Internet/Blogging – Page 3

Across Two Februaries

Oh come on, I’ve made worse references.

Tonight I did some dp.n maintenance. I now own my domain for at least the next two years. I have no recollection of whether my hosting package automatically renews or not, so the site may still dissapear in five more days. I’ll try to pre-empt that.

I also upgraded my WordPress software. That’s basically everything that you’re looking at. I used to write 100% of my own code, and now I’m lazy and let blog software handle my posts, layout and pages, subpages, and photo gallery. Do I feel any less hack? Not really. I could still do it the hard way if I wanted.

I backed up my entire website, plus an additional WordPress backup, PLUS I imported it to my wordpress.com account (the software comes from wordpress.org, which is functionally an entirely different entity). I was getting ready to manual install the software and then I had an incredible idea. What if my host’s control panel would do it for me automatically? Turns out my hunch was right, and rather than spending the next three hours hacking away at code and uploading it all, here I sit with a new install of WordPress on my server, and all it took was three clicks and about 40 seconds.

At any rate, it probably looks no different to you. No changes even for those (few) of you who login to leave comments. My control panel is organized a little differently (different, not better). My posts will have a couple more categories to go into (I had reached the limit of number of categories I could have in the previous software version, but that number has since been increased). But no automatic aesthetic differences.

So was I prepared to upgrade, even before I knew it would be easy? Well, basically the entire reason I upgraded my software was to get rid of this annoying little message that told me every time I logged in that I needed to upgrade from version 3.1 to version 3.7. And the first thing I did when I finished was login to WordPress and glance up at the top of my dashboard.
Frakking message is still there. It now just says I need to go from version 3.7 to 3.7.1. Manually. Yeah right.

In fact, it will probably be right around February 2011 that I bother to make any major changes, when domainsite and intersabre start reminding me that my domain is going to expire again. But it has definitely been fun to look through all my files as they downloaded through my ftp client and take note of all that I’ve written, all that I’ve learned about web hosting, software, plugins, and writing since February 16th-ish last year. And certainly to think about all the things I’ve had to write about since then: Hospitality, smiles, children, airplane rides (ten), different countries, states and a districts, a dozen new best friends in an 11-hour range of time zones, a jungle, unexpected returns to favorite places, a new instrument, a new language, brothers, a brother, my brother and bros (nope, not a typo), and the Truth that permeates every one.

Almost a Year

Oh, and you thought this was a real blog entry. NOPE! I’ve got a ton of drafts, three from today, even. But this is a reminder to ME that my domain name expires in 5 days. If you see me between now and Monday, ask me if I’ve found all of my necessary documents and re-registered dannypeck.net.

You’ll be getting a longer reminiscense soon. And posts longer than two paragraphs.

Ali Baba and the Animagus Thief

I’m pretty sure this breaks the International Statute of Wizarding Secrecy:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090123/ap_on_fe_st/odd_goat_thief

In other news, Statute is a really hard word to type. Happy Friday.

Update 2/13/2021: I have revisited this post multiple times over the years, and the news story keeps getting moved around, so I finally just added a screenshot of the story since the link is dead.

Thoughts from an anonymous "airplane" commentator

All day today, everyone’s been writing news articles and blogging about planes. And not to intentionally join the trend, but a comment on a blog about airplane safety caught my eye.

Turns out Popular Mechanics put to test the myth about every airplane seat being equally safe. You can read the article if you want the ins and outs of the statistical data, but in jet crashes with both fatalities and survivors (as opposed to one or the other only) the back seats are generally safer.

Out of 19 crashes between 1971 and the present with sufficient data to analyze, the front, middle, and back of the plane had 49%, 56% and 69% survivability in a crash. And while they made a big deal out of it, I’m not changing my ticket over 20% higher chances. Which brings me to my next point.

One of the commenters on the article wrote that a lot of things affect the safety of each seat and each passenger. While this person listed off proximity to the wings and engines, as well as the overall structure of different parts of the plane as being factors, he/she ended with another important safety factor: and individual’s “belief in God…”

I don’t know whether they were joking, or if they were seriously making statistical implications about prayer. But I do know that next time I get on a plane, the reason I’m not worried about that extra 20% average survivability rating is that I’m safe. If I get there at the end of a long life or a short plane ride, I’m going to the same place.

Figures

So about 60 hours after I just reinstalled Windows XP Professional on my desktop, Windows 7 is getting released as a Beta. If I’d known that, I would have just waited two days.

Oh well. I may still put it on my second hard drive. I need a new project, and I’ve never Beta tested a new operating system. And if anyone else is interested, you can download the Beta from Microsoft here, starting tomorrow (January 9, 2009) afternoon.

Banned words

Generally, I don’t agree with banning too many things. I love banned music and banned books, and if you went to high school with me, you weren’t cool unless you were banned or nearly banned from Wal-Mart.

But banned words… we need more of them. Each year, Lake Superior State University puts out a List of Words to Be Banished from the Queen’s English for Mis-use, Over-use and General Uselessness. The Associatd Press did a nice write-upof this year’s, and I’m happy to see that the emoticon “<3 ” made it onto the list.

<rant>It doesn’t even look like a heart. I think that my unwillingly-adopted sister Laura Turner was the first one to explain to me what the heck it was. And aside from its overuse by twelve-year-old girls, it is undeniably overused by twenty-something girls in their facebook photo albums and even in otherwise legitimate and expensive corporate advertisement (fortunately or unfortunately ” <3 ” is not a searchable term and I can’t find any of the images I’m looking for for your veiwing pleasure). </rant>

Also on this year’s list is “maverick,” and I’m equally surprised as Jeff Karoub that “change” didn’t make it. I was really pleased in the past when “weapons of mass destruction” and “undisclosed location” made previous lists, and though I might actually use “-monkey” as a a suffix more often now, I’d really like to see “tasty,” “mmmbye,” and “economy” (good, bad, or otherwise, I don’t want to hear about it for 50 years) on the (unfortunately non-binding) 2009 edition.

Groundhog Day

One of my parents’ all-time favorite movies is Groundhog Day, and it ranks pretty high up there on my list as well. We watched it tonight, and so, unsurprisingly, I felt a lot like Bill Murray when I checked some other people’s blogs tonight.
Several of my favorite people are just scattered about the globe right now, and all of them have this amazing ability to not update their blogs at all. And since the most recent post on every one I checked was still from the first week of December (or November… or September) I could just hear “I Got You, Babe” as I went through the checklist of favorite (unupdated) blogs.

Then I thought to myself… “Mine looks pretty much the same.”
Now granted, I’m in Elizabeth City, I’ve been working my tail off the last couple of weeks between practicing various instruments and putting musical instruments into the hands of seemingly every middle schooler from Hertford to Manteo. But I’ve just been totally slack on my writing, both my own stuff and my more public face of dannypeck.net (/facebook).
So thanks to watching Groundhog Day all the way through for the first time in many years, here’s what I’d do if I had a day to live over. And over. And over…
1. Learn piano. And flute. And pan flute. And charango. I’d probably brush up on a lot of other instruments I play as well, starting with the guitar. I’ll probably never be Carlos Santana level. But repeating the same day over and over, I think I’d at least try. And I’d resort to music lessons much faster than Phil Connors (and before Sciuridaedicide).

2. Take up ice sculpting. I promise I’ll stop stealing from Harold Ramis after this one. But I mean, really? How many people can even do that? It’s gotta be pretty lucrative.

3. Reading. I think if I lived to be 300, I could start reading now and not stop till I died and still not have hardly put a dent in my personal reading list.

4. See how many languages I could learn. If nothing else, I’d finally know what Paul was laughing at in that Shyamalan movie, and I could exponentially increase the length of my reading list.

5. Travel. Bill Murray was stuck in Punxsutawney, PA because of a blizzard. Hopefully I’d have better weather. If you’re going to wake up in the same bed in the same place every morning, why not at least make it a challenge for God or fate or Harold Ramis to put me back in bed and make it to Ecuador or India or Japan by 5:59 am.

I could keep this list going. I could fill it up with more interesting, meaningful, or at least funny things than these. But I’m going to return to The Epic of South America and simply attempt to live out number 3 instead. Merry belated Christmas, Happy early New Year, and a prosperous Groundhog Day.

Not Classifiable as "Witness"

Billy, you are forewarned. This is a rant.

I get invitations all the time to join facebook groups about Christianity. And I would feel bad if I ignored them, but I felt ridiculous joining the “I Believe in Jesus Christ” group a couple days ago, already being a member of the “Christians” group, along with “The One Body of Christ Experiment” as well as “Jesus Christ is the Freakin’ Man.”

I would have just joined the group so as not to offend the person who sent me the invitation, and then never thought about it again. However, I got a message from the group administrator to all the members this afternoon. It said “Imagine what kind of witness this group could bring if all of us added just ONE person a week [to the group].”

Shane Claiborne once said something (I’ll find the quote when I’m not full of turkey and lazy) about people giving money to charities to insulate themselves from real charitable work, from having to be exposed to poor people themselves.

I think we invite others to these little groups on facebook and join them ourselves similarly to the useless way we put the Holy Mackerel on our bumpers, making a silent statement about our faith and thinking that’s the only way we are expected to live it out. Aside from the fact that inviting people to the “I Believe” group is only going to end in a big group of people who already believe and not be a “witness” to anybody, I think labeling and classifying ourselves with names and groups and facebook invites is just another self-serving insulation from evangelism and living out faith.

While I may or may not go on a deletion spree of my own group memberships, I hope that my faith is both more evident than my facebook participation, and evident to more than just like-minded people. As St. Francis of Assisi said, I want to “Preach the gospel at all times. If necessary, use words.” Or facebook.

Presidential Poncho

This is just too wonderful not to be shared. I’m doing a bad thing and using up the Associated Press’ bandwidth by linking to this photo, but doing a good thing and not outright stealing it. W’s Press Secretary really should have foreseen this being a problem for him before he was allowed anywhere near cameras in it.

And I haven’t fallen off the face of the earth. I’ve actually been writing, and there are 4 drafts saved to my blog software right now. Maybe I’ll have some time to polish and publish those over Thanksgiving. Enjoy this in the meantime.

Update, September 2020: Because I originally did a good thing and linked to the photo, it eventually went away when the AP archived their original story. So twelve years later, I did dig it up in another place on the internet and uploaded it to my own site. Not only was this too good not to share, it’s too good to let disappear. I truly miss the days that the President of the United States managed to still be charming and entertaining even when he was an idiot.

I Grew Up With Technology… And I Still Appreciate It

All summer long, people would ask my mom “have you heard from Danny?” They would expect her to say that she gotten a hand-written letter a few weeks back and that I was otherwise totally out of contact eating wild jungle plants and sleeping on the ground. The last two weren’t too far from the truth for a good chunk of the time, but what people were surprised about was when she would say “Oh yeah, I talked to him on the phone for an hour last night.”

Just because I’ve “grown up with technology” as old people tell me all the time (despite the fact that a good portion of the wealthy octogenarians I know have had personal computers, cell phones, iPods, e-mail addresses, and GPSs, far longer than I have) doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate it. As much as I acted like it was totally normal, it blew my mind a little bit that I could hear my mom’s voice going in a North American telephone and coming out of my computer speakers in Ecuador, and then a few weeks later that she could dial an Ohio area code and the phone would ring in Quito.

This afternoon I talked to Mike via Skype chat. He’s in Morocco. Trey sent a text message to Billy during church. Billy’s on a boat somewhere (and the in-church text was about church, so we’ll let it slide). I signed into facebook a few minuets ago and could immediately see that 33 of my friends were online. 33 people, some of whom I haven’t physically talked to, much less phsyically seen in years, and I can tell what they are doing, if and where they are still in school, if they are in a relationship, and sometimes their phone number, where even six years ago I would have thought I’d never have any chance to communicate with some of those very people. And aside from that, my short list of online friends covered seven states plus Ecuador.

Last Sunday I was proud of having been to four church services at four different churches in one day. I’ve had days where I have spoken (as in with my voice: I’m not even counting text and other correspondance) with people in four countries in a shorter amount of time.

As I said, I think that’s completely amazing. And that’s just inter-personal communication. That’s to say nothing of downloading content to my Xbox or having iTunes’ Genius tell me what music I’m missing or looking up the lyrics to a song in spanish when I can’t figure out what I thought was a nonsensical word that turns out to be “para alabar” mumled all together.

I wonder if we are rapidly approaching the oft-warned-of future state of humans existing only in the form of disembodied heads in front of screens that respond to telekinetic input. Probably not. But even though it doesn’t scare me, I do appreciate the technology around me, despite how many old people think I take it for granted (mainly because they think I maneuver through it all so easily, which is totally not as true as it seems).

In fact, thanks to wordpress, paypal, intersabre, domainsite, facebook, and a score of other communication utilities and companies, all I have to do is finish typing this paragraph and click “Publish” and I will start blowing other people’s minds, and my own as I think about at least three places where this will automatically appear and be read by family, friends, and even people I haven’t seen in years. Amazing!

Click.