston, San Francisco, LA, Seattle, New York, London, and Tennessee, all this will do is give even more ego gratification to those in the upper echelons of weblogging. Bluntly, he’s advocating groupie behavior.

Wanting to meet people who you’ve come to know over time on weblogs is not only natural and healthy, it can be an exciting prospect–think about meeting people for the first time when you’ve read their writing for years.. And wanting to spend time with someone you admire or are interested in is a great way to grow personally and intellectually; isn’t this the main reason why we weblog? But wanting to ‘hang out’ with someone specifically to get your weblog noticed? Sad stuff. Very sad stuff.

I am more ambivalent about Scoble’s suggestion to do things for people and they’ll remember you. I happen to think it can be very satisfying doing things for others, but to do so primarily because you want to get more buzz for yourself or your weblog–well, all I can say is there is a fine line between whoring and marketing. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with marketing your site, your abilities, or something you believe in; I don’t do it enough, myself. But marketing should be peripheral when you’re ‘doing things for others’.

I remember conferences and going to this bash or that put on by a company. This was expected and accepted as such – none of us believed that the invitations and gifts were personal. But to do something, personally, for others, personally, purely for marketing purposes can lead to mixed messages and confusion about the reasons you’re doing what you’re doing. There’s few things I can stand less than a person who is acclaimed a ‘hero’ for helping others, when the only reason they did their ‘good deed’ is to add to their own status.

Someone bringing martinis for a group of people in a biz-tech environment can be seen as indulging in friendly marketing without any confusion about motives. But taking a weblogger out to lunch just to chat, or exchanging books or gifts, or even dating a person–that’s personal. If you do this just because you’re trying to get hits and buzz, that’s cheap. And pretty sleazy too.

As for pitching your site or a post to others–that’s a tough call. Sometimes we want something we believe in to have a wider audience than we have ourselves, and I can’t help thinking this can be a good thing. But pitching something just to get links: see above.

Biz Stone had some of the same suggestions as Scoble, but he also gets into type of weblog posts and following memes.

Like Scoble’s suggestion on doing things for others, I am ambivalent about Stone’s suggestion to follow the memes that circulate throughout weblogging. On the one hand, they can be a lot of fun and a great way to connect with others. He mentioned the Friday Five, but I’ll also add the Carnival of the Cats, which has been nothing but fun when I’ve participated with it recently. The Ecotone projects that people participate in also seems to provide a very positive kernel to some very interesting writing, as well as a way of finding great new folks to read.

But in each of these cases, the people participating are doing so based less on hits and more on interest. The interest is in the topic of the meme, not the fact that it is a meme. I think that someone participating just to get noticed is going to come across phony – as if they’ve studied weblogging as a genre and are now applying the ‘Ten rules to become an A-Lister in 6 months or less’.

As for style of weblog writing, Stone wrote:

Keep your posts and paragraphs short. Note the brevity of the aforementioned Kottke post. People will come back daily to read your fresh new work but spare them the one thousand word diatribes. Strive for succinct posts that pump pertinent new information into the blogosphere and move on. Keep it short and sweet so visitors can pop in, read up, and click on. Think of you[r] blog as a cumulative effect. This doesn’t mean you should never practice some long form writing now and then, it’s just something to keep in mind.

This is wrong on oh so many levels. (I love this phrase, and I’m not even sucking up to Matt. Honest.)

You, who ever you are, do what you want; but if you’re only here to be the next Kottke, or Scoble, or Stone, quit now. You’ll never get to their position aping their behavior or their rules; you’ll just end up miserable because you’re not writing the way you want, and for the joy of the act. Fuck me, too many sheep in this environment. How can your ‘ba-ah-ahh’ be heard when you’re surrounding by people bleating the same thing?

Someone let in the wolves – it’s feeding time.

Of course, you have to take what I write with a grain of salt. Domestic, refined, mined salt. I’m not as popular as Robert Scoble or Biz Stone, so one can assume that their suggestions work, while my ‘long form diatribe’ won’t do you a bit of good if all you want is to be known.

Or as a friend (someone who I actually like and respect as a person, regardless of how many hits he could send me) says: do what you want, anyway, because we’re all just making this stuff up.

Use of surnames does not imply lack of friendly feeling towards those who have been referenced in this weblog entry. Just a quirkly thing I feel like doing today.