Blogger Update

Another 50 old posts imported, and once again Blogger said "STOP, SPAMMER"!

Sigh.

On the positive side, I believe I have figured out a way to re-insert all my old photos and images into the old posts (which now just have funny boxes where the photos are supposed to be). But I won't do this unless Blogger solves my import problem!

Blogger Roller Coaster, Part II

So yesterday I ran into a problem with Google's Blogger service that resulted in me being unable to import posts from my old blog. I was limited to 50 posts per day, according to some information I found online. This morning I tried it again, and sure enough -- it stopped working at exactly 50 posts.

I'm hoping to hear back from the Google folks with a better solution, but meanwhile, I'll be importing a bit each day, starting with the oldest posts. You can see them in the blog archive section at right...

The Ups and the Downs of Blogger...

Losing the 1,500 or so posts from my old blog is darned annoying. I really don't want to lose them permanently. So I did some research this evening to find out if there was any way to automatically put data into my new blog, despite the fact that Blogger has no "import" feature.

And it turns out that there is way, albeit a highly geekly one. I backed up my old blog every day into a set of XML files. These files can be easily interpreted by software -- and I know how to write programs. And Blogger, bless their pointy little heads, has an "API" -- a way for programs written by geeks like me to interact with a blog. This API allows new posts to be created, and it allows comments to be tacked on -- probably the two most important things I care about. It doesn't handle images, unfortunately. But at least I could recover all that writing!

So I set to work late this afternoon, to write this little program. A couple of hours ago I finished it -- and it works! I uploaded one post, and voila! It appeared, like magic. Then I uploaded 10, and they appeared. Wow! So then I got bold, and uploaded 50 -- and only some of them appeared. Oh, oh. Something screwy going on. Worse, every attempt after that to send more posts failed, though my program got no errors.

This was really weird. I then did what software engineers always do when weird shit happens: I started researching in all the places where someone might complain about this. And sure enough, in a news group dedicated to the Blogger API, I found other users complaining about exactly this problem -- and some explanations from Google. The explanation is that in their never-ending quest to fight spam blogs (an honorable goal that I fully support), they've implemented some stuff to detect automatic posting -- especially high rates of posting to a single blog. They've set a limit of 50 posts per day -- if you go over this, they go into a blocking mode which manifests itself with exactly the symptoms I'm experiencing.

This is a real problem for me, and I've written an email to Google to explain why. In practical terms, this means I can only import 40 or so blog posts a day -- and maybe less if their software counts comments too. This could take me months to import my old blog! I can see why they're doing this, but...their very mechanical approach means that a legitimate use (which importing certainly is!) gets incorrectly tagged as something evil (spamming).

If they don't offer me some sort of solution, I'm afraid I may have to move my blog again, to another provider with a better import or API capability. WordPress is the obvious alternative choice, and I just may end up heading over there.

I sure hope I get a good answer from the folks at Google...

Big Change!

You may have noticed that the blog looks much different!

Due to major technical difficulties, I have switched from using Pebble (open source blog software) on my own server to using Blogger (free software and hosting) from Google.

So far I have not figured out any way to move all my old posts (or photos) from the old blog to the new one -- so for now, at least, I'm simply starting over...

Web Site of the Day

Part of my daily reading routine is a stop at Cute Overload to see what new delights have been posted. Every day, several new photos, audio clips, or video clips of animals are posted. “Cute Overload” is a very apt name for this site, and if you love animals, you’ll find it irresistible…

Delightful Movie

Last night, with the excellent company of my wife and our good friend Jim Barnick, we watched the Disney/Pixar animated movie “Cars”. I haven’t enjoyed a movie so much in years.

Though the plot was trite and completely predictable, the characters (all cars!) were wonderfully done, the dialog sweet, cute, and very funny. While there was dialog that most likely would only be understood by adults, there was plenty of appeal for kids. The dialog was modern, but the style — good, squeaky-clean, pure fun — was classic Walt Disney. And the animation was simply spectacular, from front to back. A couple of particular sequences stood out for me: splashing water, and a nighttime scene of blinking neon lights on a city street — but that’s like saying that a couple of Belgian chocolates stood out in a world championship chocolate contest. The whole thing was delectable!

My last visit to a movie theater must be at least five years ago, probably more like ten. That whole experience was awful, completely independently of the movie itself — jam-packed with noisy, rude people, smelling of rancid popcorn, seats covered with who-knows-what (and who wants to know, really?) … and you pay handsomely for this experience. By contrast, our very modest “home theater” has only the audience we want, the excellent company of our friends, cats, and dogs, and … the pause button. Modern electronic miracles give us THX audio and a giant high-quality screen. DVDs (and NetFlix!) give us all the content we could ever want. I cannot understand how the movie theaters stay in business!

Kevlar Shoelaces

About seven months ago, I posted about the non-breaking Kevlar shoelaces I’d discovered. Well, today I finally had to replace my first pair of them. They lasted seven months, instead of the few weeks (or even just a few days!) that I’d get out of the ordinary types of shoelaces. I have no complaints about them at all, and they were worth every penny!

Term of the Day

applied troglodytics

Used in a WSJ piece by Michael Malone, describing the reaction of the music industry to Napster and the culture of free music downloads.

A Google search for the term reveals only one other use, which appears to be completely unrelated. So I think it’s safe to credit Mr. Malone with the creation of this delicious term…

Oh My

Doomed, I tell you, we're all DOOMED!

Watch this.

Then (if you're American) weep for your country.

Anti-Icky-Poo

We just ordered some of this, on the recommendation of an animal trainer who says it works great. If I’d ever stumbled across it before, I’d have ordered it just because of the name!

From their web site:

Whether you spell it with a hyphen or without, its still the absolute best odor eliminator on the market. There are probably more animal behaviorists and veterinarians recommending Anti-Icky-Poo than any other odor eliminator available today.

Whether you have a cat urine odor, a dog urine odor, a human urine odor or any other organic odor, AIP can come to your rescue.

Why wait another day for a solution to your odor problems. Even skunk odor, musk or how about lady bug odors. We had a client call with a problem of thousands of lady bugs that died underneath her deck. With Anti-Icky-Poo the problem was solved in days.

Once we get it and try it out, we’ll let you know if it worked for us…

Saying Goodbye

How a Marine says goodbye.

What could I possibly add to this?

Modern Begging

I’m up in San Francisco at the moment for some business meetings. I stayed at a hotel on Geary Street last night, near the train station at Market and Powell streets. Early this morning I walked down from the hotel to the train station to catch a ride to the office.

Just outside the train station a man in a business suit approached me. He was clean-cut, carrying a briefcase, and at first glance looked like exactly what he claimed to be — a businessman whose wallet was stolen and who desperately needed fare to either get home or get to work. He asked me for $4.25 to get him to work, which was cheaper.

Call me cynical, but something just didn’t seem right about this scenario. In particular, I had a hard time imagining that any mature professional businessman would ever behave the way this guy was behaving. So I took a closer look and noticed that his hands were quite dirty. Then I looked at the police report he’d been waving to validate his assertion about a stolen wallet — and I saw that it was dated in 2004, and was for a vagrancy offense.

So I asked this fellow to show me what was in his briefcase, and that earned me a dirty look. But unknown to this guy, a cop had walked up behind him, and just then he said “Go ahead, Chucky — show him what you’ve got.” Chucky opened his briefcase, and what was inside isn’t what you’d expect from a businessman. Not quite. There were some filthy clothes all wadded up; a bottle of some cheap booze, half gone; a couple of crumpled black plastic bags; and what looked like $20 or so in coin. Chucky left, indignant; I talked to the cop for a moment. He told me that the beggars were getting more and more inventive with both their stories and their props, and Chucky was a completely typical example of this. Chucky has been in this businessman-in-distress role for several months, and apparently it was working fairly well for him. His big error, according to the cop, is it ran his routine at the same train station day after day, so all the commuters using that station knew all about Chucky.

There are no Chuckies in Jamul that I am aware of…

Adding Fractions

A teacher’s union president can’t add simple fractions (from the New York Daily News):

The radio audience was live and the question for teachers union president Randi Weingarten involved sixth-grade math: “What’s 1/3rd plus 1/4th?"

Weingarten, however, is a not a sixth-grader or a math teacher. She’s a lawyer and a union boss who once taught high school social studies - and no one told her there was going to be a quiz.

"I would actually have to do it on paper,” she said when asked yesterday to complete the math problem on WNYC’s “Brian Lehrer Show” where she was a guest.

Mike Pesca, who was filling in for Lehrer, introduced the show’s education topic by saying American college grads can’t do basic math while high school grads in Canada and middle-schoolers in India have no trouble.

After Weingarten stumbled, another guest quickly produced the correct answer: 7/12ths, leaving Weingarten to explain herself.

I’m not surprised by this in the slightest, but it’s still very disappointing. As the story goes on to report, many people would not only be unsurprised, they’d be uncritical.

Not me.

This very American attitude about education makes me fear for our country’s future. Adding fractions is a terrific example of a very basic mathematics skill. One could also find many examples of basic science and technology skills where sampling a broad population — including professionals and college graduates — would reveal similar general ignorance amongst Americans. In many parts of the world, such a result would be almost unimaginable, and … shameful. But not here, for some reason I simply cannot fathom.

I fear that in 10, 20, or 30 years, the pool of talent that drives our math, science, and technology will have shifted so that it lies largely outside the U.S. — and that we will suffer the severe economic consequences (and derived political consequences) of that shift.

I’d sure like to be wrong on this one, but I don’t think I am…

Lamestream Lament

A piece of free advice: whenever you see an article with the byline James Q. Wilson, read it.

In yesterday’s OpinionJournal, Mr. Wilson has a piece analyzing the effects of the press on the Global War on Terror. It is simply excellent. Go read the whole thing! The conclusion:

Most of what I have said here is common knowledge. But it is common knowledge about a new period in American journalistic history. Once, powerful press owners dictated what their papers would print, sometimes irresponsibly. But that era of partisan and circulation-building distortions was not replaced by a commitment to objective journalism; it was replaced by a deep suspicion of the American government. That suspicion, fueled in part by the Vietnam and Watergate controversies, means that the government, especially if it is a conservative one, is surrounded by journalists who doubt almost all it says. One obvious result is that since World War II there have been few reports of military heroes; indeed, there have been scarcely any reports of military victories.

This change in the media is not a transitory one that will give way to a return to the support of our military when it fights. Journalism, like so much scholarship, now dwells in a postmodern age in which truth is hard to find and statements merely serve someone’s interests.

The mainstream media’s adversarial stance, both here and abroad, means that whenever a foreign enemy challenges us, he will know that his objective will be to win the battle not on some faraway bit of land but among the people who determine what we read and watch. We won the Second World War in Europe and Japan, but we lost in Vietnam and are in danger of losing in Iraq and Lebanon in the newspapers, magazines and television programs we enjoy.

Mr. Wilson doesn’t propose any solutions. Personally, I think the marketplace is in the process of supplying them right now: on the whole, the lamestream media is failing as a business — with the notable exceptions of the “fair and balanced” Fox news, right-leaning DrudgeReport, and a number of specific centrist-to-conservative shows (think Rush Limbaugh, Michael Savage, Tammy Bruce, Roger Hedgecock, etc.). Lamestream left-leaning leaders the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times are either going to change their content or die; they are publicly and visibly in trouble right now. In my local San Diego, just this week the Copley management announced they were selling off all their newspapers except the flagship Union-Tribune (so far left that they have called Nancy Pelosi “too conservative"!) — because they want to concentrate on saving it. This is the sort of corporate behavior that precedes large change.

But if you’d like more immediate change, try my solution: just don’t listen to, or read, the lamestream media. Go cold turkey. Get your news and commentary from well-chosen blogs, second-tier news sources, alternative news sources, etc. Start with the blogs (you won’t go wrong with the list at right); they will point you to new and interesting sources of information and perspective every day…

Out of Control

This morning I was installing a new outlet strip I just purchased, and I noticed the largish “warning label” attached to its cord. It’s made from some rugged plastic material, and prominently on it is “DO NOT REMOVE THIS TAG”. Of course I removed it immediately!

But then the ponder set in. Does anyone actually read these tags? More to the point, does anyone who does read these tags learn anything useful? Is there anyone who can read that doesn’t already know everything on the tag?

This particular tag contains 22 separate directives or warnings, plus the lovely headline: “DANGER! ELECTRICAL CORDS CAN BE HAZARDOUS”. Some of them actually make sense (e.g., “DO NOT USE WHEN WET") — but really, is there even a single person out there who (a) would read this profundity, and (b) who didn’t already know that electricity and water are a bad combination? It doesn’t seem very likely to me. Some of them are just nuts (e.g., “Keep Children and Pets Away From Cord"). We have three dogs and eight cats — we’re supposed keep them away from all the electrical cords?

Of course what’s really driving these dumb labels are lawsuits. I’m sure that’s not news to any of you. Nor am I the first to observe the general uselessness of the warning labels, or even that their ubiquity is undermining whatever trivial benefit they ever had. If we actually read all the warning labels and signs on the way into the grocery store, we’d never have time to do any shopping — not that we could buy anything if we paid attention to the warnings!

But these warning labels… They seem to me to be warning us of something completely different than their intent — they’re warning us that our society’s headlong rush away from any notion of personal responsibility or accountability is just plain out of control. This warning label tells me not to drive over the cord. By implication, if they hadn’t told me that, and I was stupid enough to drive over the cord and start a fire, then it’s not my responsibility for having been an idiot. The implication is that it’s the manufacturer’s responsbility for not having warned me. That’s the same general pattern — refusing to take personal responsbility; finding others to blame — as Mark Foley blaming his outrageous behavior on an old priest and alcohol, or John Kerry finding 55 ways to not apologize to the troops he insulted.

In my 50-odd years on the planet, this is one of the more profound changes visible to me in our society. I can’t help but wonder (and worry about) where this takes us. It seems but a small step to a society where a traffic accident caused by speeding and reckless driving gets blamed on the car manufacturer for not having prevented it. Follow that chain of thoughts for a moment… Do you like the result? I don’t.

Anybody have any brilliant ideas how we could possibly reverse course on this phenomenon?

Aussie Poster Girl

Where is the American equivalent?

Just listen.

This video is topping the charts in Australia.

She can be my poster girl anytime at all...

Bumper Sticker

On a car absolutely plastered with “Kerry/Edwards” stickers:

If you want to see hate, disagree with a liberal.

What is this? Did some conservative spot the car, and think it needed a new sticker? Or is this liberal so blinded by his ideology that he actually thought that was a positive statement about liberals?

I don’t know the answer to that.

But I want one of those bumper stickers!

Non-Breaking Shoelaces

For years I’ve be plagued with a stupid problem: I break the shoelaces on my hiking boots (which is basically the only kind of shoe I wear outdoors) with distressing regularity. Typically they last just two or three days before the first break occurs, and then I live with knotted repairs for weeks until I remember to buy a new pair. The most recent pair I replaced had six knots in them — and they’d been on my shoes for less than a week.

A couple of weeks ago, I got good and fed up with this situation. I’m tired of being a one-man subsidy for the shoelace industry! So I looked all over the web, trying to find shoelaces with a steel-cable core, figuring that they would stand up to my abuse. I failed in that effort, but I found something even better: Kevlar shoelaces, available from Gempler’s. I’ve had them now for a week, and I am delighted to report that they are so strong that I cannot even purposefully break them — much less accidentally.

I bought three pairs, but I suspect it’s going to be a long while before I need the second…

Scary Referrals

My blog, like all blogs I know, keeps track of “referrals” — the web pages with links to my blog that someone clicked on to visit my blog. The vast majority of these referrals to my blog come from search engines, and sometimes they’re quite funny or surprising.

But check out this referral I got about two hours ago:

Google referral: “structural evaluation” collies “naked women” gerbils “oil price"

WTF?

What kind of a mind would ask this question? And what is the question, anyway?

Sometimes I think it might be better not to know something. This just might be one of those times…

BOLO

Just got word from my mother that they don’t know where my father is. He was supposed to travel from Philadelphia to Halifax, Nova Scotia today (through Boston). My brother dropped him off at the airport, and they haven’t heard from him since. What they have heard is that both segments of his flight have been canceled.

So…

If you happen to see a balding botanist wandering around with a confused look on his face, drop me a line, would ya? He could be anywhere by now — he’s hard of hearing, and he could easily have wandered somehwere he shouldn’t have. Like, say, a shipping crate bound for Botswana, or a hotel in the wrong part of Philadelphia…

Sigh…

Update:

The wandering botanist has been spotted in Boston. Apparently the airline managed to get him that far, and then put him up in a hotel for the night. For reasons known only to himself (and possibly not even that), he didn’t bother to call either my mother or the people who were supposed to meet him in Halifax.

Then, to top it off, he discovered that he can’t get into Canada these days with just his good looks — he needs a passport or a birth certificate. Which, of course, he doesn’t have with him in Boston. So…with a bit of scrambling and telephone help, I talked my mom through scanning his birth certificate to a file, emailing it to me, and then I faxed it to the airport. Sheesh!

I think my dad’s in big, big trouble when he gets home. And maybe when he gets to Halifax, too — worried people on both ends are ready to strangle him. Perhaps he should consider moving to somewhere out of the way … Madagascar comes to mind…

Update 2:

My dad finally made it to Halifax. He’s apparently not happy about the experience. No word on whether he understands just how much he perturbed the equinamity of his family and friends…