Alan Gutierrez

I’ve found it easier to write lately. I’d had writer’s block. I’ve got a whole bunch of Writeboards in a backlog of writing. Long complicated scribbles.

Blogging ought to be easy. It hasn’t been. Blogging had become professional communication. It was a perpetual press release. It had become and odious chore.

I was afraid of turning into one of those pro-bloggers. My experiences with social media ran counter to the breathless self-referential raving of the Web 2.0 crowd.

What strikes me about a lot of these pro-blogs is the profound absence of critical thinking. People find a niche and then build a web of people who are only seeking confirmation for what they already believe.

That is the nature of pro-blogging. Coming up with a pet of an idea, then flogging it with anecdotal evidence in the form of anecdotes.

I once ran across this horrible blog post about Henry Ford and The Secret. Remember The Secret from last year? It’s the bible of the Just World Hypothesis.

The blog post was entitled Why Henry Ford Knew More Than “The Secret”. Every time I see Henry Ford, that image pops to mind, the one of him getting the Grand Cross of the German Eagle pinned to his label by the Honorary vice-consul of the Third Reich in Detroit, Fritz Hailer pops to mind. Henry Ford the virulent anti-Semite held up as model of positive thinking.

I felt like I was all lined up to slide down the chute of the idiot pro-blogger, so I didn’t blog much at all.

Celebrating John Frum Day on Vanuatu.

Some folks have written to show concern. I appreciate the concern.

I’m still getting email about policy matters. I’m inclined to respond with, oh, wow, very interesting. Hey, seen what I’ve been up to lately?

I’m going to enjoy being rid of these people who engage me as a resource, people who have no resources to offer. That has been particularly tiring.

I know I’m not the only one who feels this way. Many New Orleanians are engaged in a cargo cult dance to bring down some form of funding for the grassroots efforts that drive the recovery. They dress up, wave the sticks, march and dance, and but the DC-3s do not land. The cargo is not for us.

It’s uncommon that local efforts are overlooked, that nonprofit organizations parachute in and disappear as quickly.

An easy decision now to go blue. Want to set the precedent, so that I’m not conflicted when I feel an urge to curse. When I do curse for the first time, I don’t want to add a paragraph about how I don’t usually curse.

A sanitation worker on St. Philip. He sweeps a Coke can into a dustpan at the end of long vacuum cleaner like handle. He drops the Coke can in to a rolling fifty gallon trash can. He rolls toward Derbingy St, back the way I came. I’m wondering if the rest of my walk to the French Quarter will be Coke can free.

More than half the structures on this block are abandoned, there are vacant lots on either side, the upriver sidewalk is overgrown and crumbling, tires are basking in the sun in puddles of mud, while the worker rolls onward in search of a particular type of refuse. Packaging, I assume.

The sidewalks reconstitute themselves as I approach Claiborne. They are solid. I imagine them to have just been throughly swept, although there are tell tale scraps of wrappers. At Claiborne I see a troop of men with brooms, bins and pans rolling along underneath I-10. I wonder why one man decided to make a detour down St. Philip.

(Update)

Barren Vending, Powerfully Clean by Adam.

I’m familiar with two separate feed readers. You’ll have to adapt these instructions for your feed reader.

Permanent Reader Zero for NetNewsWire on OS X

To perminently achieve reader zero for NetNewsWire on OS X

• Open the applications folder.
• Drag NetNewsWire to the trash.
• Empty the trash.

That was an afterthought, though. My main feed reader was Google Reader. Getting Google Reade to perminant Reader Zero was a more complicated procedure.

Permanent Reader Zero for Google Reader

First, delete all your subscriptions.

• Go to Settings link in the top left corner.
• Click on the Subscriptions tab.
• Select All N Subscriptions where N is the depressing number messages devoid of context that are ready to either consume your precious time and attention or else suck away at your sense of accomplishment.
• Click the Unsubscribe button.

This is not enough. If you are like me you have been creating a mound of items that you swear you’ll read some day using tags and stars.

Burn it.

I Love Caddyshack by Ian.

There is a ruckus in the roof sometimes. I thought they were mice, gnawing away at the insulation or the timbers in the room.

One day I saw that they were squirrels. There was a heavy scurrying in the attic, and I traced the source of the sound with my eyes. They made circles overhead ran to a corner of my room and then appeared in a perfect transition on the branches of the live oak outside my window. Two squirrels in a mad dash to the trunk and out of view, as if they were tuner sports cars, squealing out of a parking structure and onto the freeways of California to settle some score with their scurrying.

Test Pattern by Jen.

About two months ago, my funding for a dedicated Think New Orleans server came to an end. Think New Orleans had been running well for a while, so I thought it wouldn’t matter much to consolidate it with the server that hosts this blog, ljubljana.blogometer.com.

Neither website gets large amounts of traffic. Think New Orleans receives 500 unique visitors a day on a good day. I can’t imagine that all the neighborhood blogs, the New Orleans Wiki, and my personal/professional blog together attract more than 2000 unique visitors a day. Even a modest dedicated server should be able to handle that much traffic, unless something is terribly wrong.

The server also runs postfix and dovecot (IMAP). It serves up the bloggers listserv using GNU Mailmain. It acts as a Subversion repository through Apache. None of these applications concern me. They are all very well written applications. The mail and Subversion services serve only a single user, me.

The Think New Orleans web menagerie includes WordPress, MediaWiki and Instiki. WordPress and Mediawiki are PHP applications running from Apache. Instiki is in a Ruby Webrick web server which is accessed via Apache mod_proxy.

Neighborhood blogs such as Northwest Carrollton and Think New Orleans itself are run in WordPress. There are two flavors of New Orleans Wiki. The Mediawiki version and the Instiki version. The latter is getting more use these days. It contains the definitive List of New Orleans Bloggers and the resources created by CHAT.

There is an instance of Jetty that is rarely visited that runs a few simple servlets that is also accessed via Apache mod_proxy. This is very low traffic and the Servlets are my own. The unconference signup servlet is an example. It writes a web form to file.

I run a script from cron that requests http://blogometer.com/. If it takes more than three seconds to serve, I kill all httpd processes and restart Apache.

Please have a look at the crash reports and tell me what you think.

Morphing Grid by Dan Allison.

Ever find yourself with a data collection, and you can see the steps in your head, create a form, create a table? It’s a dry task that gets dryer by the minute once you find yourself once again creating that paged results table for the contact us or event registration form you’ve created a thousand times before.

I can’t tell you how much slicker it is to send that data directly to an EditGrid workbook. It is a quick and easy database that is intuitive for your users. Instead of a paged html table, their information is available as rich full-featured spreadsheet.