Weblogs

Congrats to the WordPress team for making such great bits and bytes of open source software and providing the newest kid on the block WordPress 2.9. I appreciate the tender, loving care that you spend with this stuff folks. Its been my pleasure to donate on occasion and run your software for more than a few major and minor releases. Your track recover of addressing issues, providing great plugins and widgets, and supporting the platform is commendable.

My Ubuntu and me both thank you!

Its Sunday so its tiem to try a new application on Ubuntu. Today is my first test of using QTM as a desktop blogging client. I normally just use scribefire for this type of thing since its handy dandy but you need to have choices. QTM is a nice and easy client which stays out of the way most of the time and it installs on ubuntu by simply adding a PPA to your /etc/apt/sources.list and then doing an update and install of the application.

I plan on using this on a few ubuntu systems I deal with on a daily basis so we’ll see how things go.

I’ve wondered this a few times and actually tried to maintain two blogs for awhile. I had a wordpress.com blog and had a drupal blog and found out that even though sometimes I felt constipated and needing to post, two blogs defeated me. People like Dan York can divide up their online persona’s into distinct categories. They seem able to take an online presence and divide it into groups of things and maintain a quality and quantity of posting. I sometimes think even one blog suffers with my level of quality of posting. Quantity is something I ain’t ashamed of because I can write drivel with the best of them. Quality, sometimes I feel I work at and a few folks have told me they found the anthropology category interesting on this here blog engine. Others have said that the linux category mildly excited them. Well, that’s good.

I’m sorry to say though that I don’t write for any of them; yet if they find value good! I stopped writing this blog for others after I ran out of links. You know what that’s like right? You are pumping the 1000th blogpost out and suddenly you have linkosis. Links don’t come and you search. You are frantic. You need to reach the authority level on the Big T. You need to see your link in’s and out’s higher and higher. But there is that wall like the marathoners hit.

Well, I hit that wall some years ago and decided that this here blog was really not for anyone else. Sorry if you read this and thought I wrote all this for some altruistic and world healing thing. I don’t. I write it because I can. If you enjoy it, good. But don’t expect some quality of work or quantity of lines here. This is my property, my damned Ubuntu.

I’ve been tempted a few times to write a more technical weblog actually; to gather my so many years of experience doing technology from start-ups to companies like the GAP and Visa. Offer some great reality for everyone. Truth is, there ain’t no truth. Reality is, there ain’t none of that either. Everything you see here is what you see here. Nothing more and nothing less.

I can barely write this weblog and I admire those that can pump out the words like they’re using some secret sauce that makes words and sentences boil out. Then they can divide up their thoughts into logical frameworks and send them off into the ether to the places they belong. If I had two weblogs, I would probably not write to either of them. Its all a pretense for the most part and as Kurt Vonnegut, Jr once remarked,

be careful what you pretend to be because you are what you pretend to be

I must be careful with my pretend life

Rarely do I blog about blogging; but I have to mention the theme that this blog operates off of and say a word of thanks. I’ve found the Tarski theme to be a very nice wordpress world to live in. Thanks to everyone at wordpress as well. I’ve been maintaining this sordid self exploration and peurile engagement for some years now. This is the best I’ve seen my dusty travels presented yet.

Thanks to Ben at Tarskitheme for the nice and versatile theme. I love the flexibility and looks.

I always like the Technorati “State” Reports but they always provoke more questions than answers about this beloved, perhaps dys-functional and upside down media we use. I read over the Why and How and Where and How Much posts with some interest. But I have more basic questions than the big ones. The why question I have is more basic than:

Why have blogs become a significant part of the media landscape so
quickly? Just what is it that makes the medium of blogging so
compelling? What are bloggers blogging about and why?

From Day 2: The What and Why of Blogging

No, I understand the Big Why questions and why they’re important. But the why question I have both transcends and is more basic. Why blog at all? What is it that draws people to the blog as a media of discovery, definition, deliberation, and perhaps even creation? I think we are all anthropologists of a sort on a mission of discovery and we perhaps do the blogging as Technorati says to present personal and professional ideologies. But why? I think its just as personal as though Mojave Desert prehistoric bloggers so long ago told us mysterious bits and pieces.

Imagine a blog-ologist digging up the remains of the blogosphere some years ahead. She turns to her robotic companion and begins the archeological meandering that makes up so much science.

This blogosphere was rich and textured. It seems to take into account a wide tapestry of human behavior, condition, and social life. People did this and did this often. This sphere of the blog was rich but yet people hammered each other at times and the media loved and hated it. We don’t have enough material culture; but was this sphere of the blog truly full of the same kind of human or did a wide swatch of humans do this blogging? Are there so-called socio-economic indicators of power, wealth at work? What is this whole authority thing and how did it cause stress and evolution of this sphere? Did the sphere ever look fractured or at stress because its social evolution could not keep up with its technical? Was there ever anomie at work?

Soon this future blog-ologist would put down the word-based trowel and rest. I bet if there were one blog she would read with relish and desire and wanting more; it would be Doc’s. I sure would want Doc’s blog encapsulated so I could read his journey. There is wheat and there is chaff. Blogs come and go. People update or not. The deeper why questions remain. But the blog-ologist would want to know. What were those social, economic, technological, and personal things? What caused the sphere to fragment and join again and get more complex? Is it the answers that Technorati presents or are the questions deeper and the report, while it provides a wealth of statistical, personal, and other information, cannot really reach the fabric.

Who knows?

This is my 500th post to this weblog. I’ve been at this for about 3 years now and often I have managed a blog post a day but when work kicks up a bit or things change, I seem to go down to a few a week. The weblog has always been a personal set of feelings even though I like blogging about Linux and open source, science, technology. Its meant to be nothing more or less than a personal reflection.  I leave the big pronouncements up to the top 100 because they are more worthy and have weightier things to tell us all than me with my extremely personal “news, views, and subterfuge”.

I’ve actually been blogging for longer but those other blog posts are lost in the time past. I still have an Advogato presence and I read it every so often to remind myself that this blog really has not evolved that far.

For about 6 years total and 3 years with this content, I’ve been catching various and unusual flights of fancy, bits of realism, science, technology, fantasy.  Most or all emanating from my own curious grasp on life and reality. I’ve reached the decision point that there really is no reality and that’s okay. We just need the concept because without it, the universe is too big and honking. We also need to believe in a thing which we can define. The universe is beyond definition; but then again so are our feelings.

I’ll probably carry on blogging even though I believe that the actual reason we all blog has shifted subtly from empowering social institutions that seemed to spring up to help us catalog, link, and manage. Sites like Technorati seem to have a place. But I’d openly question what we use them for?  We know we need to have special institutions that help us mark our way through the kazillion or so weblogs and find that signal in the noise.

I’d openly admit to being part of the noise. My signal ratio is low and I cannot help it. Perhaps one day, this blog will become some other social fabric; but I’ll always remember what RWR told me more than a few times:

“Remember where you are and what you are doing”

I’m trying RWR. So much has changed that marking that reality is difficult at times. But you were always there for me then.  Now I know where I need to be when I am there and I have an idea these days what I should do. This weblog is not an anchor or a social statement. Its a mile marker and a directional beacon for me.

Due to the number of issues I’ve seen reported recently from Ian and others, I’ve decided to move this weblog off wordpress.org and on to Drupal. The Drupal community seems to respond much more quickly to smacks, hacks, and attacks. I’m taking the current installation down this evening and things will be back around mid-week or so.

Don’t get me wrong, I think a lot of the wordpress philosophy and approach. Making a change is actually quite easy as long as I go to Drupal 5.7 first.

Thanks to Ian for the pointers on the buglets.

Perhaps I’m late to the party; but congrats to the folks at wordpress.org for the release of the consummate platform for personal prognostication. Nice work! I just downloaded the 2.5 release and rolled it out on my Ubuntu server with no big pains. The 5 minute install and upgrade still holds true. I did go and grab a later Barthelme theme which directly supports this release; but things just seem to work.

One other word… Count it as no surprise that I’m so glad to be working where i work these days. I’ve been handed significant new responsibilities and talk is that there will be staff augmentation to full-time roles coming up. My boss has handed me work which will take me into next year by the looks of things. Major new infrastructure and platform projects. Have I said recently that Visa simply rules? Consider it said.

Its been rather light of late in the blogging here.  I’ve been more involved reading than writing and work has become more interesting by degrees.  I made a choice which I think is a wise one to stay where I’m at.  I was tempted to go in a different direction for awhile; but I really like Visa and the work I do there.  It helps to be given a major project which will see me through the rest of this year and until October of next.  The other offer was very challenging and I would have enjoyed it but a few things came long which made me re-consider.

I like the freedom of the job now.  The work freedom is excellent and I like how I touch technology these days but I don’t rush to the data center to reboot some misbehaving server like for a few years before.

Xmas this year was interesting too.  For one of the first times, we lets things go a bit for the kids.  They should be happy with what Santa did this year.  Its another year too just around the bend and I’ve given many things more thought than I ever thought I could.  I think that my present condition is a good one but I have questions about life in general and where I fit.  Perhaps that’s a necessity as one matures.

Anyways, a few things are gonna cool off next few days so I plan on writing a few blogposts around some interesting Ubuntu things and a really bad kernel upgrade if you mount NFS shares.  I also will be getting some new hardware here and there to go install Ubuntu on and I’m excited about that.  I may blog those things after I see how it goes.

I’ll be catching up some stuff tomorrow here and there so expect a post from me in a day or so.