Internet/Blogging – Page 2

Thank You, First Amendment

Not my usual topic of discussion, but I couldn’t resist. In certain ways, you see a ton of total propaganda here in Ecuador. Granted, I’m sure that Yahoo news did not intend for this headline to come across the way that it did to me, but when gems like this appear in American news, it really makes me appreciate our Freedom of the Press.

I can’t imagine the heads that would roll if a sentence like this was published in some of the countries where I currently have friends residing. The mere fact of how true that statement can be adds to the hilarity in my book as well.

Power

I just realized I haven’t mentioned the current electricity situation in Ecuador on my blog. My apologies.

We’re having rolling blackouts right now because Ecuador is simply running low on electricity. All the power here is hydroelectric, so because of the recent lack of rain (though the President’s propaganda machine is blaming it on all the past regimes) this is a measure to conserve energy and not totally use up what we have.

It’s a little obnoxious because a big chunk of the time that I have office hours built into my schedule, there’s not power here. My house is in the same sector as the office, so the electricity is always out in both places at once. This requires a lot of thinking ahead, particularly because my job involves writing (which I do on a computer, which needs power) and web updates, which involves more writing and communication (e-mail, thus computer, thus power). For instance, today I had a Quito Quest meeting at 9am, which ran past 11:00am, when the power was scheduled to go out today. That meant making sure my computer was charged, all my e-mails were sent, and everything I needed to work on was downloaded already. I then proceeded to go home, take a shower, and go to Supermaxi (grocery store) and lunch while the power was out, and worked on writing an article that didn’t require internet access to complete.

I won’t lie and tell you I haven’t complained a little bit about this, especially since there are days when I’m working at the Youth World office in the North with no power, then return to Lourdes’ house in the South just in time for the power to go out for three hours there. But really, I could certainly have it worse. Although it makes me even more behind on my blogging, it does remind me to be social and not spend my entire life behind a screen. It is a little funny though, when I get voice mail messages from home making sure I’m still alive.

Some vague updates on my life: I’m working on finally finally getting my completed Casa G article into a publishable format with some pictures and other fun stuff, and running with a new theme on my La Red article so that the writing portion of that can be finished this week as well. Tomorrow (Wednesday) my friend John Andrew (who has been working with International Teams in Guayaquil) will be coming up to Quito to hang out for a while, Thursday is Thanksgiving (obviously) so all of the Youth World crew that are in town will be celebrating at Laura’s house, then finally on Saturday the Jensen family and us three interns ‘s will be heading to Mindo for a short retreat. Hopefully that will mean lots and lots to write about, and that I will have some time to actually do that and post it.

Catching Up

I just wanted to recognize that I’ve been failing at this whole blogging thing. It’s funny how slow-paced life seems right now compared to Youth World during the summer. And yet last summer I always found a few hours at least every two or three days to get a post up. While I haven’t been as good as I used to be, I haven’t been as bad as you all probably think I have been, which is the purpose of this post. I’m calling attention to the fact that while I have been without internet for a while, I have still been writing. So here are some links to everything I actually published today, going back more than a week.

October 27- Life with Lourdes

October 30- Students

October 31- Saturday in the Store

November 2- Never Know

On Writing

I do a lot of writing. You may have noticed.

Aside from my blog, though I’ve also been keeping a journal. I’ve discovered that between the two, the writing itself is something that helps me to process. I think of myself as an internal processor because it takes me longer to put things into words, and I carefully craft my thoughts in my head before they come out. Even when I write, I use the backspace key judiciously, so what you see is many times edited over from my brain to my fingers to the screen. And maybe that does make me an internal processor. But I don’t necessarily like fitting in a well-defined box, and more and more I’m finding the value of putting stuff out there, if for no reason than it sometimes surprises even me when it goes from vague unshaped notions in my mind to solid black-and-white words on a page or screen.

At dinner tonight, Preston and I got on the subject of writing. He does a lot of research, and has written several books, but it was his journaling that started the conversation. We talked about why we journal and the thought process and the actual product. It’s interesting to me that my journal is the one and only thing I write and have no idea who my audience is. Do I really want to re-read it? Do I really want anyone else to read it? Even after I’m dead?

At some point after Mike and I disbanded our first co-written website, I do remember thinking to myself about all the thoughts I had which themselves had nowhere to go. I’m sure this was a self-aggrandizing thought, but I decided my ideas had to much value not to be recorded.

I also spent a lot of time last summer talking about the “Operation Auca” missionaries, the five men who were martyred here in Ecuador in the 50’s. One of the most famous quotes from Jim Elliot’s writings is something he wrote only days before he died, which said “He is no fool who gives up what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose.” It sounds so profound now, looking at what he is known for now, but when he wrote it, it was just how he looked at life. I’m not so arrogant as to think I’ll ever write anything that will be published by anyone else and that will seem even half that intelligent or ring that true. But once in a while I discover something I put down in ink or pixels that I would never have otherwise remembered I’d thought. Sometimes I still don’t remember thinking of it myself.

I recently corrected all the spelling errors in a blog post I wrote last summer. I pulled it up exactly 365 days later as I was preparing for a devotion at Benjamin House. I really didn’t remember that one, but it was pretty profound. My brain must have been going pretty fast for me not to bother to even glance over it before I hit the “publish” button. But I’m sure there was some value at the time in writing it, and I can definitely see the value in re-reading it. At only twelve sentences, I think it may be my favorite thing I’ve ever written, and I didn’t even remember it, and never would have thought about it again if it hadn’t been recorded.

Backlog

I hate getting behind in my writing. I especially hate it when I miss an entire month. August 2009 is completely unrepresented on my blog. I may go back and fix that. I may not.

But simply for the entertainment of the two or three of you who have complained, I’ll show you that while I haven’t finished anything for a while, I have at least been writing. Work on a couple of these goes back to last July. These are the titles of all the unfinished drafts I have stored in my dannypeck.net WordPress software right now:

Table for Twelve
(no title)
Sermonitos
Unique Halloween
Pilgrimage
Terrible With Words
Comings and Goings
Extremist
Theology of a Cat Collar
Personalities
Favorite Communion
BIOS Battery
How to Change Strings Like a Pro

Be intrigued. More to come.

Radio, Wal-Mart, Censorship and other musings

Driving back to Sue’s from “Grandpa’s House” tonight I was marveling at the radio stations here in Atlanta. People my parents’ age complain that there is not a good Classic Rock station in Northeastern NC, and people my age complain that all they play on CHR is the same three songs until they are so overplayed we won’t listen to them again until they are Classic Rock.

What’s strange is that despite the huge amount of restaurants and traffic here and the presence of the world’s busiest airport, it took the multitude of good radio stations in the area for me to realize that I was not in what my uncle would refer to as “Mayberry.” What’s really amazing is that today, with an Internet connection and a Wal-Mart nearby, there’s just not that much difference between a big city and a small one.

And so we’ve reached Wal-Mart, and therefore Billy’s favorite: the rant.

The South Park re-run tonight happened to be the one skewering “Wall-Mart,” and did a pretty good job (as it tends to do, despite the way my mom and mothers in general tend to loathe it) of pointing out the downfalls of the world’s biggest corporation, employer and evil empire. We can discuss the cons of Big Box stores all night long, but they are easy enough to see and scarily hard enough to avert that I’ll avoid hypocrisy and carpal tunnel syndrome by skipping right to my point, demonstrated by my third hypothetical encounter of the night with Sam Walton’s corporate monster: this blog.

In case you’re Jerry too lazy to read it, the gist is that Wal-Mart won’t sell Green Day’s new album because the band refuses to release a censored version. I agree with the blogger that it obviously hasn’t been detrimental to Green Day’s sales (215,000 copies sold the first week). I also agree with Billie Joe Armstrong that a “young kid… making a record for the first time” should not be dictated to by Wal-Mart. And yet I strongly agree with Wal-Mart for sticking to their guns and upholding their long-standing policy of not selling uncensored music.

Again, I could write a diatribe here on the hypocrisy of Wal-Mart, which sells rifles, unrated movies with nudity and swearing, and sweatshop-produced clothing, but for some reason sees violence, swearing, and degrading ideas as inappropriate for the single, specific medium of audio recording. But again, not my point.

As a writer, a musician, and a (self-proclaimed) intelligent person (do I say “a” or “an” before a parenthetical phrase starting with a consonant but followed by the continuing sentence beginning with a vowel?) I disagree with censorship on principle. But as a Christian, an (I hope) moral person¹, and a 99% reformed foul-mouth, I enjoy at least an attempt at censorship, however ineffectual (because bleeping out words so that you still hear something like mother****er^{2, 3} doesn’t really do anything to censor the idea).

I will stop here to somewhat expand on the idea of ineffectual censorship. There are two great Spanish-language radio stations here in Atlanta. Obviously, the censors aren’t as strict on them as they are in English (if there are any Spanish-language censors in this country). I heard a word tonight on one of those stations whose English equivalent would never make it onto the radio (at least I hope not, which is why my opinion slightly favors Wal-Mart on this particular topic).

The solution is for artists to just realize the power of words other than the four-letter ones. Upbeat, happy-sounding (realistic) Caedmon’s Call can be much more biting as a social commentary than any of the dirty-mouthed rockers in my collection. And I’d love to see a move towards cleaner music at the source. Because much as I don’t listen to the entire genre of rap because of the generally foul content, I go out of my way⁴ to make sure I have the original, uncensored recording of any music I do own, because that is how the artist intended it.

At least I’m consistently inconsistent.

¹Went with “an” for that one. Hooray inconsistency!
²Insert Billy’s gasp here, at an almost-instance of Danny swearing on his blog.
³Better censor this guy!
⁴That task gets easier and easier for me every year as what I listen to is more and more “Jesus music” and less and less English.

Comments and Security

Last summer a ton of people told me that they would leave comments on my blog if they didn’t have to register a WordPress account on dannypeck.net. Before anyone gets bored reading my reasoning below, IT ONLY TAKES 5 SECONDS TO REGISTER. So PLEASE register! I LOVE comments, and registering will NOT send you spam or require lots of personal information.

The reason the I choose to have the blog software force registration is that I just don’t want spammers clogging up the comments or my inbox. I get an e-mail every time someone posts a comment, so I can stay current on what’s being said and make sure that I actually read anything anyone says to me. So if there’s spam, it hits both the site and my inbox too. Anoyance for you who see the comments, double annoyance for me.

Now, obviously, I don’t have a high-traffic blog. Some people can quit working and live off income from their blogs. If I bothered putting ads on my site to try to make money off this thing, I’d make about 40 cents a year. So if I only get my friends and people from church looking at my site, why am I worried about spammers?

You’d be amazed.

For the last several weeks I’ve loosened the security restrictions on my comments. Instead of requiring a login, anyone could post a comment. I was going to keep track of all the spam, but after about the first 3 days, I gave up on that. I deleted 42 spam comments off my wordpress software this morning, and that was only from about the last two days. I have gotten eight more spam comments between 11:53pm last night and 11:24pm tonight. And most of them have been full of meta tag keywords or simply nonsense or just links to more spam web sites.

No one but Michael Turner even noticed that they no longer had to be logged in to leave a comment. Plus, I get really excited whenever I have mail. And every time I check Thunderbird lately, there’s seemingly something to read. But an inordinate amount has been “You’ve got Spam!” for the last two weeks. I’ve been marking all these comments “Spam” so that WordPress would get smart and start automatically blocking some of it. But not even that has been able to slow the incoming barrage of psuedo-comments.

So I’ve reverted to medium security, and logins are now required again.

I apologize for the minor inconvenience of having to register and then to log in to make a comment. But please know that my small security restrictions are not to keep YOU from responding to my thoughts (or lack thereof). It is to keep you from having to wade through kilobyes and kilobytes (some of these spam comments are loooong) and kilobytes of random crap written by an artificially intelligent bot to get to the kilobytes of random crap written by me.

It’s also so I know who wrote it. People sometimes don’t bother to write their name in what becomes an otherwise anonymous comment. I’m not worried about accountabiliy or anything. I just want to be able to thank people who bother to read this.

So again, apologies that I am taking a few second more of your time, but it actually saves your eyes and my inbox a lot of trouble. And thanks to those who actually read.

Ad follow-up

In case you’re reading somewhere other than dp.n, this post references this.

Total endoresment here. FedEx. Best commercial ever. They played it in fast-forward and said (and I’m paraphrasing just slighty) “Instead of our commercial, get back to your show, your time is valuable.” Waaaay better than the repetative vacuum thing. Thanks, FedEx.

Ad variety… add variety

My return to daily writing is going to be celebrated by a rant. And by two observations. Because one forces me to write in too much detail for me to do it at odd hours of the night, and because I just like hanging a Louie halfway through.

Because I like putting off other things, and because I’m totally addicted, I’ve been watching episodes of House online. I haven’t decided if I’m going endorse my (legal) viewing site yet, but I’ll de-endorse its advertising. Every time there would be a commercial break on TV, one commercial comes on. The same commercial.

After the third time I watched the Hoover Platinum Collection commercial, I was pretty tired of it. By the sixth or seventh, I was wondering what exactly it is about House that makes advertising execs think the people watching it want to buy a vacuum. Granted, I began watching House because my mom was always watching it, and she’s a lot more likely to buy a vacuum than I am, evidenced both by the fact that she owns multiple vacuums and that her presence or my then-girlfriend’s was the only thing that got me or Anthony to vacuum our room in Greensboro.

In fact, not only do I spend two hours watching House most weeknights (an amount of time I haven’t spent in front of the TV in a looong time), I’m watching it on the internet. When the heck am I going to vacuum? I just don’t think I’m their target audience.

Point number two: I was annoyed enough by and inattentive enough to the commercial that I will obviously remember it. But even aside from the fact that I act on that by writing a silly blog post about it, if my related actions were (like most people’s would be) confined to my buying habits, annoyance isn’t the emotion I’d be going for when selling a product. So why advertising execs think that much repetition is a good idea.

I truly believe that free (and even cheap) web hosting would have died out a long time ago if it hadn’t been for super-heavy initial investment by people who thought the related advertising would take off. Even half the free web hosting sites don’t have banners anymore, because nobody wants to bother with worthless website advertising. Except for that same whole investment phenomenon, I’d worry that internet TV would go the same way, as it’s funded by commercials the same way real TV is.

My analysis, of course, hinges on the fact that I’m mostly immune to advertising anyway. I don’t shop, I don’t pay attention to commercials unless they are for a product I had not previously known existed (the one and only case in which I believe advertising effects me and accomplishes its goal) or for a product which I already know, love, and regularly support in a monetary or temporal fashion, and in which case the advertising is wasted. Either way, I’m both annoyed at repetition and very glad that the advertising world just hasn’t figured out how to really work their magic online (maybe those ads are better than I give them credit for, but placement is still all wrong, whether this blogger is giving them more coverage or not). It means I’ll be watching House from my computer for a long time.

Header Image Randomizer

There’s a seven-in-eight chance that you’re looking at a new header on my site. That’s because I did some work and put up my image randomizer, finally. I’ve known about this little piece of code forever, and I’ve actually had it sitting around unused since at least March 17 of last year. But it’s in use now, and the result is that you’ll see a different header every time you visit the site. (If you want to have fun with it, press Ctrl+F5 right now to clear the cache and refresh, and you can cycle through them in random order).

I’ll have more images cycling through the header soon. It takes a little bit of image editing to get one the right dimensions to work, so I’m really proud of the seven that I’ve done in addition to the original header. Thanks to Mike Turner for referring me to this code, and Matt Mullenweg for originally writing it.

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This blog originally posted at www.dannypeck.net (cruise on over there and you’ll understand).