dglenn

QotD

2008-09-06T09:15:33Z

"We journalism students are told that before we write a scathing review, we should start with something about the movie which was done well. I sat through the credits of Lair of the White Worm desperately looking for something, when I saw the credit for 'Footstep Editor'. I must admit, the footstep editing was done flawlessly." -- from a review of The Lair of the White Worm in the New York Times ( thanks to feste-sylvain for quoting it earlier)

Bad Week

2008-09-05T23:16:09Z

Not feeling well. Tried to go to HCB rehearsal Wednesday; realized after a near miss a couple miles out, that I was not really driving well enough to make the next thirty minutes and the return trip a very good idea, so I turned around. (Other driver's mistake, but my reaction was slow and sloppy, and that got me to pay more attention to just how well I was doing overall.)

Really need to get to Bowie, but failed to get out of the house yesterday or today ... will try for tomorrow if the weather isn't absurdly bad and I feel any better. Crashed last night with the telly on, right around the start of McCain's speech. (Haven't watched it yet -- yah, I taped it.) Slept fitfully; have felt icky and still sleepy all day.

QotD

2008-09-05T09:15:44Z

From "Learning to Lie", by Po Bronson, New York magazine, 2008-02-10:

The most disturbing reason children lie is that parents teach them to. According to Talwar, they learn it from us. "We dont explicitly tell them to lie, but they see us do it. They see us tell the telemarketer, 'I'm just a guest here.' They see us boast and lie to smooth social relationships."

Consider how we expect a child to act when he opens a gift he doesnt like. [...]

Meanwhile, the child's parent usually cheers when the child comes up with the white lie. "Often, the parents are proud that their kids are 'polite' -- they don't see it as lying," Talwar remarks. She's regularly amazed at parents' seeming inability to recognize that white lies are still lies.

[...]

Encouraged to tell so many white lies and hearing so many others, children gradually get comfortable with being disingenuous. Insincerity becomes, literally, a daily occurrence. They learn that honesty only creates conflict, and dishonesty is an easy way to avoid conflict. And while they don't confuse white-lie situations with lying to cover their misdeeds, they bring this emotional groundwork from one circumstance to the other. It becomes easier, psychologically, to lie to a parent. So if the parent says, "Where did you get these Pokémon cards?! I told you, youre not allowed to waste your allowance on Pokémon cards!" this may feel to the child very much like a white-lie scenario -- he can make his father feel better by telling him the cards were extras from a friend.

(quoted passage appears on the third of five pages in the web version of the article)

Does McCain Deserve To Be President?

2008-09-04T11:29:15Z

I watched approximately the last half of the three-hour coverage of the Republican convention on PBS last night. (Wow, that got ugly in places. But maybe I'll analyze the layers of that later. I've got this snark to get out of the way first.)

For a while there, I got the impression that the speakers were fetishizing McCain's war injuries -- even more than the POW experience in which they were inflicted (or were his injuries from the crash and just not treated while he was a POW? I've lost track). I don't think that's what they intended, or were consciously thinking, but as an outsider looking in I found it a wee bit creepy; as though they were saying, "Look! We got us a maimed guy for a pet! The Dems don't have one of these -- neener neener neener! Isn't this cool, how he can't raise his arms? Makes him special, a limited-edition. And we've got one and they don't!"

But even when they weren't saying things that sounded to my ears like an odd involuntary-bodymod fetish, one of the messages I got from three or four speakers was, "John McCain deserves to be president, because of what he's done for our country already and what he's suffered."

And y'know what? After hearing that enough times, it's starting to actually make sense to me -- maybe they're right. Maybe this is the time when we should award the presidency to someone who deserves it as a reward having been a POW in Vietnam.

I read somewhere that there were about 600 POWs in Vietnam. A four-year presidential term is what, 1,461 days, right? So if they were all still alive, that'd be about two and a half days each. But I don't know how many are still alive -- is it few enough that each could be president for a week?

We can even let McCain decide whether he wants to be president for the first week of the term, or the last week (I'm guessing that those will be the most desirable slots -- you get to either pick a cabinet, or write pardons), since it was his campaign that came up with the idea that former POWs deserve to be president. It's only fair, right?

QotD

2008-09-04T09:15:50Z

"Civilization, in fact, grows more and more maudlin and hysterical; especially under democracy it tends to degenerate into a mere combat of crazes; the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary." -- H.L. Mencken

Fact-Checking 'Least Experienced Candidate' Bogon

2008-09-03T22:10:10Z

I went ahead and watched three hours of Republican convention coverage on PBS last night, even though I knew it would make me want to shout back at the television every so often. I heard false statements uttered and accepted without challenge from the commentators -- for the most part I'm not going to venture a guess right now as to which were lies and intentional distortions, and which were mistakes and misconceptions held by the speakers, but it seems to me that matters of fact should be corrected. And it also makes me wonder how many such things slipped right by me during the Democratic convention, because they were in line with what I wanted/expected to hear, or lined up with things I already mistakenly believe, and were similarly un-challenged by those reporting and commenting on the event. The media would be doing me a service by pointing out false statements made by each side. Reasonable people can disagree about matters of opinion or speculation, about what our goals should be and how to prioritize them, even about interpretation, but as Daniel Moynihan famously said, "Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts."

One phrase that stuck in my mind, partly because I was a little surprised to still hear it after the Palin nomination, was when Obama was referred to (by Fred Thompson) as "the most inexperienced nominee to ever run for president."

Let's see: eight years in a state legislature and two years in the US house of representatives can be made out to be a little light in terms of preparation to become POTUS, I suppose, when running against someone with a longer history ... but that candidate not only got elected, he gets brought up as a shining example of how wonderful a Republican president can be! With the same amount of time at the state level, Obama has two more years in the Senate than Abraham Lincoln did in the House. And you'd think that Republican orators would be expected to know something about the most famous Republican president, n'est-ce pas? After all, I'm not as well versed in history as I ought to be, but it took me less than five minutes to find that out. I still don't know who was the least experienced candidate to run, but it's easy to find candidates less experienced than Obama who won.

So I'm not inclined to give them a pass on that one. Even if 'twas an honest mistake the first time they used it, by now the speechwriters have had time to look it up. At this point, whether it's honest ignorance or a deliberate bogon, there's not really any excuse for it, and anybody discussing the speeches where it's used should be pointing it out and correcting it. Any time you hear them say Obama is inexperienced, think. "You mean like Lincoln was? Or Reagan? Or Bush?"

If they want to say Obama's insufficiently experienced, that's a matter of interpretation/opinion (which calls into question the speaker's grasp of history, but they can still have that as their opinion). But to call him the least experienced candidate in history is, quite simply, untrue.

QotD

2008-09-03T09:15:59Z

From the Quotation of the day mailing list, 2007-01-07:

"Even if the federal government raised individual and corporate income taxes to 100 percent, simply confiscating every penny every business and person in the U.S. made, we would still have a federal deficit."- John Williams of Shadow Statistics

http://www.shadowstats.com/cgi-bin/sgs/article/id=882

(submitted to the mailing list by Duffy O'Craven)

How To Use OpenID To Leave Me A Comment

2008-09-03T01:35:39Z

Unsurprisingly, OpenID is generating some confusion. But (so far) not in the ways I'd anticipated.

First off, AFAICT, Blurty, GreatestJournal, and JournalFen don't appear to support OpenID. (At least, I don't see that as one of the options on the 'post comment' page. Just anonymous, or user-of-that-site.)

CrazyLife, CommieJournal, DeadJournal, and Scribbld (and LiveJournal) offer a choice of anonymous, OpenID, or "Logged in user" (of that site) -- which to pick is probably reasonably unconfusing; I'll clear up the other potentially confusing bit below. (DeaadJournal has both "Logged in user" and "DeadJournal user" as options ... but unless you have a DJ account, you probably don't need to figure out what the difference is between those two choices.)

InsaneJournal, alas, has the potential for extra confusion: the radio button that ought to say either "InsaneJournal user" or "Logged in user", unfortunately says, "LiveJournal user", which can mislead the unwary LJ user into thinking it's an already-aimed-at-LJ configuration of OpenID or something, leading to frustration (and/or worry, when it looks as though IJ is asking for your LJ password, when IJ thinks you're trying to log in as an IJ user). I stuck a message about that in what I hope was an appropriate place, so maybe the wording will get fixed. In any case, if you're an LJ user following me over to IJ to leave a comment, you want the OpenID button.

Anyhow, here's how logging in with OpenID is supposed to work:

I'm going to assume you're already logged in on LiveJournal...
Select the "OpenID" radio button. Input fields labelled "Identity URL" and "Login?" will appear.
Enter yourljusername.livejournal.com in the "Identity URL" box. Check the "Login?" box if staying logged in on this site as your LJ/OpenID identity might be convenient (like, if you expect to post more than one comment there, or want to go to the "edit profile" page afterward to associate a user-icon with your OpenID presence).
Type in your comment, then click the "Post Comment" button.
The page in that tab will be replaced by one with a LiveJournal URL (it'll start, "http://www.livejournal.com/openid/approve.bml?[...]") that's labelled "Grant identity validation?" It will say that, "Another site on the web wants to validate your LiveJournal identity. No information will be shared with them that isn't already public in your profile, only that you're who you've already told them you are (if you told them)." You'll have three buttons: "Yes; just this time", "Yes; always", and "No."
Click one of the 'yes' buttons, and your comment will be posted.

What if you weren't already logged in at LiveJournal when you tried to use it for your OpenID credential? Instead of the "Grant identity validation?" page, you'll get one that says, "You need to be logged in to grant another site permission to know your identity."

And, of course, despite this description being written for a LiveJournal user commenting as a guest on another site via OpenID, it all works pretty much the same way if you're coming from a site other than LJ (a DJ user commenting at IJ, or a Blogger user commenting at LJ, or a Movable Type user commenting at Blogger; you just need to know the URL to use as your identity URL on the site where you have an account, to be able to log in via OpenID on other OpenID-enabled sites.

That's how it's supposed to work. That's how it worked for me while I was typing this up. One person so far has complained that it didn't, and I haven't yet sorted out why not -- drop me a line at dglenn@panix.com or via the LJ inbox if you can't get it to work, so I'll have some idea how often it breaks ... and if I'm lucky, wind up with enough info to send a bug report to whichever site seems to be the one causing the problem.

Addendum: Anybody else's local news say anything?

2008-09-02T23:23:35Z

Addendum to previous entry: did anybody reading this catch the WMAR, WJZ, or WBFF dinnertime-news broadcasts here in/near Baltimore? Did any of them cover the raids on peace-activist groups? (I'm pretty sure what the answer will be, but hey, surprise me.) And for folks elsewhere, did your local news say a single word about the raids? And if not, do they provide a convenient way to contact them to ask them why not? (Not going to even try to be subtle about the hint.)

If you're starting from zero on this story, these'll get you started:

Dear WBAL-TV, where was the right-to-free-speech story?

2008-09-02T22:41:24Z

Sent via the WBAL (Baltimore channel 11 television) website (wbaltv.com):

I just watched your news broadcast from 17:00 to 18:30, and am mystified by what I DIDN'T see.

Why was there no mention of the pre-emptive police/FBI raids on non-violent protest groups (including Food Not Bombs) at the Republican convention, and the arrest of JOURNALISTS? Between the apparent use of the raids and arrests to prevent citizens' exercise of their right to free speech (which certainly bears investigation, either to clear authorities of that suspicion or to shine a light on police-state tactics, whichever turns out to be the case), and the arrest and detention of journalists who were there to report events, not participate (a precedent I'm sure members of your profession don't want established), I had expected news media to be all over that story, and was very much looking forward to learning details that had not yet been covered in blogs.

Where were you? Did the attempt to intimidate the protesters out of speaking up work so well that all the way in Maryland news organizations are scared to report what's going on?

Will I see anything about this on the eleven o'clock news tonight? It's a story that strikes to the very heart of Fundamental American Principles And Ideals, our very identity as "the land of the free and the home of the brave". It cannot be considered inconsequential.

(I wasn't sure whether HTML tags would work, hence the capitalization for emphasis.)

QotD

2008-09-02T09:16:09Z

"Open source relates to code reuse in much the way romantic love relates to sexual reproduction -- it's possible to explain the former in terms of the latter, but to do so is to risk overlooking much of what makes the former interesting." -- Eric S. Raymond, The Art of Unix Programming, 2003 (quote appears in chapter 16)

QotD

2008-09-01T09:16:16Z

"The only way to fix everything quickly would be a revolution, and I don't mean the bloodless kind. I don't like the state of our country, but I'd rather see gradual change than half of my neighbors dead." -- bfeist , 2008-08-24

Brightness vs. Angle graph for IR LEDs?

2008-09-01T02:52:27Z

I can't afford to order parts yet, but I figured I should work out enough of the design for the infrared flash I want to build, to have some idea what parts I need to save up for. I know that infrared LEDs are available with different angles of coverage for the cone of light they project, and I can easily enough calculate the angle-of-view for lenses of various focal lengths ... but I'm missing a crucial clue required for this geometry problem.

Do IR LEDs project a sharply-defined cone of even illumination; or do they appear to get continuously brighter as you get closer to seeing them head-on, with the viewing angle on the data sheet just indicating the range in which they're brighter than some industry-standard arbitrary threshold? (If you graph intensity versus viewing-angle, does the plot look more like the blue curve or the red curve in the figure to the right?) When you're using an IR photoreceptor simply as a switch, it doesn't matter -- either the coverage angle just tells you the angle over which your detector is guaranteed to get at least a certain amount of the emitter's power, or if you're trying to detect the orientation of the emitter you calibrate the receptor to trigger at the threshold you observe at the angle you want to declare close enough. But for photography, it's going to affect how hard it is to avoid "hot spots" in my photos, overexposed areas, uneven lighting.

Is the answer the same as for visible-light LEDs? If so, I can find out experimentally with LEDs I have at hand, easily enough. I'm betting that coverage angle depends at least partly on the shape of the lens -- domed vs. flat -- but does the fuzzy-vs.-sharp distinction also depend on the package? Or is the answer an extremely convenient "it's always like the blue curve" or "it's always like the red curve"?

I've been thinking of mounting the IR LED array on a flexible (or possibly hinged) surface, so I can change the curvature to change the coverage angle of the flash. So that when I'm using a 200mm lens, I'm not wasting energy lighting up the whole area that a 28mm lens would see, and can therefore get more distance (or use a smaller aperture) with the same number of milliWatts. I'll need to be careful not to create hot spots if I do that. And even if I don't make it adjustable, of the LEDs themselves make a hot spot in the center, I'll need to play games with the angles of different LEDs in the array to even that out. Unless I sacrifice some percentage of the output and stick a diffuser in front of them ... or is a diffuser with a Fresnel lens in front of that the proper way to go about this regardless?

The Unfortunate Reason For The Annoying Cuts

2008-09-01T00:55:10Z

Yes, I'm going on about LiveJournal-specific stuff again. While this is just to explain things to my LJ readers, I'm mirroring it to the other sites anyhow for the sake of completeness. Or maybe because my mind got infested with hobgoblins, I dunno.

The short version: LJ did something I find unacceptable. I don't want to vanish entirely from the view of my LJ-using friends, so I'm posting these "hey, new entry over here" entries on LJ but no longer posting whole entries there. I know I'll lose some readers, and I'm not happy about that, but I feel I have no other reasonable option. This makes me sad.

---------------------------------------------

At least a few of you noticed that my last few entries, including quote-of-the-day entries, have been posted to LiveJournal entirely behind what look like cut-tags, and a few of you have noticed that those are really links to full entries on sites other than LiveJournal. I've gotten some questions, some emphatic complaints, and at least one wrong (but close) guess. I did anticipate that folks would not be thrilled, and even that I'd lose readers over the change, as much as that prospect dismays me (and worries me, as I don't really have a good idea how many readers I'll lose). And I guess I really ought to provide the explanation where folks can see it easily, without extra clicking.

Really, I'm not fond of cut-tags myself, though they do have their uses. I routinely cut dreams and memes because I expect those to be 'noise' rather than 'signal' for a significant number of my friends and I don't feel as strong a need to make sure those get read as I do my other entries; and I have even occasionally cut for length (though I have a higher threshold for "needs a cut" than many people, and am more likely to cut as a way of folding/unfolding long parenthetical passages), as well as to make something easy for folks who'd be upset by it to avoid. But I'm with you on the "it breaks the flow of reading my friends-page" complaint, and I'm less likely to click a cut than to wade through a long entry right in front of me myself. So why am I inflicting on y'all something that I wouldn't particularly like as a reader? Well, basically, I feel boxed in -- this seemed like the least-bad course of action open to me when "put up or shut up" time arrived (late on the 28th).

This really goes back to Strikethrough 2007. (I hear you groan.)

Reaching even farther back than that: when I started using LJ, I liked the fact that it was free, and I liked thefact that it didn't have advertisements on it. I thought a couple of the paid-account features would be nice but I certainly didn't feel I needed them, especially considering how much time I spend broke. But after I'd been using LJ for a while and had decided that the service as a whole was something of value to me, not just a random entertainment, I decided I should pay for my account when I could, to support the site. (I don't recall whether my first-ever spell as a paid-account user was that, or whether someone had gifted me some paid time before then. I did receive gifts of paid-account time on several occasions, which meant that I had a paid account a little more often than I could afford to pay.) Once I'd gotten used to, for example, being able to create polls, I decided I really liked having paid features, but my main reason for scraping up the money when I could was really still to support this site that was giving me a service I valued even at the basic level; getting the extra features was a bonus, not the motivation.

Then Six Apart, who bought LJ, did some vile crap.

I wasn't hit directly, but I was sufficiently offended that I realized the Proper action would be to say, "If you don't make this right, I'm leaving." But I wasn't prepared for relocation, so leaving would have carried a high-enough cost to me (in terms of starting over) to make me flinch ... and I flinched. (And felt shame at having flinched.)

I took a somewhat lamer step though, and reverted my account to basic, withdrawing my financial support and stating (yes, in fora that site-management read) my reasons for doing so and my hope that they would redeem themselves enough to again be an organization that I could support in good conscience. Six Apart never did really get a clue, I think -- they made some gestures in the right direction, but didn't do enough. And then they went and did similar crap again, showing by actions (though denied in statements) that their advertisers' concerns carried more weight than those of their users. (An understandable -- even predictable -- prioritization for a company built on an advertising model, but I hope equally understandably offpissing to a user base that had been around longer than the advertising.) So in addition to "Do I want to support an organization that does that?", there was an added layer of, "Do I want to pay to be treated poorly?"

I started investigating other sites using the LJ software, both to prepare a bolt-hole in case 6A did something else that I really could not abide (multiple ones, in case my first pick went 404, turned evil, or got sold), and to try to keep up with (and be findable by) friends who had already fled LJ in disgust, in protest, or both. (With only partial success on that second bit. *sigh*) But while I wanted to not feel 'stuck' in LJ, I also really didn't want to leave. LJ is a social networking site in addition to being a blog host, and thus it matters where other users are. I really, really hoped that 6A would listen to the message its users were sending, correct its course, and be worthy of my cash again.

SUP bought LiveJournal, and some users predicted doom and gloom while others held out hope that the new owners would have a Clue (or show signs of being able to learn when Clue was handed to them). My message was that I really wanted SUP to be a company we could trust, and that would treat its users in a way that I felt I could support. SUP made some disagreeable moves early on, digging the hole deeper, but eventually at least started learning how to talk to LJ users, even if their even greater emphasis on ads was offputting (to put it mildly). Lately it's felt like they're taking three steps forward and two steps back, whereas at first it seemed as though they were making two steps back for each step forward. There are still some important bits missing, and the trust problem is not helped by things like taking away the ability to create basic accounts and using the excuse they used. Nor did the announcement that they were "bringing back basic accounts" that turned out not to be what we used to call basic accounts -- that there would be advertising attached somehow even to 'basic' accounts (which used to be the distinguishing feature between 'basic' and 'plus') and that, contrary to an earlier promise, existing basic accounts would not be grandfathered when ads were added to so-called 'basic' accounts.

They floated a few proposals for how to add ads to basic accounts, some better than others, depending on one's priorities and one's purpose in blogging. One of those, I considered poison. Alas, they decided on that one.

More than a few people who do not have LJ accounts and do not wish to for whatever reasons -- I'm not really sure how many, but a few I know in meatspace have mentioned it -- regularly read my journal. And as far as I can tell, I'm getting occasional non-LJ-user readers finding my journal via search engines (or links from non-LJ blogs). As of 2008-08-28, those people started seeing advertisements on my 'basic' LiveJournal journal. That's not cool, for a couple of reasons. First, because I know some folks are going to be put off by seeing the ads, so if there are ads I want it to be only because I decided that what I gain by having ads is worth more than losing whatever percentage of readers find ads distasteful enough to not come back. And I haven't decided that. Second, because if my words are being used to sell advertising, I want a cut. And third, because here I've decided that LJ -- as 6A and then as SUP -- has not (yet!) earned my support, and SUP has gone and said, "Oh, that's okay, we're going to make money off of you anyhow."

(This "show ads to not-logged-in readers seeing basic users' journals" business is obviously not so toxic to every basic user. Some post friends-only, so nobody can see their entries without being logged in anyhow; others don't expect, or don't care about, random strangers' and their impressions; some consider the ads to be such an insignificant factor that they're just not concerned regardless (though why anyone who thinks that wouldn't get a Plus account instead eludes me). We don't all have the same priorities here.)

Hey, their site, their investment, their rules. They can do that if they want. But also, hey, my content -- I can take it out of their playground. I'd rather have them earn my respect and my money than sell my work to advertisers, but that's not the direction they decided to go.

I know they have to get their money from someplace, but the whole point of withdrawing my financial support, however tiny it had been, was to tell them that if they wanted it from me, I wanted to see the policy problems fixed first. And yes, I realize that I'm effectively saying I expect something for nothing by continuing to use the site without paying. But as long as that was an option they allowed, I figure that was cool. They've now said "no free rides; either pay or be bait for the advertisers," which is not an unreasonable thing for them to say. And seeing that I do have options -- despite drawbacks like having a lot of people not follow me -- my answer to that reasonable announcement is a similarly reasonable, "since I don't like that, I'll put my writing elsewhere instead." This is not about whether LJ has some moral or ethical obligation to support free users (especially if, as they appeared to back when that 'strike' business was going on, consider those of us who wish to send them a message as 'enemies' (*sigh*)) without imposing ads -- we've had that conversation and I've stated my PR arguments, my for-the-good-of-the-community arguments, my economic arguments, and my admittedly weak ethical arguments (basically: "but you told us you weren't gonna!", which doesn't qualify is a 'contract') in that conversation. Them what 'as the gold made their decision, and that conversation's done; now it's just a question of how I act in light of the new rule.

I am, yes, trying to have my cake and eat it too, by continuing to post links to my new entries elsewhere. I accept that my decision not to support SUP at this time carries a cost, and I'm trying to minimize the pain as much as I can without resorting to whining, "but activism shouldn't inconvenience me." The Absolutely Correct path would be to delete everything except a message saying why I'd left, and not post to LJ again until/unless they live up to my standards. I'm doing this halfway: continuing to post pages that they'll put ads on, but having the only thing on those pages be the pointer to the part worth reading elsewhere. (Well, I hope my journal's worth reading anyhow.) I get a fraction of the value I used to get from LiveJournal, and they get a fraction of the revenue they'd hoped to get from my journal.

If they'd already convinced me to resume paying for an account before throwing this latest wrinkle in, this would be a much more difficult decision. It wouldn't affect me then (as currently implemented but if this doesn't bring in enough money, expect them to impose more ads more places), and I seem to have gotten pretty good at finding excuses and rationalizations for "not leaving quite yet" these past several months, so I'd have to weigh just how much I really cared purely as a matter of "preserve the atmosphere of classic LJ" principle. As it is, it does affect me, so the decision, while still terribly unpleasant, was at least obvious. Either tell SUP/LJ, "I'm a blowhard who can make lofty arguments but in the end you can go ahead, ignore everything I've said, and walk all over me," or demonstrate, "Yes I really did mean what I wrote, and will act in accordance with that reasoning even when it costs me more than a few dozen minutes of typing; even when it costs me some of what I'm here for in the first place."

Sadly, this makes me even less likely to pay for an LJ account in the future, because the longer I have to get used to not sharing my entries on LJ, the less value LJ will have for me even ifwhen SUP does demonstrate they can be trusted to treat their users well.

In the meantime, while I know that some of you will disagree with my reasons or think that I'm right but that a Strongly Worded Letter would have been enough without changing my posting habits, and I know that many of you find the extra step irritating because it does disrupt the scrollin'-thru-the-friendslist groove (and you have to do the OpenID dance to post a non-anonymous comment), I hope that most of you will at least understand that this is no mere caprice, and will click through to check out what I have to say anyhow, or will follow me to Blurty, CommieJournal, CrazyLife, DeadJournal, GreatestJournal, InsaneJournal, JournalFen, or Scribbld, (or DreamWidth when that becomes active) and friend me there.

And if you do not, I will understand. I knew there would be a price in readership. I wish it had not come to this. I'll miss the insightful, funny, helpful, and snarky comments from those of you who stop reading.

Just don't call this a 'flounce'. I'm not doing it for Teh Drahmah (I had hoped to make the change low-key but I underestimated how much the cuts would upset people). And I'm not even doing it to Make A Statement to SUP -- I've made my statements to SUP, explicitly, carefully, and repeatedly, when I told them why I had reverted my Paid account to Basic and what the consequence of imposing ads on existing basic accounts would be. (And I made my statement in a place where a representative of the company assured us the staff were reading every comment.) They didn't believe me, or more likely bet that I represent an ignorable minority (in which they may well turn out to be absolutely correct), or both, and "put up or shut up" day arrived. They took an action I'd said would be unacceptable, and here I am not accepting it. It's pretty simple, regardless of how annoying it is.

I'll entertain suggestions for ways to make this even less dramatic, and less inconvenient for y'all and for myself. So far this is the least painful of the solutions I've come up with consistent with my concerns. If you have a solution that neither violates the LJ TOS nor lets LJ earn advertising dollars from my writing, and is less annoying than this, I'll listen.

In principle, I should turn off comments on the LJ fake-cut entries, so that the comment pages won't be able to generate ad revenue either. But I figure that would annoy people even more, who want to post non-anonymously with the fewest extra steps possible, so I'm just going to hope that the comment pages don't get many ad-views.

I haven't chosen a 'main' site yet, but I'm posting the same content everywhere except on LiveJournal anyhow, so if you want to pick one, see where most of the comments start showing up, I suppose. I've got a partial design in my head for a system that'll gather the comments from all the copies of an entry into one place, but I haven't started trying to build it yet. DreamWidth is making smoother inter-site interoperability one of their goals, so perhaps they'll build something that will save me from having to roll my own (in which case they'll be my "front door"). Currently, InsaneJournal and CommieJournal are at the top of my list, and IJ is where I've been seeing the most comments other than LJ. The site that each fake-cut links to may differ (it's the alphabetically-first site without ads from the list of sites the entry has been posted to 140 seconds after the script started trying to post to all of them at once. If it points someplace other than whatever you've picked as your preferred place to read me, by the time you see the LJ entry the real entry should have showed up on my 'recent entries' page at all the other sites, barring site problems or network problems).

Additional reading:

I'll let someone else find old links giving background on Strikethrough, Boldthrough, the breast feeding kerfuffle, the removal of Basic accounts, the monkeying with the popular interests list and interest-searches, the ominously vague statements regarding interpretation of also-vague policy, statement/action inconsistencies, and other reasons why LJ is in a position of having to earn trust back. I need to go do something else for a while.

QotD

2008-08-31T09:16:28Z

From the Quotation of the day mailing list, 2007-01-21:

"If you're going to go in and try to topple Saddam Hussein, you have to go to Baghdad. Once you've got Baghdad, it's not clear what you do with it. It's not clear what kind of government you would put in place of the one that's currently there now. Is it going to be a Shia regime, a Sunni regime or a Kurdish regime? Or one that tilts toward the Baathists, or one that tilts toward the Islamic fundamentalists? How much credibility is that government going to have if it's set up by the United States military when it's there? How long does the United States military have to stay to protect the people that sign on for that government, and what happens to it once we leave?" -- Dick Cheney, U.S. vice-president, quoted in a New York Times story published April 13, 1991 after the first Gulf War.

http://www.slate.com/id/2072609/

(submitted to the mailing list by Mike Krawchuk)

Status: Pain and Frustration (and a strange dream)

2008-08-30T18:41:22Z

Argh. I have things I really needed to do today, mostly postponed from the last few days (and pushing a fun-thing off today's agenda entirely). But I'm finding it painful to stand upright, as well as difficult to walk, so I think today may be yet another "maybe tomorrow" kind of day. :-( Waiting for the codeine to start working, to see whether it'll do enough good today to let me drive to Bowie, but the odds do not appear to be in my favour.

At least I got some sleep this morning. With a dream about my parents' back yard flooding (the dream was set sometime between when the weeping willow there was cut down, and my father's death) but somehow not flooding the house or front yard, which are downhill from the back yard. And a humongeous tarp had been stretched over the yard before the rain, and the rain somehow mostly wound up under the tarp, which ballooned up ... so when I went to check things out I discovered I was standing in a few inches of water + grass clippings + leaves, on top of a sheet of plastic that had four or five feet of water under it, and I could walk around on it and bounce -- use it as a cross between a trampoline and a waterbed. The yard next door was flooded too, but the water in one yard was blue, and in the other it was green.

I have no idea whether that dream connects in any way to anything I've been thinking about awake lately, nor whether it has any symbolic meaning -- it feels completely random. There wasn't really any plot, and the emotional tone throughout was simple curiosity/exploration, without any layers of joy/anxiety/confusion/etc.

QotD

2008-08-30T09:16:35Z

"Laziness is nothing more than the habit of resting before you get tired." -- Jules Renard (thanks to blueeowyn)

QotD

2008-08-29T09:16:42Z

"I ended up with a fairly 'correct' family, but I don't see how the pro-family folks are doing squat for me. How about better schools, access to health care, a livable minimum wage (funny how the same folks who think the wife shouldn't work oppose mandating a wage that a family could possibly survive on) a safer, cleaner environment? And if they can't do any of this stuff, why insult me by telling me that I somehow benefit by government persecution of other American families?" -- old-hedwig, 2005-01-25

LJ API Question

2008-08-29T04:47:06Z

Okay, I give up. How does one set the date-out-of-order flag on a new entry via one of the three LJ APIs? (Preferably the flat interface, since that's what the code I'm modifying already uses?) The 'backdated' property doesn't seem to take care of it, and I haven't spotted anything else likely-looking in the documentation.

Worst case, I guess having someone confirm that some other open-source client correctly handles the DOOO property would help, 'cause then I can crawl through the source code for that, looking for the relevant property. But I don't want to start off by downloading more clents at random to look.

Consulting/Music/Holiday Dream

2008-08-28T15:56:42Z

Guh ... that was a long, complicated, shifting sequece of dreams all blurring into each other ... when I woke, I wasn't suree whether it was morning or evening, nor did I think it was the right day (I wasn't even sure which month I'd woken up in, for a moment) -- it felt as though I'd lived through, and dreamt between, about three days, even accounting for ordinary amounts of time compression in dreams.

It combined a team consulting gig working for Karl, Pennsic, blogging, and bits from multiple bands, in a most confusing mishmash. I was on electric bas guitar at the end.

Most of the dream took place in a bizarrely laid out office, combining the worst elements of a) cubicles and b) enclosed offices where there wasn't really enough space to build walls and still leave room for people to walk. I was on a team captained by Karl (I think about a third of my friendslist knows whom I mean; for the rest of you, think fannish entrepeneur with a strong personality who for a while seemed destined to employ most of mid-Atlantic fandom as computer-jocks), who seemed worried about our behaviour in the offices of the client, because it had been so long since most of us had worked together|worked for him|done consulting|something like that, I forget which. Some of the other folks on the team were people I'd worked with under Karl IRL, others were bandmates, others just random friends.

The office was a warren of tiny, irregularly-shaped offices containing one to four desks that looked like desk components of a cubicle rather than standalone desks. Each desk had a very shallow sink in it, and running water. And a narrow, verical window next to the door. And for how narrow the passageways were, it might as well have been on a submarine.

At one point I tried to sneak away to write a blog entry about Pennsic, on a tablet-PC (something I've only ever read about -- for anyone not sure what that is, imagine a PDA grown up to legal-pad sizr instead of in-the-palm-of-your-hand sized, running the same class of OS you'd expect on a laptop or desktop computer, but using a stylus instead of a keyboard). At the time, the Pennic-ness of the situation was somehow clear (perhaps an in-dream recollection of the previous dream?) but the connection had faded by the time I got to the last scene of the dream. At various other points, I was talking to members of the client's staff about music. (Our group was occupying extra desks scattered throughout the client's warren, and there were still many vacant desks, but the space was still terribly crowded. And we were constantly squeezing past each other in the corridors to find more people we had to talk to to suss out more parts of the problem we were hired to solve.)

And then sudddenly it was nearly Christmas, and baked goods started appearing, and I was attempting to arrange things in such a way that I had a reason to pass through the reception area in time to grab some of the especially interesting cookies (very colourful, incorporating hard candy in a way that was tasty in the dream but wouldn't really work in waking life) that someone had brought, before they were all gone -- the reception area (a barely-wider spot in the middle of a corridor, with what looked more like a nurse's station than a reception desk next to it) was so crowded at that point, because of the cookies and brownies, that it seemed like an excuse was needed to allow oneself to get caught in that office traffic jam.

I've forgotten the transition scenes between talking about bands I play in to being invited to perform, but somehow we wound up in an auditorium that had a lot more space but was otherwise just as poorly designed as the rest of the office, led by a person who seemed like a bizarre combination of every band-leader, music director, and recording engeneer I've worked with. Some of the client's staff were acting as stagehands, the rest being spread out in the bizarrely-arranged auditoreum. We discovered that a famous rock musician was in the audience (I don't recall who -- maybe Brian Setzer, but I don't think that's right), and we asked whether it would be okay if we performed one of his songs that was in our repertoire. I was supposed to lead off the piece on electric bass, and struggled to remember it because it had been six or seven years since the last time I'd played that song.

I somehow got the song started, and woke up in the middle of it, after being told my bass wasn't loud enough and trying to find the preson who had control of my volume knob (my amplifier was halfway across the auditoreum from me) to get them to turn it up ... we wound up making the song sound like a Mark Knopfler version (Dire Straits) instead sounding anything like the original, but I can't remember which song it was (because once the thought, "this sounds more like Dire Straits" woke me up, I got an odd mashup of "The Sultans of Swing" and "Love Over Gold" stuck in my head).

There was, of course, a lot more in the middle. I can only faintly recall some of the associations in it, no additional details. Toward the very end of the dream, my awareness narrowed to just my fingers and the bass guitar and trying to remember the tune I hadn't played in so long.

QotD

2008-08-28T09:16:47Z

"You know it's bad when people are too pissed off to macro." machineplay 2008-03-12, regarding PR disasters (especially those taking place on LJ)

QotD

2008-08-27T09:16:54Z

"You do not examine legislation in the light of the benefits it will convey if properly administered, but in the light of the wrongs it would do and the harms it would cause if improperly administered." -- Lyndon Johnson (b. 1908-08-27, d. 1973-01-22; US President 1963-1969)

Partial Braindump

2008-08-26T20:03:37Z

Ugh. More alert yet, but also in more pain, with hyperacute hearing to boot (had to sleep with earplugs in last night; would still have them in, but they start to hurt after a few hours -- will probably put them back in soon though; cars passing by no longer hurt terribly unless their stereos are cranked, but the sound of a passing truck or bus is pretty #$%^ing painful). Have somewhere I really ought to go tonight, somewhere it'd be fun to go tonight, and places it would be good to get to this afternoon ... and I think I'm not likely to get anywhere at all the way I feel this afternoon. (And I did remember to take pain meds; this is despite those.) Feh.

Made progress on mods to journal client, auto-QotD script, and auto-crossposting script, but still having problems deep in source code for Clive (rather decently commented in some aspects, effectively uncommented in others; suspect there's a few "if you're reading this then you will have already read such-and-such" assumptions in it). For a while I had a version that would only post to DeadJournal, and only if comments were disabled. Found out how to turn on debugging messages but find the choice of which bits get reported at which level of verbosity ... less than ideal for my purposes. (Tempted to rewrite the debugging code to display which function it's called from. Also tempted to use the Clive source mostly as examples/documentation, and hack a new client from scratch, but should probably resist. It's not broken, nor all that seriously mis-organized, just not architected quite the way I woulda done it and I'm having trouble following parts of it.) Part of my problem grokking the code is probably the effects of pain and hyperacusis on attention span. I know part is from the effects of fibromyalgia on short-term memory, and that's the really frustrating part: knowing how good at this I used to be.

Anywho, hope to have ability to specify tags on command line soon (the main reason I gave up on tags was the nuisance of having to go edit each mirrored copy of each entry to add tags after posting it), but can't find documentation for how to set "date out of order" flag on an entry via the LJ API (which will be important when a QotD entry fails to post to a site, and the next scheduled retry happens after I've posted something else). Found a property that sounded like it should do that, but it doesn't seem to. Trying to get it all sorted before LJ's changes on the 28th. Also plan to make site-to-post-to a command-line option (currently using separate copies of Clive executable, each compiled to post to a different site). Hmm. Guess I should've checked to see whether there's a more recent version to work from than the one I've been tinkering with, but haven't seen any signs of life on that front in a long time. (Checking now ... nope, 0.4.5 is still the most recent version I see at SourceForge.)

Acutely disheartened by what has become standard way of dealing with protesters in my country nowadays (restrict them to a spot so far away from what they're protesting that neither the media nor the folks they're trying to address can even see them, and arrest the ones who try to protest someplace effective). Even if they're protesting against something I support, freedoms of speech & assembly seem to demand better. (N.b.: picketing private events like funerals, and blockading abortion clinics, seem to be 'obvious' special cases to me, but haven't worked out how to articulate where the line should be drawn.)

Also perplexed by reading opinion of someone who supports McCain over Obama because he doesn't like Obama's attitudes towards our soldiers. WTF? Which one wants to keep sending 'em to the meat grinder yet opposes benefits or even decent medical treatment when they come home?

Ugh. Anyhow: body not working well, brain apparently not working great either despite feeling more alart, awfully tired, hating loud vehicles.

QotD

2008-08-26T09:16:59Z

"The day begins with a morning meeting where material harvested from 15 TiVos and even more newspapers, magazines and Web sites is reviewed. That meeting, Mr. Stewart said, 'would be very unpleasant for most people to watch: its really a gathering of curmudgeons expressing frustration and upset, and the rest of the day is spent trying to mask or repress that through whatever creative devices we can find.'" -- from "Is Jon Stewart the Most Trusted Man in America?", by Michiko Kakutani, 2008-08-15 (quoted passage appears on page 2) [thanks to vvalkyri and osewalrus for pointing it out]

Bleah

2008-08-25T23:10:48Z

Feeling more coherent than yesterday, but not feeling coordinated enough to want to get on I-95. :-( Going to stay in.