Author: Shelley Powers

Categories
Political

Etern-urh-Internment Debate

I listened to the debate between Eric Muller and Michelle Malkin on radio yesterday. It was interesting to hear views normally only read.

Muller was very knowledgeable, but sometimes his legal background got in the way. For instance, when he asked Malkin to name one Japanese-American in the internment camps who was arrested for espionage, I think he was expecting Malkin to respond with the answer she did, but then he’d have time to cross-examine her response. Debates don’t work that way, and the issue was left hanging.

Still, he came off very confident about his background in the topic. Frustrated a couple of times, but confident.

I thought that Malkin started out fairly strong, but ended up sounding rather dogmatic and very defensive. It was as if she was reciting facts memorized for a history test, rather than arguing from any real depth of knowledge. She seemed comfortable until a point when the program had to break for commercial, and that seemed to rattle her. She came off sounding abrasive from that point on, only softening when she felt she received a phone call that supported her position.

I would say this debate did not end up a positive experience for Malkin. Perhaps this explains why last night she came out with a rather petulant sounding challenge for Muller and Robinson. The gloves are now off, but, frankly, does anyone care?

This dog has rolled over, and the bunny is dust. The blogosphere holds for no man or woman, and this story has done been played, and the drummer gone home for the day. He went home with the fiddler who played the good-night song for the saga of Kerry and the Swift Vote –urh– Swift Boat Veterans.

Good, golly Miss Molly, but politics is certainly getting mighty dull around here. With a Presidential election nine weeks away, I thought we’d have so much to talk about: Iraq and unemployment, health care, the deficit and the environment, gay marriage, racism and religious intolerance, and the growing nightmare of AIDs and genocide in Africa–not to mention there are still a lot of people in this world who don’t trust us.

Whatever reach was made between this topic and today’s events has been stretched beyond stability; popped, like the gum bubble of an overenthusiastic teen. Japanese internment as excuse for racial profiling has been chewed, and the flavor is gone; time to stick it under the table and move on.

Sigh. If this continues, I’m going to be forced to bring out the old squirrel photos in a desperate attempt at entertainment.

Squirrel with tail to camera saying, 'you call that a cute butt? This, this is a cute butt.

Categories
Just Shelley

Relative terms

It’s dangerous to use relative terms such as hot, cold, sweet, salty, better, or worse. Doing so leaves the door open to miscommunications.

For instance, I found today that my interpretation of the word ’short’ doesn’t agree with my hair stylist’s interpretation of the word ’short’. My idea was shoulder length, layered (since my hair is thick and wavy); her’s was Anne Heche.

Categories
Weblogging

Oh dear but this is sad

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

With some of the current unpleasantness going on in the WordPress support forum and elsewhere, I’ll focus more quickly on getting the WordPress to Movable Type format export finished. This doesn’t mean I’m encouraging people to move, as I really like WordPress. And it doesn’t mean you’re locked into moving back to Movable Type: most major weblogging tools provide utilities and instructions for importing MT formatted weblog data.

(That’s why I will only support the MT format–using Atom is just a way of showing that you’re geeky. Sorry, but why focus on an export format not supported by most tools?)

However, some of the decision making can have some pretty adverse impacts on the non-geeks who just want to use a weblogging tool that works and doesn’t get them spammed. I really like WordPress, and respect and like many of the people who work on and help support the tool; but right now, there are a lot of growing pains and a little too much arrogance associated with the core community, and this isn’t good for the tool.

(I wonder if I just lost my volunteers for my upcoming tutorials?)

Categories
Weblogging

MT and WP Tutorials

My thanks to the two people who have volunteered their sites for conversion from MT to WP 1.3: Steve from Rodent Regatta and Loren from In a Dark Time. I’d hoped for two more, but we’ll go with these fine gentlemen. As soon as WP 1.3 releases and I have a chance to upgrad my sites and make sure all is well, I’ll tackle their moves.

I’ve also had a couple of Movable Type 3.1 folks who have volunteered installations and space, but right now this beta is all hush-hush so I’ll give them credit later.

I’ve been asked why I’ve dropped the port-a-blogging business. Part of the reason is that I’ve postponed buying my camera because of changing financial circumstances. I had planned on putting book money into the fund, but the book didn’t materialize. The money that has been donated (for which I am grateful) will go to film and development; with my Nikon 995, this will do.

However, the main reason for shutting down the weblogging porting biz is that my charging any kind of fee-based service is just not a workable proposition with WordPress. It’s not that the community surrounding WordPress is inimical to someone charging for services associated with WordPress development; it’s that if the service isn’t offered for no charge when you start, it most likely will be within a week or so after starting.

Additionally, people are now getting paid to work in the Movable Type environment, where before they did it for thanks and tips and I sometimes wonder if that hasn’t changed the perception of expectations between ‘weblog developer’ and ‘weblog community’. Movable Type has moved into the arena of the fiercely paid, with an associated expectation of service on demand; while leaving other tools such as WordPress to be obsessively free, but still competing in the same marketplace.

It’s hard to find the words to say without sounding petty, but I’ll give it a shot: I love to tinker with tech and to write, and I enjoy helping others, and don’t mind that I don’t get paid; but I don’t want to feel obligated to do things this way.

I can’t beat the cost of doing things for free, and I don’t want to volunteer to help all people with all things related to WordPress. Nor do I want to become One with the Force, as it were, in order to get legions of adoring fans. I’ve been working with tech close to 25 years now; I stopped having love affairs with my tools back when when I thought Java was hot, only to find out it was just another pretty langauge now fat and bloated by eating too many constructs.

Instead, I’ll convert this small select group of folk, and write tutorials that might help others do the job themselves. Then that will be it for my development and writing online about weblogging tools. Somehow, somewhere along the way, it stopped being fun.

I’ll still write on technology–gentle PHP and might MySQL, Internet ins and out and gotchas, and twisty techs like RDF, with other bits of this and that thrown in; but only as the interest moves me, and that way we’ll all have fun.

Categories
Burningbird

Complementary or clashing

Yesterday I took several photos during an afternoon’s hot, humid shooting at the Botanical Gardens. The dragonflies were thick as ticks, and by the time I was done, my face was red, my shirt soaking wet.

When I uploaded the photos, into a post called Shape and Color, I tested the page in Preview using Fire & Ice stylesheet. The photos looked awful with the coloring and the photos on the side. I tried them with Route 66, and Burningbird of Happiness, but none of the stylesheets looked good. Even Random Shot, though relatively neutral in coloring, was too ‘busy’, with the photos on the side and in the post.

When I tried Lemon Shake-Ups, ahhh! Quick, close it! My eyes are bleeding!

None of my stylesheets is really set up for photos, especially when my photos can range from pink pastel to vivid orange and lime green. In addition, photos in the posts wreck havoc with that micreant browser, Internet Explorer.

I had planned on creating the Tin Foil Project for photo projects, and as my test weblog for upgrading from WordPress 1.2 to 1.3. However, in order to display some of the later summer floral shoots, I’ve decided to move up the time line. Check out the site.

I experimented with colors for the background, including the traditional black, white, and gray used for many photo albums. However, I felt that the black washed out the colors, and white was too bright–both created too much contrast at times. I also thought the grays reduced the brightness of the colors, or at least this is what I perceived from my inexpert viewpoint.

(ed. Or maybe what it all reduces to, is I wanted to try something new.)

I then remembered something my a karate teacher I had years ago in Arizona told me. He was a master carpenter, actually getting a MFA based on his furniture making. His thesis work was this incredible cabinet created for his dojo that featured inlay woods and hand smithed silver work – an amazing piece of craftsmanship.

Anyway, I noticed that one of the pieces he made for his home had a painted background behind the shelves rather than being finished wood. It was a pale gray/green color, relatively neutral in tone. I asked him about this at the time and he said that many cabinet makers will use a green backdrop because it complements most colors, without dimming them, contrasting too heavily, or causing the colors to seem to shift.

Considering that nature herself uses green as a backdrop for many of her brighter works, what he said made a lot of sense. So I spent today experimenting around with green colors, until reached what you see. Hopefully the photos are enhanced by the color, and the background images, which are transparent black & white merged into backgrounds the same color as the web page.

One issue I’m still dealing with is a slight margin of color around the images creating a faint line in the page. However, I think I can manage to eliminate it with PhotoShop.

The only time I’ll use photos at Burningbird, now, will be smaller ones complementary to a story. Any writing featuring larger numbers of photos, or photo posts only will be posted at Tin Foil. This means much of my photographical and sensory work will shift to that weblog.

(Eventually I’ll have functions that will list recent writing across all the weblogs (Practical RDF, Tin Foil Project, and Burningbird) ; comments, too, if I can manage it.)

If you have a moment, let me know what you think.