Author: Shelley Powers

Categories
Weblogging

Welcome back Noah

Noah Grey is back with his incredibly elegant weblog, and his beautiful photographs.

I am just now dipping my toes into the Black & White photo world. I’ve long been held by the rich hues of color photography, enamored of bright blues, vivid reds, sunny yellows. It was only in the last year that I realized that B & W photography allows one to portray thought and feeling, form and opinion without the distraction of color.

However, I have a sinking feeling that my B & W photographs are going to quickly demonstrate the flaws in my photos, as well as my lack of skill and experience.

Still, one can’t grow from the rooftops; one has to be in the basement with the rest of the fungi.

Categories
Weblogging

Weblog spam bot

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

It looks like the evil email spam bots have discovered my little virtual neighborhood. Tom Matrullo received a junk email seemingly addressed by me today, at the exact time I also received an email from me with the same subject. Well, since I didn’t send an email with the following in it, I knew it was junk:

I AM JONATHAN KANU , A MEMBER OF THE BOARD OF RWA AGENCY. WE ARE EMPOWERED TO ADMINISTER TRUST FUND WELL OVER TEWNTY FOUR MILLION UNITED STATES DOLLARS (US$300,000.000. 00) FOR THE PROVISION OF RELIEF MATERIALS TO TROUBLED SPOT IN THE WEST AFRICAN SUB-REGION.

I wrote the following to Tom as likely explanation of what happened:

You have people who link to you that also link to me (we’re only 1 degree of separation apart in the loosely joined pieces game). It would be very easy for a spam bot to grab these links and follow them back to our respective weblogs. Both you and I also embed our email addresses directly in our web pages with the mailto hypertext link. This means our email addresses are easily scrapped from the page.

The very nature of weblogging makes this type of spam bot activity easier, because we all link to each other – we provide a web of opportunity for these nasty little critters.

What we’ll need to do is send our agents in South Africa, Mike and Nithia, out to beat the crap out of this JONATHAN KANU.

Show him not to mess around with webloggers.

 

Categories
Technology

Tech hassles cont

I pinpointed the code that wasn’t executing in Movable Type and have forwarded same on to Ben. I know the issue is a data one, but hopefully this will provide enough information so that Ben can give me some direction as to how to incorporate categories back into this weblog. I also finally sent $20.00 to Ben and Mena for my use of MT – I wish I could do more, but I’m tapped.

(I’d give them an autographed copy of Essential Blogging in exchange for using MT, but since they co-authored it I’m assuming they’d rather have the bucks. Especially since they are also looking to move to a new server.)

BTW – I still love my Movable Type! Particularly since I could hack directly and easily into the nice, clean, highly readable Perl code.

Categories
Connecting

More angry voices

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Interesting comments in the the Value of Anger posting. As I expected, this is not a subject that people treat lightly. However, I was surprised at how personally some people took this posting.

For instance, Dave Rogers disagrees, strongly, with the concept of “healthy anger”, writing:

Anger isn’t some transcendent experience. It’s a temporary (hopefully) abnormal condition. Let it go.

Frank Paynter was actually “pissed” because Mike Golby and I talked about the healing power of anger. He wrote:

Anger is a bad thing. It comes from fear, and it inspires fear. Fear has a proximate cause. Root out the cause, displace the anger. Anger sucks. Angry people rationalize inhuman behavior. Angry people foster hostility and resentment in others. Angry people haven’t learned a loving acceptance that transcends helpless acceptance. Angry people are stunted in their personal development.

And both Jonathon and Dorothea saw themselves as “gently melancholic and intellectually pessimistic”, taking exception to the line If it’s angry people that forge a new society, it’s the gently melancholic, the intellectually pessimistic, and the complacent and indifferent people that destroy it.

Considering that I was wrote this line after reading a book based on a period of time 1000 years ago, I wasn’t expecting immediate identification. However, this shouldn’t be surprising. No matter how technologically advanced we get, no matter how we see ourselves advancing as a species, we’re still nothing more than humans experiencing human emotions. Love. Hate. Joy. Compassion. And Anger.

Anger is a part of us. It’s been a part of us before we ever attached a name to the emotion so that we could discuss it rather than act it out. To deny anger is to deny ourselves. Might as well deny love – it, too, can lead to destructive actions.

I don’t know about anyone else, but I have no interest in being a saint. And I have no interest in denying my capability for love or anger. I would hope that I expend my love on those that return it – to do otherwise leads to a great deal of pain. And I hope that I can control my anger and use the energy it generates for something productive, such as fighting the current political administration.

Mike had it right – anger is sharing.

Categories
Burningbird

Tech hassles

First, MT 2.21 has broken my categories. I can’t assign a category to an entry, and can’t republish my category archives.

Next, my server is getting resource bound and I’m running into problems. Don’t expect ThreadNeedle too soon unless I get rich and can upgrade my server.

Update: I’m in negotiations with Interland to go to a 1GB system, which would give me the room and resources I need. However, it may come down to a choice of eating or upgrading*.

Doesn’t look good on the MT and category problem. If I could get some error messages, I would at least have a starting place, something to work from. Looks like I’ll have to hack into the MT code.

* I was just joking about the eating or upgrading. I’ll just blow off the taxes I owe the government, instead.