Navel Gazing

I just got a Nigerian scam message as a blog comment. End of the Net predicted; Trackback at 11.

It’s a brand-new server! ( See here (original) for details.)

There’s kind of a trend in the weblog world: people turn off comments on older entries to avoid comment spam. It’s probably the right thing to do. Still, I’d hate to miss comments like this: I met Douglas Chandler at Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary in 1952 and later, unfortunately, married his daughter. I’d be interested in further information about the man—who was a thoroughly unsymathetic character. Not to mention the response: To the person who posted a msg on August 23, 2003: I, too, met Douglas Chandler. In my case, it was while riding a train in Germany in the 1970’s. I got to listen to this 80-ish man talk about his (still) extreme right wing political views (ad nauseum), his experiences as the National Geographic’s “representative” in Europe prior to WWII, his experiences as a radio broadcaster in Germany during the war, his being captured, detained, tried as a war criminal (I think) and then imprisoned until being released (he said) by RFK during JFK’s presidency, etc. He was an unrepentant Nazi, to the end. Unfortunately, as a fellow in my 20’s, I was somewhat astonished by this “meeting with history”, and listened to him thoroughly, not fully appreciating the gravity of his crimes. Still, it was an interesting exposure to an obscure part of WWII history. ...

Oh yeah — posts will be seldom for the rest of this week, as I am off traveling on business. Parenthetically, there’s nothing quite so amusing as introducing a tech geek to Fry’s for the first time. Sure, I’m jaded by years of bad Fry’s customer service, but newbies don’t know the horrors that lurk beneath the tech megastore surface.

Hey, new stuff on the blogroll! Well, semi-new stuff, but I felt like noting it. DonkeyRising is demographer’s Ruy Teixeira’s blog about Democratic strategy. It’s a little rah-rah but insightful and informative. The Decembrist is Mark Schmitt’s blog; he was formerly one of Bill Bradley’s senior aides. Solid stuff from a political insider. The American Street is a new group blog with David Neiwert as a contributor. They need to fix their layout but I’ll read Neiwert’s stuff anywhere. ...

As per Phil Ringnalda’s advice — I’m experimenting with rebuilding individual archives when an entry gets a TrackBack ping. If you have trouble pinging me, please let me know about it. Also, you might try setting a longer value for PingTimeout in your mt.cfg file.

I made a couple of changes to improve load times and rebuild times ( thanks, Ginger, and man are you ever right). I’m no longer bothering with “Recent Entries” on the sidebar, cause like anyone ever used those. I also killed most of the sidebar on the category archive pages and replaced it all with a full list of entries in that category. And there’s no full category archive pages anymore, because that didn’t scale very well. ...

Anyone else had weird problems with Kung-Log in the last couple of days? Like… since the new year? And I can’t download a new version because the guy who wrote it is doing a new for-pay version called Ecto, which I would happily buy but it isn’t out yet. Zempt hasn’t been ported to the Mac yet. NetNewsWire is good, but you have to pop up a modal dialog box to edit your extended entries. I am beginning to feel very edgy; I’ve grown addicted to saving drafts and working on posts over time. (Just wait till you see my favorite movies of 2003 post.) I need my fix.

I’m futzing around with ljcrosspost (original), a new plugin that automates crossposting between MT and LiveJournal. If it wipes out all my LJ posts, I will be very sad. … OK, it’s a nice plugin but it doesn’t really make it easy to customize the post title and it doesn’t provide easy access to the permalink — so I can’t easily create links back to the blog side of things. Maybe in a couple of revs. It’s a damned cool idea, though.

From time to time, people ask me why I link to and read right-wing bloggers. The simple answer is “Because I want to see other viewpoints.” However, Tacitus just provided us with a clear example of the kind of integrity and honesty I find deeply valuable. How could I not read a conservative thinker who’s that honest? That’s not an enemy, that’s a fellow human being who happens to disagree with me.