Categories
History

Oh no

Archived with comments at the Wayback Machine

I received a news alert from CNN, only to hear that communication with the Shuttle Columbia has been lost.

Flight patchThere’s no other official news other than this, but it sounds like it did explode on entry. It breaks my heart because if there’s one thing this country does well, it is our exploration of space. It is the very best of us.

I tried to watch the news, but would turn the channel every time someone would start talking about terrorism. Can we for once not taint everything around us with our unreasoned and unthinking and unfounded paranoia, and just feel sorrow at the loss?

My deepest sympathies to the family and friends of the astronauts.

Categories
Burningbird

Email problems

I had email auto responding on and off this week and just found out today that it was not forwarding emails on to me. I’m not sure what happened to the email, but it didn’t get through to me.

If you’ve sent an email, especially in the last week, and have been expecting a response, you might want to send it again because I may not have received it.

Categories
Weather

The sun’s always shining somewhere

Farrago has been introducing us to her home in a series of photographic essays from out and about in Sea Point, South Africa.

If you’ve never had a chance to see Farrago’s photographs, you need to take some time, now, and look around; especially if you’re in the northern hemisphere and facing snow, sleet, and frozen rain like we had in St. Louis today. The sunny, warm, and brightly colored pictures from Sea Point are more than enough to make you feel absolutely toasty.

Of course, for those who live in the southern hemisphere and who are faced with high heat, I’ve saved a nice snowy, cold photo, just for you.

snowy.jpg

Categories
Just Shelley Political

What did you do to fight the war, Daddy?

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Lest you all think that we in America speak in the same voice as Bush, and lest you all think that we America are doing little to fight this upcoming war in Iraq, think again.

I was contacted about a job just across the river in Illinois that I was a perfect fit for about three weeks ago. I had the skills, I had the experience, and most importantly, I had a secret government clearance that could be quickly activated. This, combined with my previous experience having worked on defense systems gave me the edge for a job. A good job. It would have been a good job.

A job working on a system for the military to be used in whatever capacity in the Middle East. What kind of system, what type of work, I don’t know.

I did not pursue this job, and declined the opportunity with the recruiter, telling them that the job is incompatible with my beliefs, and that the government would not care for my continued protestation against Bush and his actions in the Middle East.

I didn’t say anything about this three weeks ago as I figured you all would think I was an idiot. I felt like an idiot afterwards. And maybe I am — a principled idiot, without a fucking job in a really lousy economy.

I didn’t put my blood on the line, but I put my future, and that will have to do.

Categories
Technology Weblogging

Month, day, year, oh my

Another fooflah, this time over archiving.

Dorothea picked on Mark’s archive setup, which is based on archive-month-link. Jonathon responds with a push-back at Dorothea’s weekly archive. He’s joined in his comments by Mark who pushes back with justification for his archive-month-link. Aquarionics bravely joines the discussion, Dorothea retracts.

Could be me misreading everything but it sure looked like good fun was NOT had by all. Good lord, I thought I was the only person who took things too seriously.

Being the pain in the butt, annoyance, and general irritant that I am, I thought I would make things worse. It’s part of my philosophy that if you push things enough, either it blows totally, in which case we’ll at least have an interesting afternoon; or everyone collapses into laughter, poking gentle fun at each other’s font choice.

In line with this, I take a great deal of satisfaction in knowing that everyone would be uncomfortable with my archive setup. I list categories, the last 50 entries, and I provide search. That’s it. No weekly or monthly archives at all. I never really thought anyone used them. From this discussion, though, I think I may be off in my assessment; perhaps people do use archives. Well, this is a lowering thought. All this time I’ve been depriving my readers of my archives.

However, after reading all this, I wasn’t sure how to do archives. No matter what kind of archive I implemented, I would be taking sides, and that kind of ruins some of the fun. But I didn’t want to do all of the archives, as static web page generation is taking far too long now as it is. So I did what any self-respecting blogger would do: I picked door number 3.

Instead of static archive pages, I added a form to my main Archive page just under the categories. A person puts in a specific date (using a specific format), picks if they want the material ordered reverse chronological, and clicks the button. A MySql/PHP page opens that lists all of the content in either chronological (default) or reverse order. They can then click on an item to go the main page to view the trackbacks and comments, or they can just read the material there (though I might change this).

Because I let MT do my line breaks I had to a little tiny munging on the text, but that’s my own fault for not doing my own markup.

If a person screws up the format, they’ll get all of my material dating back to when I did my last port in March of last year (I didn’t move all my old content over). However, I also put a limit of only 300 entries on the page. I might play with this a bit, add a range later, but we’ll see how it goes for now.

Following is the code — change stuff appropriately.

 

$dt = $_POST[‘create_date’];
$reverse = $_POST[‘reverse’];

if ($reverse)
$order = “ORDER BY entry_created_on desc limit 300”;
else
$order = “ORDER BY entry_created_on limit 300”;

$link = mysql_connect(“localhost”, “user”, “password”)
or die(“database errors”);
mysql_select_db (“database”);

$query = “SELECT entry_id, entry_title, entry_text, entry_created_on FROM mt_entry where entry_created_on > ‘” . $dt . “‘ and entry_blog_id = 2 and entry_status = 2 ” . $order;

$result = mysql_query($query) or die(“database errors”);

while ($line = mysql_fetch_array($result, MYSQL_NUM)) {
$input = $line[0];
$input = str_pad($input, 6, “0”, STR_PAD_LEFT);

$text = str_replace(“</blockquote><br />”, “</blockquote>”, str_replace(“<blockquote><br />”, “<blockquote>”,nl2br($line[2])));

printf(“<div class=’titlebox’><span class=’title’>”);

printf(“<a href=’http://weblog.burningbird.net/fires/%s.htm’>%s</a></span></div>”, $input, $line[1]);

printf(“<div class=’blogbody’ style=’font-family: arial; font-size: 12px; line-height: 16px’>%s<div class=’posted’><p>Posted on %s</p></div>”,
$text, $line[3]);
printf(“</div>”);
}

/* Free resultset */
mysql_free_result($result);

/* Closing connection */
mysql_close($link);