For folks who actually visit my page, when the change takes place it should be pretty transparent -- going to http://www.hill-kleerup.org/blog should bring you in. (Not sure about how "index.html" will apply). What'll be here will likely be ugly and stripped down, but it'll be here.

For feed readers, though, the address of the feeds here is almost certainly going to change . The best I can suggest is visiting my home page itself and looking for the new feed links.

Here's to a new era ...

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Okay, well I misspent my Friday afternoon plowing into WordPress, methodically walking through documentation both centralized and diverse. None of this was helped by my site running like molasses -- which, of course, was the driver to making it all work.

Stacy's observation was that the main problem was with this, my main blog, that the Black Hats were busy hammering away at it, as opposed to the other blogs on the site. That's the most prominent one, and the one whose files are being hardest hit by mindless spambots trying to have their way with me. In other words, my Cunning Plan to slowly convert things over to WP, with ***Dave Does the Blog being next-to-last on the list, was not actually all that good an idea.

*sigh*

However, I wasn't going to start with my main blog first, as my initial dive into WordPress. So I chose an obscure genealogy blog I've never really gotten off the ground, did my install (carefully), played with some of the options, got it to work and play well ... and (eventually) felt ready to let it rock.

So, I have a WP blog now. Woot.

The next step is, based on the problems here, the Big Kahuna, this main DDtB blog. I'm not going to tackle that tonight (it's late, it's Friday, I'm tired, I've had a few glasses of wine -- none of these are good for screwing around with your blog), but I will probably take the plunge tomorrow. 

Which means a few things for you, my myriad loyal readers:

1. Any comments you post (until I say otherwise) will possibly not get transferred over. After I'm done with this post, I'll be working on staging an export of all the content here, etc.
2. This blog may be a bit wonky tomorrow. Which would likely be an improvement on "nearly non-functional" the way it has been the past week or so.
3. Expect, up front, a fairly bare-bones blog page. It's going to take me some time to recreate all the myriad spiffiness that is the current iteration of ***Dave Does the Blog. Especially since I'm pretty clueless viz WordPress templating and the like.

And, boy, am I already tired of my brain turning "WP" into "WordPerfect." Which, I suppose, dates me pretty badly.

A couple of notes on my implementation.

First off, I'm going to go ahead and install parallel installs of WP for each of the blogs I'm bringing over. That's mitigated a bit by the fact I'm not doing it all at once -- indeed, that's a feature, not a bug. I'm ready to deal with the annoyance of multiple configurations for the time being.

Second, I think I've skinned the "old links" issue. The best info going out there on MT-to-WP stuff remains this WP Codex article, even though it's aging and is flagged as possibly obsolete. It contains (along with pointers to a lot of other info) a number of different ways to maintain your old MT links after the import to WP. That's been my biggest bugbear to worry over. The ultimate solution for me -- I believe -- is found in the section labelled "Forcing Wordpress to Use the Movable Type Permalink Structure." In other words, if MT called something A, and you can get WP to call it A, then all those links will work. 

That turns out to be a lot more complicated than it sounds -- and for DDtB, it's not helped by the fact that up until MT allowed (natively) for title-based filenames, I stuck with the numeric EntryID filenames. Nor by the fact that MT uses underscores between words in title-based filenames, while WP uses dashes. Nor that MT uses (generally) a shorter filename ...

Bottom line is, I won't be able to lock in all of the old links. But I can lock in a lot of them, especially the newer ones (past few years), using the SQL cheats in that Codex (from what I've been able to experiment with), so I'm fairly happy. While there are ways I could have made both nomenclatures worked, they would have been a lot less elegant and a leave a lot more footprints (and require in some cases I keep MT installed).

So, I think I have a handle on the parts that have been worrying me. We'll see how it goes.

A note on WP documentation. Yes, there's a lot of it. But a lot of it is obsolete over the various updates (though, to be fair, it's often flagged as such). And a lot of it really doesn't clearly explain stuff. It's akin to reading archetype guides at the City of Heroes forum -- there's a hell of a lot of good info there, and a lot more than if you only depended on the company to crank out Official Stuff -- but sometimes there's a competition as to whether you can actually find the pony in that pile of docs.

It's still better, though, that what MT has to offer. The current MT documentation, for 4.x, is even worse than the scattershot 3.x stuff. I was trying to cobble together a date format, and it took forever to track down the parameters to use -- and I still ended up going to the 3.x docs to find out how to produce an AM/PM marker.  

WP doesn't seem to support a category hierarchy -- which is probably okay, but will take some cogitation.

The install creates an "admin" userid. It took me a bit to realize that I simply need to create a "Dave" userid with admin rights to not have to worry about having to log in and out of different IDs.

While DDtB and Blog of Heroes and Doing Write and Boulder Dude all use title-based filenames, Margie's Kitchen uses EntryID numeric-based ones. Most of the concern there, though, is with outside links, and I've already given up worrying about those, so I'll probably convert her and not worry about it.

WIST continues to loom a bit large on how to make it work, given my use of categories and subcategories (which WP seems a bit weak on). But if the driver to health for my overall site is getting DDtB off onto something less vulnerable, I'll have time to work on that.

I'm aiming at installing my WP stuff in the directory below each actual blog's directory, to avoid cluttering it up. That means I need to use the info in this codex to have WP and the blog root be different things (the doc has a few obsolete passages in it, but nothing that can't be worked around on the fly).

Rather than relying on the built-in MT export routine, I created an index template in MT that included much the same info. The main advantage is that it finesses all the "Convert Breaks" stuff, which I've been inconsistent on over the years. That makes it a lot easier for WP t digest. I also take the output file and covert it (through my text editor) to UTF-8, which is what WP uses.

And here we go.

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And in this corner, as a contender for replacing Movable Type here, is WordPress, probably the most popular blogging platform around. I'm interested in hosting my blog myself, for a variety of paranoid reasons, so any sort of hosted blog service (including WordPress's own) is out.

So somethings about WordPress.

First, one of the standard criticisms (or advantages, depending on who you talk to) of WP is that it's all dynamically published -- there are no static pages of generated HTML, just pages pulled out of the database on the fly. MT took the other approach, initially. Static pages take longer to save, take up much more disk space, and may require rebuilding if you change elements of the blog, but are fast to load with minimum effort.

Enough folks get by with dynamic pages I'm not too worried.

Another issue with WP is the multi-blog situation. I currently have four pretty active blogs here (including BD's and WIST), three more with limited activity, and two that are old experiments. So make it seven blogs I want to keep up. 

WP appears, out of the box, to support a single blog. The implication is that I'd have to install and support a separate WP installation for each of my blogs.

Now, that's not necessarily just a bad thing. Yes, it means that any maintenance I have to do has to be done seven times. If there's a plug-in I want universally, I would have to install it on each blog. And there's the extra disk space of multiple installations.  Etc. Annoying.

On the other hand, it does mean that each blog can be maintained separately, and if I do an upgrade on blog X, or try out a plug-in there, or want a plug-in that's incompatible with a plug-in I use on blog Y, I can do that. It's more work, but it's work that's more easily done in smaller, more manageable chunks.

It's not even necessarily a forced case. There's a couple of ways to handle multi-blog WP I've found with just a bit of poking. WordPressMU is designed for just that (though with the idea of hosting multiple people's blogs rather than multiple blogs for a person).  Ryan McDonnell seems to have figured out a way to do it on his own, assuming you have command-line access to your host. There appears to be a fair amount of discussion on the general topic, and in fact the official WP doc that starts off with saying you need a separate install for each blog points to the above and several other fancy ways of handling it.

So, if I decide that single-blog set-up is a non-starter, there are ways to skin that cat. I'm honestly not sure if it's that big a deal.

• This Smackdown from June of last year compares MT to WP, which is an interesting way of getting a sense of the two of them and what would change for me going from one to the other.
• Someone who changed and some plug-ins they used.
• Another comparison, favoring WP. I'll confess I'm a bit daunted about shifting from templating info with HTML and specialized MT tags to PHP. I've not had any great desire to learn PHP, but it seems I'll likely end up learning a little of it.
• A good series on one person's conversion from MT to WP.
• This article compares in favor of MT. Honestly, though, the cool stuff touted for MT out of the box is, in general, mostly stuff I'm not interested in (esp. since I do all of my posting from outside of the actual client, via Linear). The same is true for the infamous "Yeah, upgrade ... to MT" post.

Doyce notes that our host offers WP up in a very easy Fantastico package. Which means it's nearly painless to try it out. Hmmmmm ...

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The Club Gitmo T-shirt - When America Was Safe 

ECONOMIC STIMULUS! President Obama has issued an executive order closing Club Gitmo within a year. So we have adjusted to changing economic times with a new Club Gitmo design. Club Gitmo: When America Was Safe.

New Club Gitmo slogan/logo with diving board and swimming pool (Water & Board) emblazoned on front and back. Available in Institutional Orange only in sizes: S, M, L, XL, XXL, XXXL & XXXXL!

Ha ha ha! Get it? Water and board? Waterboard? Hilarious! Soon to also come with a knife and beach balls design, too!

Even if you believe that Gitmo and harsh interrogation techniques are necessary, and closing the camp is a mistake, cracking wise about a detention camp for terrorists and their treatment there is just plain stupid, tasteless, sophomoric ...

But, then, consider the source.

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So the suggestion has been raised by Stacey (web maven, MT pro, and tech support guru at my web host) that I give up on Movable Type and move over to WordPress. The primary motivator here is that periodically (e.g., over the past few weeks), the spammers and black hats and other miscreants slow me (and the server) to a crawl in their spam attacks on the site. MT, because of the way it uses Perl and CGI scripts and all that jazz (insert technical stuff I have a vague sense about) is particularly vulnerable here. The spam doesn't actually get through, but the system is so swamped fending it off that it chokes off. Non-hilarity ensues.

(I am gratified by the number of emails I've received saying, "Hey, there's something wrong with your system, and I really wanted to comment on this one blog post you have there." Thanks, folks, it's always good to know when you're missed.)

I'll confess that the thought is not new to me.  I know of other folks who have migrated away from MT for their blogging needs (most to WordPress, others to ExpressionEngine or other platforms, more about which anon), while I know of few who have migrated back here. A lot of that was driven by some of MT's missteps in licensing, but others were driven by a more vibrant development community on the WP side of things. Certainly it seems easier to find plug-ins and interfaces to WP blogs than MT blogs, much to my occasional frustration.

There's also a "fresh start" aspect to this that's appealing -- I've been wanting to do a major upgrade to my MT installation and templates for some time, and this would be just taking it a few steps further.

There are a few factors I'll need to consider here. (And I'm doing it in public because, hey, if you can muse about blogging on your own blog, where can you muse about it?) 

First off is the historic factor, i.e., in my 14K posts here, I have a lot of cross-references to other blog posts, and there are likely more than a few links from the outside world to posts I have here, too. I don't want those to stop working -- it's inelegant and rude and a blow to my own ego.

Stacey's suggestion was (if I read it correctly) is very straightforward. Import the existing MT entries. Only the front page (index.html) will resolve as the same. Leave the old MT archives there so that any old/internal links will still remain live (I'd rebuild the templates to clue visitors into the "new" version). Block off the scripts that cause fits when the spammers hit them, and I'm right as rain, right? Folks

It's deceptively simple, though there are a few devils in the details that would need to be resolved. 

1. First off, I do a lot of dynamic publishing in MT -- would I need to turn the MT archives and individual files into static entries? (In other words, what-all gets turned off in the MT installation that might cause problems for folks to visit those older pages?)
2. The current MT archives on my main blog are busted (monthly and category). That's not a big issue, it's just sloppiness I'm leaving behind. 
3. I make a lot of use of internal trackbacks to cross-reference posts (so it's not just links going to previous posts, but trackbacks pointing back). Would need to research this on other platforms, as well as consider what sort of long-term clean-up of old links I might want to make.
4. This needs to be done on multiple blogs. That's just a complexity in the implementation; I don't necessarily need to do everything all at once (though the site remains vulnerable in the meantime).
5. One of the blogs is BD's. We'll need to chat as to whether this is a problem (I'd doubt it, but it will be some new under-the-hood stuff he'd have to learn).
6. Learning curve -- I'd have to learn about WP (or whatever), vs what I know about MT (dating back to primeval versions).
7. Most of my blogs are (aesthetic cruft aside) pretty straightforward. WIST, though, is a whole other beast -- I'm using all sorts of fields in non-standard ways, and displayed in non-standard ways, and I suspect that the page design and implementation of it into another platform, if possible, will be by far the biggest challenge (certainly it was to originally start).
8. Obviously I'd need to swap out or update all the little tools and widgets and Flickr drivers and so forth. That's "just" clean-up.

I'd do this in a gradual effort. I have some small blogs off in the background that I'd probably do first, just to get my feet wet. Then I'd probably do Blog of Heroes, BoulderDude, Dave Does the Blog, then WIST.

Of course, all of this would be a huge time sink (any strategic solution here is, of course as well). I have no grasp as yet of what it would take to actually do this thing, but I suspect a few weeks of intense effort, trailing out into a few months to get all the pieces actually migrated and in place. No time like the present, to be sure, but I'm not sure how many of the other things I'm juggling could be put on hold for this.

The other question (beyond "Should I do this?") is clearly what the target system should be. WordPress seems to be the logical choice, but there are certainly other candidates out there. 

So ... assuming people can actually get comments to open and post here ... what do all you techie blogger types think?

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When was the last time you were in a Borders or Barnes and Noble? I can't remember either.

Actually, I can. I was at the downtown Denver B&N just this lunchtime.

I can't argue that's a fully and perpetually sustainable model, but I like bookstores, and not just indie hole-in-the-wall places (which have their own charms and disadvantages), but the big, soulless chain bookstores -- Borders and B&N. I like browsing through sections I like, much larger than what I can find at Target or Wal*mart, and seeing, much faster than I could browse on Amazon, an array of books that I can peruse. I also like being able to pick up a book, walk to the front of the store, hand them money, and walk out, reading it right then and there. Even though I'm an Amazon Prime customer (free two-day shipping on everything), you can't beat that kind of instant gratification.

Is the selection as good as Amazon? No, but it's often good enough. Are the prices better? Definitely not. But the convenience and serendipity factors are mighty counters to that, for me at least.

Now, I suppose if I were a Kindle user, I could get around the convenience factor (since you can download books wirelessly) -- but I suspect I will be a very later adapter to the e-book model. I don't want to rely on a single device (which can break or be misplaced) to read stuff. I don't want to rely on DRM restriction on what I ostensibly own. I want to be able to loan books to friends. I want to be able to give away books that I'm not reading any more. I want to have different books downstairs, in my briefcase, in the bathroom -- or two or three of them -- and hop to the at any time. I want to browse through the books on my shelves, rediscovering old friends I haven't seen for a while. I want to see gift inscriptions inside of covers.

So, while I do buy the majority of what books I have through Amazon (and there are some mighty advantages to that whole model), I don't see not going to bricks and mortar stores any time soon. They just have too much to offer I can't get elsewhere.

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It always provides a level of cognitive dissonance, as it's just not how I see myself.

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First, we were pondering some sort of big vacation this year -- big deals, something family-oriented, something getaway and fun.

Second, I was working on the endless "Putting Digital Photos on Flickr" project.

Next thing you know ... Margie was booking us a week down at Walt Disney World for a ridiculously low price and staying at a nicer on-resort hotel than in the past. We're heading down there right after Katherine's out of school, as a "birthday present."

We rarely plan anything so quickly -- but clearly we're both ready to go now.

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A call to action from former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich and U.S. Senator Jim DeMint to stop ACLU supported bill 

Democrats vote to discriminate against Christians and people of faith 

Oh, don't be silly, guys. DeMint's a jerk, but Gingrich is just playing political games here. Note, by the way, the clever "hot button" dropping of the ACLU's name.

Dear Dave,

Nice to be addressed so familiarly. (Not limited to Right-wing political mailings, of course.)

President Obama's stimulus bill discriminates against Christians and people of faith. The stimulus bans universities and colleges from using funds to renovate buildings where students engage in "religious worship."

U.S. Senator Jim DeMint made the following statement after Democrats voted 43-54 against his amendment to strike from the economic stimulus bill language that discriminates against people of faith. Senator DeMint's amendment would have eliminated a provision that bans any university or college receiving restoration funds, from allowing "sectarian instruction" or "religious worship" within the facility. This would in effect bar use of campus buildings for groups like Fellowship of Christian Athletes, Campus Crusade for Christ, Catholic Student Ministries, Hillel and other religious organizations.

Wow, that sounds pretty dire? Is it true? (No, it isn't. See below.)

"This is a direct attack on students of faith, and I'm outraged Democrats are using an economic stimulus bill to promote discrimination," said Sen. DeMint. "Democrats should be ashamed of themselves for siding with the ACLU over millions of students of faith. These students simply want equal access to public facilities, which is their constitutional right. This hostility toward religion must end. Those who voted for this discrimination are standing in the schoolhouse door to keep people of faith from entering any campus building renovated by this bill.

Next thing you know, it's Scarlet Crosses on their school uniforms and everything! The horror! And ... look, other gratuitous ACLU slam!

"This is now an ACLU stimulus designed to trigger lawsuits designed to intimidate religious organizations across the nation. This language is so vague, it's not clear if students can even pray in a dorm room renovated with this funding since that is a form of 'religious worship.' If this provision remains in the bill, it will have a chilling effect on students of faith in America" he continued.

No prayer in dorms! Eek! Next think you know, the ACLU (again!) will be installing CCTV in all dorm rooms to make sure that nobody's praying in there! That's just the sort of thing they'd do, those organized disregarders of human rights!

"Our culture cannot survive without faith and our nation cannot survive without freedom. This provision is an assault against both. It's un-American and it's unconstitutional. Intolerant and it's intolerable."

Note it's only when their freedom ox is gored that this contingent cries about how it's un-American and unconstitutional. The rest of the time they're busy talking about "our Christian nation" and "people who nitpick over fringe interpretations of the Constitution."

This funding restriction is unconstitutional. In the 2001 Good News Club v. Milford Central School Supreme Court decision, the court ruled that restricting religious speech within the context of public shared-use facilities (or schools) is unconstitutional.

Though the ACLU (since we've dragged them into this) filed an amicus brief in favor of the school, its concerns were not with the the presence of "religious speech within the context of public shared-use facilities (or schools)" -- indeed, the brief notes that they'd favored not restricting such speech in the Lamb's Chapel v. Center Moriches Union Free School District case (1993) -- but over issues as to when such speech arrangements become tantamount to the public facility actually endorsing such speech.

Pages 164-165 of the stimulus contain the following prohibitions on the use of $3.5 billion available for renovation of public or private college and university facilities.

(2) PROHIBITED USES OF FUNDS. No funds awarded under this section may be used for - (C) modernization, renovation, or repair of facilities (i) used for sectarian instruction, religious worship, or a school or department of divinity; or (ii) in which a substantial portion of the functions of the facilities are subsumed in a religious mission; or construction of new facilities.

Former Speaker Newt Gingrich urges Christian activists and other conservatives to e-mail and call their representative and senators demanding that the language discriminating against people of faith be removed.

Aha! We actually see the text involved here and ... it doesn't say anything like what it's being accused of. Instead, it basically says you can't spend Federal bail-out money to work on church schools, churches, or buildings for religious higher education -- or on buildings which are largely used for religious missions. It also says you can't build any new facilities with the money (religious or not).

Nothing about preventing Hillel from meeting in a classroom after hours, or the Campus Crusade for Christ gathering at the student coop conference room, or even the Christian Rainbow Coalition having a meeting in someone's dorm room. Unless those rooms, or buildings, are purposed toward religious groups, worship, etc., in which case, yeah, I suspect the AFA would rather not pay federal tax dollars for roof repairs on the Wicca Wig-wam, or new air conditioning at the local madras.

[...] Christians have not expressed enough outrage focused on the concept that people of faith are being taken advantage of by the stimulus bill during a time of crisis. They are being stolen from them when they are down and out and looking in good faith to the government for help. Instead of the stimulus we need, the liberals are getting the pork that they want -- for themselves, their families, and their friends. They are pickpockets and thieves preying on the down and out.

Right. The only people "down and out and looking in good faith to the government for help" are all good, Christian, "people of faith." No liberals (who I guess are the opposite of "people of faith" according to the AFA) are suffering; they're all "pickpockets and thieves." Nice. 

Etc., etc., please write your senators and send us money. Of course.

Looking at the passage in broader context shows that it also prohibits spending money on college athletic facilities, auditoriums, and theaters ("modernization, renovation, or repair of stadiums or other facilities primarily used for athletic contests or exhibitions or other events for which admission is charged to the general public"). Clearly part of the Liberal War on Sports and Theater, too. And clearly that will have a chilling effect on colleges, such that students who toss around a football on the Quad will be at risk of expulsion lest the school lose all it's federal moolah.

It's not even like this is some unique formulation that was stuffed in here as a new, covert way to kick off the Obama-bin-Ladin War on Christians. It's practically boilerplate text for federal spending bills.

Funds appropriated under a certain higher education grant program “may not be used…for a school or department of divinity or any religious worship or sectarian activity”
http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/html/uscode20/usc_sec_20_00001068—e000-.html 

Funds appropriated under another program “may not be used…for a school or department of divinity or any religious worship or sectarian activity”
http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/html/uscode20/usc_sec_20_00001103—e000-.html 

Limitation contained in program to help historically black institutions: “No grant may be made under this chapter for any educational program, activity, or service related to sectarian instruction or religious worship, or provided by a school or department of divinity.”
http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/html/uscode20/usc_sec_20_00001062----000-.html 

Grants for work-study programs may “not involve the construction, operation, or maintenance of so much of any facility as is used or is to be used for sectarian instruction or as a place for religious worship”
http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/html/uscode42/usc_sec_42_00002753----000-.html 

Money used under a specific community development program subject to limitation that “no participant will be employed on projects involving political parties, or the construction, operation, or maintenance of so much of any facility as is used or to be used for sectarian instruction or as a place for religious worship”
http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/html/uscode42/usc_sec_42_00009807----000-.html 

Aid under program providing grants for volunteer service projects may not be used for ”projects involving the construction, operation, or maintenance of so much of any facility used or to be used for sectarian instruction or as a place for religious worship.”
http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/html/uscode42/usc_sec_42_00005001----000-.html 

No energy resource graduate fellowships “shall be awarded under this subchapter for study at a school or department of divinity.”
uscode/html/uscode30/usc_sec_30_00001325----000-.html 

Religious organizations participating in the “Community Schools Youth Services and Supervision Grant Program Act of 1994″ “shall not provide any sectarian instruction or sectarian worship in connection with an activity funded under this subchapter.”
http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/html/uscode42/usc_sec_42_00013791----000-.html 

Funds used under grant program for tribally controlled schools “shall not be used in connection with religious worship or sectarian instruction.”
http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/html/uscode25/usc_sec_25_00001803----000-.html 

Another construction program: “Participants shall not be employed under this chapter to carry out the construction, operation, or maintenance of any part of any facility that is used or to be used for sectarian instruction or as a place for religious worship (except with respect to the maintenance of a facility that is not primarily or inherently devoted to sectarian instruction or religious worship, in a case in which the organization operating the facility is part of a program or activity providing services to participants).”
http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/html/uscode29/usc_sec_29_00002938----000-.html 

And that's because I don't particularly feel that religious schools or religious groups and buildings within other schools need or should get my federal tax dollars. Heck, that sounds like a positively conservative statement, or at least old-school (so to speak) conservative.

What chaps my hide on this is that it's not even trying to argue the economic merits of the stimulus. Instead, it's just rampant fear-mongering and public-point-making, trying to make the Democrats and the president look like they're about to pass laws tossing Christians to the lions next, when in reality it's simply Just. Not. So. It's either delusions from ignorant fear, or lying for political gain. I'll let you decide.

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Sunday morning 2/7/09, at around 3:00 am, the Smith family house was completely destroyed in a devestating fire. Thankfully, all family members made it out in time. Rick is still in the hospital with some broken bones and the youngest is being treated for smoke inhalation.  

I have had several requests for information so that friends and coworkers may send flowers or cards and asking for other ways that we can help. Rick's daughters and his wife are busy working to begin rebuilding their lives. To help with this, I've set up a site to submit donations to the family to help with the cost. Any money you decide to send will be used towards purchasing new clothes, toys, items for personal hygiene and anything else they need.  

I would also like to ask any of you with photos or mementos you may have to share to send them my way. While we can easily help with the necessecities, nothing can replace the personal items.  

Whatever you can do to help is greatly appreciated. Click on the link below to submit your donation via Paypal or with any credit/debit card.

First off, it's amazing that you can throw up a PayPal thing so quickly to gather up donations for a worthy cause like this. Second -- it's amazing how quickly a family's life can be changed. Yes, it's something you know ... but you doesn't know it until you've actually encountered it with friends, family, or yourself.

The story is described here. It does make me think of all the fire safety things we should be doing at home -- getting more documents into the fire safe, drills, making sure alarm batteries are up to date, getting (more) disposable ladders for second floor evacuations ...

Just a scosh scary.

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Yes, I'm painfully aware that the blog (particularly the comment system) is performing very slowly.

No, I'm not certain what's causing it, though it seems to be Evil Spammer-related.

Yes, I'm working on it. I'm tracking traffic, tracking files hit, reviewing error logs, renaming scripts, blocking a few IP addies, etc., but there are only vague wisps of gunsmoke in the air (and a few bodies on the ground), no actual smoking gun I can tackle.

No, I can't do a lot to work on it while at the office, because of firewall issues.

Yes, it is intensely annoying.

No, no schedule on resolution.

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Captain's Fury by Jim Butcher (2008). Book 4 of the "Codex Alera" series, Butcher's Roman-styled high fantasy, sees various secrets revealed and, by the end of the book, a bit of a clearing of the table of some of the complicated threats that had built up around Tavi and Company (while laying the groundwork for new ones). Ironically, the ostensible protagonist is the least-fleshed-out or interesting of the characters here, but it's still solid entertainment, and a bit more accessible than Books 2-3.  

Glory Road by Robert Heinlein (1962). I keep rereading this about every 5 years, and every 5 years I remember why I don't care for it. Heinlein's too analytical to enjoy fantasy, and he's far too busy being heavy-handedly philosophical -- saying, rather than showing -- in this, one of his earlier "adult" SF novels. Ironically, even as he preaches open-mindedness and non-conformity, his protagonist, Oscar, is one of the most annoying provincials Heinlein ever wrote.

The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman (2008). This Newberry-winning tale of a child raised in a graveyard by ghosts is full of a thousand interesting bits that turn it into a fine narrative that never really seems to have a point to it. It's still wonderful and charming to read, and recommendable on that basis alone, but I finished it (about three hours of solid reading) feeling like there should have been more there there.

The Incredibles by Brad Bird (2004). This movie continues to impress me more each time I see it -- wildly imaginative, yet amidst its both serious and comedic super-hero tale inserting plenty of questions about heroism, hero-worship, personal responsibility, family commitments, what it means to be special vs. conforming ... oh, and lots of great stuff blowing up. Highly recommended.

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So what?

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A recent io9 article on the Bradbury Building (boggled over by BD) made reference to my own personal first connection with that LA classic, the Outer Limits episode "Demon with a Glass Hand," one of two of that show's eps written by Harlan Ellison. 

The clip in the article, though, didn't actually show anything of the building (which most people know from Blade Runner). To my surprise, though, the episode is available in its entirety (ahem, legit or not) on YouTube, starting here. The interior of the building starts at about the 8 minute mark, and thereafter is key to the ongoing action.

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Um ... the following would seem to indicate that something is seriously unstable and unsustainable in our economic system.

The Treasury opened its window to help. They pumped a hundred and five billion dollars into the system and quickly realized that they could not stem the tide. We were having an electronic run on the banks. They decided to close the operation, close down the money accounts, and announce a guarantee of $250,000 per account so there wouldn't be further panic and there. And that's what actually happened.

If they had not done that their estimation was that by two o'clock that afternoon, five-and-a-half trillion dollars would have been drawn out of the money market system of the United States, would have collapsed the entire economy of the United States, and within 24 hours the world economy would have collapsed."

It would have been the end of our political system and our economic systems as we know it.

That's the chair of the Capital Markets Subcommittee, Rep. Paul Kanjorski (D-PA), talking to C-Span.

Which makes me think of a house on a hill, where the hillside is about to be washed away by and collapse under a storm today, saved only by the National Guard throwing a ton of sandbags on it. We'd generally speaking call the homeowner crazy if they kept living there, under the assumption that the National Guard will always be able to throw sufficient sandbags to save the day in future storms.

So ... when are we going to stop being crazy?

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