Categories
People

Missing developer

Sadly, when I recovered this post in 2023, it was after Danny Clune’s body was found. 

Rogi pointed out a news item about BookCrossing’s lead developer, Danny Clune, gone missing since early Saturday morning, November 6th, in Sandpoint, Idaho.

I called my Mom, who lives in this community, and asked her if she recognized the name and she said yes, that his picture and posters asking about his whereabouts are on every light pole in the downtown Sandpoint area. She said the story was frequently in the news, and that the police had focused on searching the lake until this week, thinking he may have fallen in. A bit of a surprise that, because that would be a very difficult bridge to fall from accidentally. This week the police started questioning the people who were in the bar.

I hope the family finds answers, soon. In the meantime, there is a site with more information, and where people can contribute to the search fund.

Categories
Connecting

Anger is the fire still burning

Chris at Emptybottle responded to my post about the lack of intimacy in weblogging. Specifically, he questioned my paragraph on anger, and my sentence, …anger is the ultimate camouflage for what’s really going on in our heads and our lives.

He wrote:

Anger is peace, thwarted. Love, unrequited. The face of god, almost touched. The heartbreaking awareness that you (and so, all) just might not get there, wherever there might be. And ranging as it does in denomination, like our coin flipping up there in the air, the anger can be fire banked against the coming night, or a bolus of flaming tar catapulted at those who thwart the good.

I agree with Chris and more, and can match him lost dream for lost dream; and anger can be based on rightousness and a sense of injustice done. All too often, though, anger is more of a mask for an unhappiness, an uneasy state of being, or a need that can never be satisfied. But rather than be sad or reflective or hurt, which can leave us feeling vulnerable and exposed, we react angrily. We lash out indiscriminately, leaving a wake of dazed and battered friends, co-workers, and family members.

(Luckily weblogging has provided a new target in which to wreck our wrath, and usually without the consequences. I wonder if the divorce rate among webloggers is lower or higher than the norm?)

Chris also wrote:

Looking for some kind of truth outside myself, raging against the machine. Now I’m a model citizen, older and less convinced that any truth that could have any meaning for me lies anywhere outside myself and the threads that bind me to other people.

But I remain angry, and I maintain that that is the outward sign of my attempts to be honest with myself. It’s my honesty with the rest of the world, and it’s both personal and passionate.

Is anger an honest interaction with the world — literally what you see, all blazing glory of it, is what you get? I used to think so, and may have even at one point been so, but now, I’m not so sure.

However, there can be beauty in anger, and Chris, Stavros, is a beautifully angry person:
Long may he burn brightest.

Categories
Connecting Weather

First storm of the season

The weather today is horrid, and I almost changed my mind about coming down to the coffee shop to connect, but I had work to deliver, and new work to pick up. This is definitely the downside of not having a connection; with comment spammers and tech problems at the Kitchen and snow predicted later, I have to wonder how long this little brain storm will last.

(Note, as I sit here shivering in the cafe, soaked to the skin after drying my laptop bag off, I think not long…)

Yet there’s the advantages: having to work something through on my own in Adobe CS without being able to ‘google for help’; spending last night relaxing with a book rather than being online; and the experience at the library yesterday.

I had to share one of the small computer rooms with another person, since I hadn’t booked ahead. As I was typing away, the gentleman turned to me and said he wished he could type that fast. We ended up chatting about various things, including the internet and what kids are exposed to nowadays. Both of our monitors were very visible to each other, and the type on mine was enlarged, because I was using the handicap-equipped station. I could see from the headers in his page that he was looking up religious material; and he could easily see the writing and photos of the sites that I visit on a fairly regular basis. What a great opportunity for a little cross-cultural exposure.

Still, with the tech problems I had at the Kitchen, and the spam, maybe this wasn’t such a good idea…

update

Well, this is one of my more brain dead ideas. After driving home through streets with a foot of water in places, I decided to grab a dial-up account. Not having a connection at home does not work if you’re having to make deliverables on specific days and can’t always drive to a internet connection; or when you’re having to monitor sites that are having problems.

But dial-up is also a pain to use, so it makes a happy medium between always on, and always off.

Besides, the problem isn’t with the connection, it’s with me. Instead of changing the connection, I need to change me.

Categories
Copyright Weblogging

Always off

Is this still on? Testing, testing.

Can you hear me? Good!

Frank Paynter is surveying several people about why they blog for a post he’s writing for the Kitchen. When he asked the question, I had a hard time answering. It wasn’t that I didn’t have good reasons to blog, because I do. In fact I have dozens of good reasons, hundreds! Give me several hours and I could, and probably would write them out into a post.

Of course, then there would be another day where I sat down at my computer in the morning just to check what’s new only to surface in mid-afternoon, wondering where the day’s gone. A better question for me isn’t why do I weblog, but why I do it so much.

The hype behind broadband is that you’re ‘always on’. I could be the poster child for ‘always on’ because lately that’s a pretty good description of my life on a day to day basis. As for my roommate, switch internet for TV and you could describe him, at least on the weekends.

So, as an experiment, I’ve set up my home laptops to do the work I normally do on my server, and I’ve gone out and saved several web pages of research for a new article, and today I’ll disconnect the cable modem. We’ve already disconnected the digital cable converters, and I’ll take them and the modem down to Charter.

If something goes wrong with my web sites, Hosting Matters will either correct the problem or keep it from being a problem for anyone else, and I’ll make any fixes I need when I connect. As for the Kitchen, I’ve tried to make this as self-sufficient as possible, because the strength of that effort should be in the fact that it’s not dependent on any one person.

I’ll be slower to respond to email, but I don’t think anyone will mind. I’ll post less, but most of us are posting less. In fact, you’re probably indifferent as to the state of my connectivity, but I want to provide a heads up for anyone who might be expecting responses from me.

I don’t plan on being offline at home forever–just for a couple of months, see how it goes. Maybe less. Maybe more.

All well and good, but what I hadn’t counted on is how all of this is going to impact on Zoe. You see, every morning after she gets breakfast, Zoe comes in and curls up on my cable digital converter box. This morning, it wasn’t there, so she had to make do. Tomorrow, even that will be gone. Poor dear.

Categories
People

Speechless

When I followed the pointer to Oliver Willis’ Brand Democrat, that Happy Tutor provided, I didn’t know whether to laugh or to cry. This is about as absurd as changing the name of I69 because of it’s ’sexual connotations’.

President Kennedy was shot and killed on this day in 1963. He was a good president not the least because he was willing to admit he made mistakes and then learn from them. He was forward thinking but still very shrewd.

We remember him in almost an ideal way, but he wasn’t an ideal man. He planted the seeds of what was to become the Vietnam war. He tried to put some brakes on the civil rights movement, because it was going too fast. Oddly enough, he’s been given credit for many advances in civil rights at the time, but he really wasn’t a leader in this effort — it was old LBJ, the president now remembered for escalating Vietnam who was the person most responsible for putting civil rights into the platform of the Democratic party–leading to a mass exodus of southern Democrats to the Republican party.

People are never as pure as they seem: either purely good, or purely bad.

The I-69 story was a prank, and I fell for it. I guess this is where that ‘makes mistakes and learns from them’ comes in.