Wednesday, May 14, 2008

Blogging update

You may have noticed I’ve been missing in action lately… Well, actually, I’ve been busy blogging at The Moderate Voice where I am grateful to have been welcomed as a regular contributor.

These are among the posts I’ve been most proud of while there:

Two on the NPR series on how parents are addressing their children’s gender-identity issues which aired last week, NPR: 2 families, 2 approaches to gender identity and most especially, On gender identity, amputee wannabes, & our contagious natures; McCain, abortion, Southern Baptists & the emergence of the Religious Right; Earth to Democrats: Black votes count!; Jeremiah Wright & Martin Luther King: “Tolerance” v. “Equality & Justice for all”; Fightin’ Words; Colbert & Stewart: One Formidable Opponent; Is mainstreet ready for gay PDA?

Unfortunately, I started blogging there just as the semester was winding down and work was heating up which means… the worst possible time! I was far too busy, had way too much to do to be able to keep everything going. Something had to give and, sadly, it was my own little blog.

As you may recall, I had been having troubles here. The fallout from the disastrous business relationship with E.Webscapes and Lisa Sabin-Wilson has left me in a quandary as to what to do about this site. It continues to have technical difficulties. I have closed down comments and have yet to settle on a long-term solution.

Meanwhile, there is no easy means to find my posts from among the others at TMV. And posting there is somewhat more time consuming than here on my own site. I’m trying to decide how best to address these issues and will let you know what I come up with shortly.

Friday, April 18, 2008

Handwriting holds no clues to personality

Remember that pricy personality test I had done by a popular Manhattan handwriting analyst?

Lest there was any doubt science has conclusively proven… [to my satisfaction...] it’s all bunk!

Geoffrey Dean has reviewed two hundred different studies into whether graphology can tell us anything about personality (Dean, 1992). Adding up the effect of each of these studies showed that graphology has a combined power of about...wait for it...zero. Well, not quite zero but still very, very small - so small as to be insignificant.

No Internet - toggled the input - I’m back!

Technical difficulties kept me from posting yesterday. After some time I finally figured out that my router went bad. All I had to do was toggle the input (plug the modem directly into the computer) to get back up and going. Too bad I didn’t have Hillary here to help me out!

Colbert was masterful!

Tuesday, April 15, 2008

Health Insurance in America: Dying for Coverage

Facing South reports on a recently released report from Families USA, Dying for Coverage, finding that in all 50 states the number of uninsured and the estimated number of deaths is directly related to lack of health insurance:

A study by the Institute of Medicine, tha basis for the Family USA report, found that uninsured adults are 25 percent more likely to die prematurely than adults with private health insurance. Another academic study found that lack of health insurance is the third leading cause of death, following heart disease and cancer, for uninsured adults between the ages of 55 and 64.

While the percentage of uninsured, working age (25-64) people in the South reported by Families USA in 2006 (20.5%) is similar to overall U.S. percentage of uninsured in the same age group reported by the U.S. Census (19.9%), several Southern states have a significantly higher percentage of uninsured.

For example, the Families USA report found that Louisiana had the highest rate of uninsured among working people at 26.2%. Florida (25.3%), Arkansas (23.2%), and Mississippi (22.1%) also exceeded the regional and national rates. Virginia (15.1%) and West Virginia (16.5%) are well below the regional and national rates.

Other state reports from around the South on the percentage of uninsured working age people include Alabama (20.1%), Georgia (19.7%), Kentucky (19.0%), North Carolina (21.1%), South Carolina (19.7%), and Tennessee (18.3%).

The U.S. Census report shows that the South has the highest percentage of uninsured overall, 19.0%, as compared to 11.4% in the Midwest, 12.3% in the Northeast, and 17.9% in the West.

When you add it all up, there are nearly 8.5 million working age people in the South without health insurance. Even more disturbing, the Families USA report attributes nearly 52,000 premature deaths to lack of health insurance in these states between 2000 and 2006.

Meanwhile, in my ongoing war with SHPS, Ms. Quigley wrote me back summarizing my calls but said nothing about my $179 in reimbursement (not did she answer my question about making those calls available to me—like I expected she would???). It’s now 14 business days after providing the required documentation and I have not been reimbursed.

I’ll spare you the snippy email I sent in response. Flexible Spending Accounts are another Republican corporate welfare program masquerading as a healthcare tax benefit. SHPS is making money—my money! I’ve not gotten the benefit. It’s a scam!

Monday, April 14, 2008

Burning Down the House

A friend here told me that the way to kill fire ants was to poor gasoline on them, light a match, and be done with it. He says that the chemicals we use to kill fire ants are bad for the environment and don’t work.

What do I know?

So yesterday I’m doing yard work. I take my can of gasoline, poor it on the ant hill, strike a match, toss it, and whoosh!

Now I have to tell you it has been many, many years since I put a match to gasoline. Somehow I was honestly thinking that the gasoline was going to soak into the ground and it wasn’t even going to light. Like I was going to have a problem lighting it.

Well, it lit alright. And I jumped right out of my skin! There was fire and there was smoke and I am just lucky I wasn’t fricasseed right along with those ants!

With the ants dead, I mowed the lawn and came on inside.

A couple hours later my nephew came home. And I do mean A COUPLE OF HOURS LATER. Maybe three? He comes in and I’m sitting here comfortably on the couch with the dogs working on the computer and my nephew says to me, “Uncle Joey, is the yard supposed to be on fire?”

THE YARD IS ON FIRE???

Now I have to tell you that we’re lucky there’s still a water shortage here in Georgia. It’s because of that water shortage that we have garbage cans full of collected water all over the yard.

We ran and collected those cans and dumped buckets and pales and we hosed and we got lucky. And I’m going back to Amdro I don’t care what anybody tells me!

Sexual tales from my old Pennsatucky home

I was raised in Central PA. Ran away at 17. Remember that my nephew, who is gay, lives here now with Doug and me. Ironic that he had to leave the liberal Northeast and flee to the Old South to find loving support and family acceptance. My brother is, er, oh, never mind…

I’m going on about this because I just read about the Republican commissioner of Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, who had been accused of rape. By a man!

He denied it.

TPM Muckracker picks up the story from there:

On March 31st, police, investigating the allegation of rape by the 20-year old Marshall McCurdy, obtained a warrant to search Barclay’s home. They didn’t find evidence of rape. But they did find videotapes of hundreds of sexual encounters with men that Barclay had filmed on high-tech surveillance cameras.  The cameras were hidden inside AM/FM radios, motion detectors and intercom speaker systems, among other places.  There was also one at his business office.

None of the subjects were aware they were being filmed and no permission had been obtained, Barclay admitted.  According to a second warrant issued on April 9th, Barclay also admitted to hiring prostitutes on a weekly basis from the now-defunct website harrisburgfratboys.com.

On April 10th, the rape charges were dropped.  One of the videos found during the search showed Barclay and McCurdy engaging in apparently consensual sex.[...]

Sadly, his vindication was his undoing. Barclay was forced to resign.

And legally, Barclay’s not quite out of the woods yet-- he’s still facing possible charges for privacy violations and promoting prostitution. McCurdy, however, has been charged with making false reports to law enforcement authorities and unsworn falsifications to authorities. He’s up for a possible 3-year prison stint and $7,500 in fines.

Ah, just as I remember home.

Sunday, April 13, 2008

More on the technical perils of blogging

We’re always hearing about how empowered bloggers are, and I count myself among those who agree that it’s a wondrous world in which any of us can become a publisher. But the perils are many. It’s an either do-it-yourself or put yourself in the hands of huge corporations choice that bloggers face when they decide to set out.

I chose the former, wanting to learn how to design and build the blog, not just enter my content into someone else’s system. But that is an even more complex choice in which you must make a myriad of complex decisions, choose a blog platform, and still you are at the mercy of web hosting companies.

This morning I shared my nearly six months of struggle with a designer I had enlisted to help with my site. Later I ran across news from Blogs for Democracy that a regional ISP in Georgia has apparently failed without warning:

Sorry for the nonpolitical post, folks, but an area ISP that I (and thousands of others) use, Speedfactory (link is dead), has apparently ceased operations with no warning.  I’m taking the liberty of posting this info here, because with the exception of this web forum thread there seems to be no information available at all.  All that’s known from anecdotal reports is that everything has been down for two days, customer service calls are answered by an “all circuits busy” recording, and Speedfactory’s offices in the area are locked up with no sign of activity.  It’s conceivable that this will have an effect on some area web sites, so don’t be shocked if you notice some isolated outages for a couple of days while customers transfer their DSL and web hosting services.

It’s probably only a matter of time before the AJC, Clark Howard, and/or other media types bring you more in-depth reporting on this unfolding debacle, but in the meantime, you heard it here first.  (This post brought to you by Verizon mobile broadband while my DSL modem sits uselessly idle.)

Nothing yet reported in the news.

UPDATE: More from Blogs for Democracy. They say they’re still in business. But I’m thankful that I’m not their customer. 

Friday, April 11, 2008

A Public Defender Visitors…

Click Here! Unavoidably, my link changed. Sorry for the inconvenience!

Wednesday, April 09, 2008

I’m at war with SHPS

Before we begin let me stipulate that I think Flexible Spending Accounts are bad public policy. I sat in the New York living room of a friend arguning as much in 2005, even as I had signed up for a measly $500 in 2006. Well a hernia operation and Sudden Sensorineural Hearing Loss turned that into a bad decision quick!

Anticipating more of the same, I upped my 2007 contribution to $1,500 and monitored it throughout the year. I knew I would come in under, but because my company had a new “2.5 exemption” (we can use medical expenses from January through March 15 of this year against last year’s balance), and because I had not been submitting all of my expenses through the year (mileage, for example, my doctors are in Macon, 45 miles away) I figured I’d adjust things at the beginning of this year.

SHPS don’t like that!

When it came time to do the adjusting, all hell broke loose! I have had to fight lick the dickens to get my money back. And to this minute, April 9, 2008, they are still holding $179 even though I have documented the legitimate medical expense over and over and over again. Here’s my latest email to SHPS:

Ms. Quigley,

I was away for a while, then back and getting caught up. I hope that you have had time to review the [recorded customer service phone] calls* by now. I wonder if you can provide those calls to me so that I can refresh my memory? Without them my memory is limited. Below is the best that I can do.

I remember at least three or four calls. The calls started off very cheerfully. Your service representatives were helpful but not always clear and sometimes confusing. When the first person informed me of a 2007 remaining balance of nearly $600, she acted as if she expected me to get angry.

I did not get angry because I knew there would be a balance. I was, though, surprised and confused at the size of that balance. The confusion was because all through the year I had been getting notices of “Potentially Ineligible Expenses.” I did not know until that call that those expenses were included in the running balance at the upper right of the web page. She explained that they were.

In another call it was explained that my plan did not include a “2.5 exemption.” I argued that it did. The representative, after much looking, ultimately found that I was correct. She then explained that I could not use my SHPS Visa card for those reimbursements. I objected. I asked why and was told something about the card being “emptied” from one year and “loaded” for the next. I argued about the fairness of that.

I have since been told by our Human Resources department that the information that customer service representative gave me was not correct.

In the last call the arguing grew angry. That’s when I sat with my unduly large healthcare records file—the file that contains every receipt for every expense that I have submitted for reimbursement. During that call I was informed for the first time and quite suddenly that I had a $256.80 “overpayment.” An overpayment??? Nowhere on the website is there any mention of an overpayment. In none of the copious correspondence is there any mention of an overpayment. In none of the other phone calls was there any mention of an overpayment. Now, out of the blue, there was an overpayment.

Well, of course, I knew there was no overpayment. But even with all of my records I was at a loss to prove it. And as I rustled through my ungodly large pile of papers trying to find the single one I needed confirming that I had sent a fax I was left sputtering, wondering, what if I didn’t have that one? What if I never received that one? What if I actually lost that one? Then I’d just be lost, wouldn’t I? So, yes, I was angry. Very, very, angry.

I’d love to hear that phone call. Will you provide it to me? As I recall it, in the end I asked, desperately, could I appeal?

Well it turned out that I did have the letter. And the fax receipt. So I faxed it again. And that’s when you got involved. And only then, after who knows how many calls and faxes, did I learn that it was the wrong KIND of receipt. Of course, that was the only receipt that the doctor had given me. So after all of the calls and faxes and service representatives and human resources and visits to the doctor (That’s efficiency??? That’s convenience??? That’s what SHPS has to offer???) I returned to the doctors office and got the correct receipt, faxed that to you—9 business days ago—and the disputed amount has yet to be deposited into my account!!!

So about those IRS requirements you mention… I have no doubt that you are correct. But I want to propose back to you that a company of your size—that does hundreds of millions of dollars in business and has thousands of employees—should have some leverage there. You should be able to do something about those systems. In point of fact, your website boasts precisely that. You say that you are “transforming healthcare” with “health management tools, resources and services.”

I’ve used them. I don’t think so.

Instead I think the receipt I sent you that you ultimately accepted—the one that makes the IRS so happy—could be forged by a 4th grader. In fact, I know that it can be forged by a 4th grader. I work in technology support. So your procedures, if they are designed to thwart theft through false claims, instead thwart only the hundreds, the thousands, of honest people like myself who are merely seeking to be reimbursed with their own funds for their own legitimate healthcare expenses.

Your system thwarts the good guys who are trying to comply and lets the bad guys go free. Those who are trying to scam the system can forge their fake documents like the one I sent you that you accepted. Forgers can easily double the amount for [eye]glasses and have it accepted. Your system doesn’t work! It hurts the good people. It wastes their time, their money, their productivity. It is a sham. What the public is left with is an expensive needless burdensome inefficient system. And deep animosity. I sincerely believe the results of your system have done me wrong.

Now, as promised in my last phone call, I have contacted my congressman, John Barrow, and copied Miss Johnson from his office on this email. But I have since learned that SHPS is a huge provider of services for the federal government and a good many southern states. So if I have to I will expand my quest for allies to include health and other advocacy organizations. I also want to be clear that I do not believe that any individual at SHPS is acting in bad faith. I have no doubt that you and your colleagues are trying to do the best that you can. But I fail to understand how your best efforts leave me without my lousy 179 bucks after all this time and effort.  And for the benefit of Ms. Johnson I will say again that I firmly believe that “healthcare consumerism” is bad policy, but that bad policy has been compounded by very bad implementation.

Sincerely,
Joe Windish

* ABOUT THOSE PHONE CALLS: When you call Chase Manhattan Bank they tell you that they record every call. When you call SHPS they tell you that they may record your call to improve your customer service. But Ms. Quigley told me that she was going to go “pull all my calls.” That sounds to me like they record every call. Is that legal? I have no doubt it is. I should have access to all of those recordings. 

Saturday, March 29, 2008

Homeward bound

Thanks to our hosts; It was great seeing friends. We’ll be back!

Desire

I’ve only been to New Orleans three or four times in my life, all of them to visit with my friend the documentary filmmaker Julie Gustafson who I’ve known since she was a director of Global Village back in New York.  She came here in 1995 to make a film and has stayed since. The film is titled, Desire:

Nearly a decade in the making, this refreshingly honest film documents the challenges and desires of a group of young women in New Orleans by letting them film their own stories. As this diverse group of young women-two teenagers from the Desire housing projects, a single mother from the working-class suburb of Belle Chasse across the river, and two girls from the most prestigious private high school in New Orleans-make short films about their own desires, this provocative film records the intimate dramas of their changing lives.

Sensitively and intelligently interweaving the girls’ short videos throughout the film’s narrative, DESIRE pivots around the intimacy and risk that the two generations of filmmakers share together and with the audience. Addressing everything from sex and contraception to the impact of educational and material opportunities on their futures as women, DESIRE presents a nuanced and authentic look at modern young womanhood.

Mississippi riverboat

Thursday, March 27, 2008

A Metairie Masterpiece

Our host, a New Orleans native, is a builder and a collector of old doors, mantels, banisters, railings and balustrades. The vanity plate on his pick-up reads “BUILDIT.” His house is an authentic local attraction.

More after the jump

Read the rest of "A Metairie Masterpiece" in the extended entry.

Sunday, March 23, 2008

Happy Easter

My favorite from The second annual Sunday Source Peeps Diorama Contest:

“ ’Peep Art‘—a reinterpretation of the Pop Art movement and homage to Andy Warhol and his muse Edie Sedgwick—is a revolutionary concept taking the Peeps Diorama Contest to an entirely different level.”

Well then.

“The name is a pun, and the concept itself is the pun,” explains Ilana Greenstein, an operations officer for the CIA. “Pop art uses everyday images in art, and Peep art does the same.” With Peeps. Multiple levels of meaning. After two contests and more than 1,100 dioramas, we may finally have a submission that defines the Peep art movement.

Greenstein and Jane Dokko’s diorama exudes the austerity of a museum, but within the mounted frames it’s colorful chaos: Peeps cutouts splashed on a Jackson Pollock, “PEEP!” replacing “VAROOM!” in a Roy Lichtenstein piece and nine Warholized Peeps at the center of the action. And let’s not forget: Admiring the exhibit are Warhol and Sedgwick themselves.

Thursday, March 20, 2008

Easter eggs at our house (again)

Doug’s decorating Easter Eggs agin. He attaches herbs with string and boils them in natural blueberry, onion skin and cabbage dyes. The house is odiferous, but the eggs are… wondiferous?

He’s promised to do an instructable (here’s one for onion skins). It works for Christmas ornaments too!

The photos are from last year…

decorating eggs, Hosted on Zooomr

Monday, March 10, 2008

Italian Greyhound named “Ugliest Dog”

I’m appaled:

San Diego crowned its “ugliest dog” Sunday during the 13th annual “Ugly Dog Contest.”

Some say these four-legged furballs are so ugly, they’re cute, but only one dog can walk away the ugliest.

Victoria, an Italian greyhound, won the contest for the second year in a row.

Photo is of our two Italian Greyhounds, Jake & Baci. Do you really think they’re ugly??? Italian Greyhounds Rock!!!

More after the jump.

Read the rest of "Italian Greyhound named “Ugliest Dog”" in the extended entry.

Friday, March 07, 2008

Moving beyond Library 2.0

Yesterday I proposed a presentation for a summer library conference titled Moving Beyond Library 2.0. Here’s what I submitted:

My title, “It’s a wwwwww1234 World: Technology and the Web from 1984 to 2020” is a play on the classic 1963 comedy film ”It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World” that opens with a spectacular car crash in the California desert, then zooms through a comedic treasure hunt and ends with a suitcase filled with cash dumped from a swinging fire ladder on an excited crowd of passersby below. 

I plan to use a clip from the film as a fun kick-off and comedic intro to the presentation. The film also serves as a metaphor and commentary on our relationship to technology—the pace of change is quick; the influence of money and the market has meant huge economic swings from boom to bust then back again; and all of it has wrought wonderful social changes that were wholly unimaginable only a short time ago.

Or were they?

I pick 1984 as the starting point because it was the title of George Orwell’s iconic novel in which obsolete and wasteful technology is deliberately used in order to perpetuate useless fighting. 1984 is also, of course, the year the Macintosh was introduced. And 1984 is the year the term “Cyberspace” was coined popularized [yipes! Got that wrong...] in the science fiction novel Neuromancer. A line from that novel—“The future is here. It’s just not evenly distributed yet.”—has also been taken up as a mantra for the web 2.0 crowd. I end with the year 2020 because a recent report, Semantic Wave 2008: Industry Roadmap to Web 3.0 and Multibillion Dollar Market Opportunities, ends with that year.

The report actually takes us all the way through to Web 4.0, so I use it to walk us through Web 1.0, 2.0, 3.0 and 4, and also to look at Cloud Computing, Utility Computing and wrap up with a look at Chris Anderson’s forthcoming book [Free] (outlined in the much discussed March Cover Story of Wired Magazine), Free! Why $0.00 is the Future of Business, in which he argues that the Google model—the gift economy, low-cost digital distribution made possible by abundant bandwidth—will revolutionize business.

My conclusion is that in reality what we nearly always get is more of the same, just a little bit different ("new paradigms don’t eclipse old, they just spawn new business models").

I did a variation on that theme for faculty a couple weeks ago and it was a hit but I rushed through it in 11 minutes (it was supposed to be 7) so I decided I should give it its due and extend it to a full presentation.

I should say that I suffer from terrible stage fright. My presentations are often well received, despite my inability to relax and enjoy them. We’ll see if the proposal is accepted.

Saturday, February 23, 2008

On humanely killed animals

In my self-satisfied, novice excitement at filling my freezer with nearly 300 pounds of grass-fed beef, out come phrases that others read as oxymoronic:

Not that I’m calling you out, but when you write “humanely killed”, um, what?

Well, while it seems abundantly clear to me, I completely understand that it’s certainly not to others (and for some, it never will be).

I think it’s noteworthy that this week we had the largest meat recall in U.S. history. The recall came as a result of a Humane Society video that caught what the USDA later called “egregious violations” of federal animal care regulations.

Here’s an interview with the CEO of The Humane Society on why this video captured the media’s attention when so many of their others do not (among the reasons, it wasn’t too awful to watch). Here’s an LATimes story on the man who shot the video.

For specifics, Temple Grandin has written on redesigning slaughterhouses to make them more humane. I assume my commenter will get the point that if we are going to kill animals for food, it should be done as humanely as possible.

But I gather his real point is to ask, should we be killing animals for food at all? For the moment it is clear where I come down on that question, though I may one day, still, become a vegetarian. It is indeed a very enlightening exercise to look the animal in the eye that you will one day eat. In that I have, in my way, followed Michael Pollan. This from his 2002 NYTimes Magazine piece, An Animal’s Place:

Except for our pets, real animals-animals living and dying-no longer figure in our everyday lives. Meat comes from the grocery store, where it is cut and packaged to look as little like parts of animals as possible. The disappearance of animals from our lives has opened a space in which there’s no reality check, either on the sentiment or the brutality. Several years ago, the English critic John Berger wrote an essay, ‘’Why Look at Animals?’’ in which he suggested that the loss of everyday contact between ourselves and animals-and specifically the loss of eye contact-has left us deeply confused about the terms of our relationship to other species. That eye contact, always slightly uncanny, had provided a vivid daily reminder that animals were at once crucially like and unlike us; in their eyes we glimpsed something unmistakably familiar (pain, fear, tenderness) and something irretrievably alien. Upon this paradox people built a relationship in which they felt they could both honor and eat animals without looking away.

So today, for good or bad, I live in the belief that I both honor and eat that animal, that cow, #12, without looking away.

In The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Pollan has a passage I’ve quoted (at greater length) before in which he distinguishes between Animal Rights and Animal Welfare.

I don’t know that this one paragraph can capture it, but it can begin to suggest the idea, I think, that there may be an ethical construct for eating animals. From page 325:

To give up eating animals is to give up on these places as human habitat, unless of course we are willing to make complete our dependence on a highly industrialized national food chain. That food chain would be in turn even more dependent than it already is on fossil fuels and chemical fertilizer, since food would need to travel even farther and fertility - in the form of manures - would be in short supply. Indeed, it is doubtful you can build a genuinely sustainable agriculture without animals to cycle nutrients and support local food production. If our concern is for the health of nature - rather than, say, the internal consistency of our moral code or the condition of our souls - then eating animals may sometimes be the most ethical thing to do.

Whether ethical or not, most Americans today—if not most of the people on the planet—eat living creatures. I’d like to see us improve the living standards of those creatures. And when the time comes, I’d like to give them, too, a more humane death.

SEE ALSO: How to avoid meat from factory farms.

#12: The cow’s come home

Just home from the abattoir, the cow’s in the trunk (frozen). Our dog, Baci, checks it out.

Last winter we had gone out to the pastuer and picked out the calf, #12. Last year we went in with three couples on a half cow; this time around the three couples bought a whole cow. We took half.

292.5 pounds of beef. $757.89. That’s $2.59 per pound.

Here’s the breakdown:

9 Large (huge!) sirloins
19 T-bones
18 Rib steaks
2 sirloin tip roasts
5 chuck roasts
4 rump roasts
3 beef ribs (Doug doesn’t like them so most were ground up, the few we got are for the dogs)
390 burgers in patties (quarter pounders at least, I paid extra to have them made into patties)
9 boneless stew (packages of cut up meat for skewers on the grill, I’m thinking a package is good for 2 or 3 people)

Now, if that seems like a lot to you (and it does to most folks) let me just say that if it were to be eaten just by us, it would come to 1.87 pounds per week per person. BUT… it won’t be eaten just by us. We have people over. Often. And lots of them.

Further, this is grass fed, humanely raised and humanely killed, anti-biotic-free and un-processed meat. So, for example, where once we might have had a salt-laden highly-processed luncheon meat, now we will have a burger.

We had gone through last year’s sixth of a cow in four months and now we have my big eatin’ super-buff nephew living with us. I’m guessing he and his friends will help us finish this new cow off in no time…

Friday, February 15, 2008

Lingering blog issues

I’m aware that there are ongoing residual problems that remain as a result of last week’s crash of this blog. There are some display issues, but the biggest issue is that you cannot leave comments. I am trying to get these problems resolved. I am also trying to rebuild the archive and develop a long-term strategy for moving forward. 

I hate that my blog is hobbling along. Through it all I have considered quitting, but I have also come to understand how much this blog means to me. I’m totally swept up in my ability to follow and interact with the news, those who report the news, and the newsmakers. I like that from right here in rural Georgia I can be part of the process and the ecosystem that is media at the start of the 21st century.

Significantly, though, I’m learning through this experience that along with the empowerment comes some complicated responsibilities to negotiate. My blog host is in Hong Kong. My designer in Wisconsin. The software from somewhere in the cloud. Much of what is going on with my blog right now is out of my control.

Because I host it myself, you’d think I would have that control. I have a tech team I can draw on; you’d think I could direct them. For a number of reasons, I cannot. I’ve thought, then, that maybe I should take this opportunity to move to a hosted blog option. After all, there’s power in numbers.

danah boyd tells a Google horror story that puts the kibosh to that:

Earlier this week, Bob received a notice that there was a spam problem in his Orkut community. The message was in English and it looked legitimate and so he clicked on it. He didn’t realize that he’d fallen into a phisher’s net until it was too late. His account was hijacked for god-knows-what-purposes until his account was blocked and deleted. He contacted Google’s customer service and their response basically boiled down to “that sucks, we can’t restore anything, sign up for a new account.” Boom! No more email, no more calendar, no more Orkut, no more gChat history, no more Blogger, no more anything connected to his Google account.

::gasp:: My heart threatens to attack my throat at the mere idea of losing four years worth of email. ::shudder:: Or what if this blog disappeared? Like, OMG. {insert horror film music here}

Bob’s story has a happy ending, because Bob is well connected. But what if he were me? I’m not well-connected so I’d have no protection.

The bottom line is: please bear with me. I hope to have comments back soon!

Thursday, February 07, 2008

Recovery takes time

Ok… So at 4:30 a.m. on Wednesday morning Network Solutions deleted my database. That was all well and good. They notified me last week that they would and I had moved my site to ICDSoft.

There was just one problem. Even though I had moved the site, the configuration file was not updated so I was still pointing to the database at the old host.

Nightmare!

It took until tonight to get the site restored. To December 27, 2007. From there forward it will be one post at a time. It’s going to be a long weekend.

I had a later backup but I’ve lost it. Long story. Have I mentioned that I always learn lessons the hard way?

A note from a NY friend

"Do I need to remind you that I have a huge Internet following.” --------Well you did. We miss you!

Saturday, February 02, 2008

Tiny houses

You may recall that we have my nephew, TJ, living with us. Our house is small by American standards (1,450 square feet) but now Doug wants to put a tiny house out in the backyard for TJ…

More here and here. Sorry, Doug. At $43,000 if TJ wants one he will have to buy his own.

Monday, January 07, 2008

Hillary’s earned my vote

I didn’t want her to run. And I haven’t expressed an overt preference for a candidate here before. But if you were to read between the lines, go back and take a look at all that I’ve written, you would find very little criticism of Hillary. From that you might glean that I favor her.

I do. And here’s why.

Iraq

I didn’t call it right on Iraq either. I believed the press consensus on WMD and that Saddam was a real bad guy. And so I bought in.

Very quickly - when Turkey didn’t agree to allow troops to cross its border - I had serious doubts. Still I can forgive those who in good faith voted as they did. To the accusation that she should have known, she had access to all of the information and briefings, I don’t know if that was all the information our hindsight says it was.

But what to do now. Anti-war is a very easy position. Pull out is easier said than done. It’s going to be a dangerous logistical quagmire that will require significant political skill. From here it doesn’t look like we’re nearly so united about how to do that as we like to think polls indicate. So getting out and what to do about Iraq once we are “out” is far from settled.

Then there’s the actual terrorist threat whipped up by Bush (as opposed to the “War on Terror” the man has this country living in paranoid fear of). I favor a police action approach to that fight. But that, too, is so much easier said than done. The impact of all we’ve done so far has been to make the terror situation exponentially worse, so the challenge we face today is that much tougher than the one we missed on September 11, 2001.

What I’ve seen of Hillary in the Senate has demonstrated to me that she has the skills and experience I trust to handle Iraq and the threat posed by al-Qaeda.

Health care

I’d favor a single payer plan that cherry-picks the best features of national health care systems around the globe.

That isn’t going to happen.

The entrenched interests are way too powerful. And, as important, a huge segment of the U.S. population is as opposed to a “government run” or “mandated” health plan as I am in favor of a “universal” and “affordable” health care system. We’re going to have to come to compromise. Hillary’s experience there is unmatched. (And I don’t blame her for the press-fed Republican lampooning. I see it as practice.)

These reasons, pragmatic and pessimistic as they may seem to be, match my age. I do want experience.

It became obvious to me on the morning of the Iowa caucuses, when the photos of Hillary in her crowd and Obama in his made clear to me that, at 53, I am of my generation. If I were 20 years younger I’m guessing I’d be championing the politics of hope. While I prefer Hillary I am as impressed as anyone at the hopeful energy of Obama. In that Iowa speech, where he cast himself in the role of President of the United States, I saw that it fit. If he gets the nomination, I will vote for him.

But as things stand now, come February 5, I will be pulling the lever for Hillary.

Wednesday, December 26, 2007

Off to PA…

After a terrific Christmas with Doug’s family in Athens, GA, we’re off to see mine in PA. Driving! Blogging will be sporadic through to the New Year.