Weblogs

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?

Its been three years with the content now for this place. I started the weblog over on the hosted wordpress and then moved things around a few times. I’ve used Drupal here and then moved back and forward and sideways. I even got this thing working with MovableType but I could never really tolerate it. There is just something big and bloated and difficult combined with a administrative interface that seems strung together with bailing wire, glue, and straw. I could never learn my way around.

Now, I’m sitting on this blog on my own Ubuntu powered Apache2 server. I own the server and it does mail, web, and a few other things. Linux just does these things well. I also run Dovecot and Postfix on it for mail and openvpn for vpn.

After three years of gently writing posts which appear in their chronological order, I’ve learned a few things about blogging:

1. Don’t take it too seriously. Chances of me making it to the top 100 are not even in this universe and if they were I’d deny wanting it. Blogging is important but I don’t want or need to write “clued in” manifestos where I hop the train and ride to awareness. Where each post is adored and commented on and read and linked and relinked and reread. I have had a few posts with comments like my take on Linuxcare and Levanta and its passing. That’s cool! In fact, a number of old friends posted comments to the blogpost and I appreciate you guys taking the time to read my drivel.
2. Blogging is habit-forming. I blog because I must. I feel the pressure raise and then its the five pound chicken/ten pound egg thing. I get constipated with words left unsaid, thoughts unexplicated, ideas lingering. I must blog.
3. Blogging is not fun sometimes. I get bored with it and want a different thing. Sometimes, I want to stop; but then I get that full feeling and I know its not fun and I have this habit I must satisfy.
4. Finally, blogging is just blogging. I’ve learned that its not some social fabric for me and its not raising some kind of consciousness that others can link to. No, its me being a part of a larger universal thing; but it is just me and I may fit and I may not. Its still blogging and I get chewy goodness from it but I want nothing more from it than what it gives me.

Someone asked me at work whether they should start writing weblogs. It took me a moment and I just stared at them and asked, “why would you want to do that?” If you cannot answer, then you should not be doing it. So embrace the years, watch the posts roll by but they are just that. I gather, capture, wonder, post. Will I ever tire of the never-ending dates and times arranged by this software? Probably not. Wordpress seems to get generally better as time goes by for me. Themes get nicer and widgets dress it up.

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.

It seems we have a plethora of power management tools; yet judging by the Ubuntuforums, none of them seem to really do what we all want. By default one gets acpi-support, gnome-power-manager, acpid. All of these live in some unholy trinity on a laptop I would gather. Yet it seems that Gutsy has problems with most portable systems with waking up. Not suspending. Suspending here works really good. My T40 and T43 suspend each and every time. Its the waking up part.

So, I am always interested in finding new things. Enter this debian package called pm-utils. Of course, I have to give it a go. With this package, you depend on HAL to do the right thing and I gather that g-p-m and acpi don’t really like each other too much either. So, I removed acpi-support with all those strange scripts and decided to give it a go. So far, the suspends and wakeups seem okay but the laptop does not wake up when the lid is re-opened. You have to plonk the power button. I bet I can write a hook or something to make it do that.

But here is the thing in a nutshell… Power management has just got to work on portable systems. People want to use Linux on laptops. Its nice on laptops overall; but this whole thing about acpi, suspending, resuming, hibernating, and then troubleshooting things is a bit much.

I’m gonna give pm-utils a try and also figure out what it does with lid suspends and opens. Perhaps a simple little scriptlet or hook will take care of it. If not, I’m sure that another package will make its way out or I’ll just live with a solution which works some percentage of the time.

Other News Fit to Blog…

I just noticed that Technorati got a facelift. I think I’ve ventured beyond what it provides or perhaps I’ve simplified. When I first look at it, it seems that the “blog monster” has been released and there is a glut of information on the pages and it seems dressed up in windows and borders and pretty things. My question is more basic. Is it still relevant? Do we need enterprising startup services and institutions around blogging? Is blogging a social institution comprised of millions and millions of “hubs” of editing in some strange order?

Sociology would say that our institutions arise to meet needs. But why? Why do they? What is it about blogging that we believe needs an institution? My take is that blogging extends and enhances and unpacks my terribly cluttered mind sometimes. Facts, lies, half truths, even some evil can come out. But are we held to a higher order? I doubt it. I also don’t really know anymore what Technorati’s core value is. The site is confusing and I don’t get what its trying to tell me. But, I have to give full disclosure. I am a terrible judge of websites for the most part. I don’t know what works and why with a website. My judgements are on whether it does some to me or for me. Unfortunately, technorati does neither. I think perhaps they should take the word of the bard and “simplify”. Make it easier to find the information and remove the clutter.

In the end I’d ask what its core value is and what it intends on delivering. What are bloggers wanting their service providers to do these days? Search and report? Not sure. I don’t write for those reasons. I gave up the idea of getting reasonable links to and from awhile ago. I figure if someone types in a URL the wrong way and ends up here, they may read yet another blog ™ and then travel on. There are better bloggers to read out there like Doc and others. I’m just a weed that kicks up in the wind or a piece of flotsam that may travel a literary tidal pool. But I ain’t in search of readership or linkership. Not anymore. Its the mere act of doing it.

Its also why I could never maintain multiple weblogs each with its own little cast of characters; yet I applaud those like Dan York that seem able to. I have enough silliness and pedantry for just one and sometimes this one suffers and I can feel it boiling it up inside me. Then it comes doodling out with chicken scratches on virtual papers. I say congrats to Dan because he is prolific and can maintain it. To Technorati, I say sorry. I know you are trying to tell me something; but I don’t know what it is any longer. Perhaps its my fault.

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Well, things have been tied to a project here on this real estate for awhile.  Now, things have quieted down with that work so I decided to just put back Wordpress 2.3 here and bask in its glory.  I’m running the Cutline theme.

A lot has been going on at work.  Joyfully, I got a year extension which means they’re stuck with me for another 12 months or so :).  That’s a good thing for everyone and the family unit here really likes it.  No one likes it more than me though.  This job triggers a thing in me.  Its like the right thing, right time.  I don’t quite understand why I had to make so many payment to the wrong things to find this.  Its not around Linux and open source too much; but I do get to talk Linux with our data center back in the mid-west on occasion.  We use a lot of Linux boxen to manage things.

So, this blog has been only updated when I felt like it and I lost my wordpress.com domain because I tired of it.  Seems these things have some kind of “half life” and I feel the urge to move.  I still have not moved this here server from Debian Etch though and that’s a good thing.  I don’t have a lot of time to play with Linux this or that these days though.  Work requires this other OS.  Truth be told, I like the mix and combinations the way they are now. So sue me.  Call me less than fanatical.  Never was fanatical expect when it came to the best of operating systems:

 OS/2 Baby!

Then I was.  I did bad things to Windows 95 boxes at a CompUSA one time. Sabotage to its delicate files.  Shame.

Those days thankfully ended and now computers and OS’es are mere tools that make me productive or slow me down.  Hint: if they slow me down, I ain’t got much in the way of patience.

So here I left and now I write.  I write and will write whether its here or somewhere else.  I got the craze and have had it.  If you want to know the ultimate truth and reality; hang on.  There ain’t none.  If you expect a dose of penultimate open source bigotry, look elsewhere.  I went beyond that at the last clueless job I had.  Back at _that_ startup that did that.  Now I don’t do startups. Or spindowns.  Its me, the work, the play.  The pay.

See ya!  Remember blogging is good for you even if you don’t match up with the grand citizens that can take you to new political, social, and ideological realities.  Write because its right.  Or because its wrong.

A few changes have come about. This blog has come alive again but not at wordpress.com. I decided I wanted to own the blogging presences here and there. This blog runs the open source wordpress.org stuff on my hosting provider. I’ll be updating this site as I go or perhaps less. I have two presences it appears now. The other place is my home running Drupal. We’ll see if I can maintain two weblogs…

Please tag along and watch. Its bound to be an interesting trip.

After some degree of healthy analysis and a lot of time spent setting up Drupal, understanding its complexity, trying to formulate what I wanted my pages to look like; I decided that all I really wanted was a blogging platform and not a knowledge extension thing. I already have a blogging thing and I can only do one.

So this one stays and that one is masked for now. I figure I have time to blog to a single place on a variety of topics and I don’t have time to blog various things to various places. Kudos to those that can. For me, this place is the place and it gives me the quickest and least painful entry point.

I also remembered why I decided not to host my own webserver. Its work and effort and you feel responsible and you worry. I like the idea of letting the wordpress.com team worry about some of those things and let me just worry whether my blog is posted to with its usual clarity and information (or lack thereof)…