Flit(tm)

Some of What I've been up to

I've been profoundly disappointed in both major political parties. We can't seem to renew either of them in any way that seems to stick. Creating tools that work around their fundamental incompetence and corruption seems to be the only peaceful way out that might have a shot at working.

Instead of blogging, that's what I've been doing, conceiving and starting to build something that might serve for that purpose. I'm using the Sam Adams Alliance's Sunshine Review wiki as a starter data set. I'm looking to create a wiki/structured data set interface for the Wikipedia software, MediaWiki.

There doesn't seem to be much out there to take the relatively unstructured data coming out of wikis and structuring it so that you can do some analysis across various wiki pages where appropriate. There are a lot of projects looking to take advantage of free labor that use wiki platforms but they cripple themselves by not getting a version of the data that is more structured.

A different direction

Work's keeping me busy and I'm taking things in a bit of a different direction. I'm putting my political stuff over on Chicago Boyz blog and going to be writing more personally and work related material here.

Dad's giving in to the Internet

I just got off the phone with my father and I'm shaking my head in amazement. He's starting to see the value of that crazy Internet thing and he asked me to order him a book, Mark Levin's Liberty and Tyranny: A Conservative Manifesto to be delivered to his house. It's an excellent choice for a first Internet book order if the reviews are to be believed.

Twitterings

I've been using Twitter lately under the label TMLutas. If anybody's interested in following me...

I've had it with my scanner

It still works but boy is it slow. I've had it. It's off to Amazon for a nice little number from Fujitsu, specifically the Fujitsu S510M. From what I can tell it'll suit me much better. I finally don't have to flip over two sided pages and the scan speeds seem absurdly good for a unit this price (the machine at work beats it out but there are a couple extra zeros on that machine's price tag).

Twitter

I've signed up for Twitter. My account is TMLutas.

Offer Letter

Well, it looks like Wednesday shall be my start day. That's ok, I got a better deal out of the offer letter when it finally came in writing. I guess using a recruiter can help even on the money end (though you never know these things for sure).

Getting Regular

I seem to have a bit of trouble getting regular.

No, not that way.

I've got the opposite of verbal diarrhea, a head full of ideas and observation and the prose just doesn't *flow*. So, I'm going to strain a bit and just toss my usual standards out the window. Bear with me, coherence and good writing should be back by February. Until then, you've been warned.

So, Where Have I Been?

In short, I was outsourced in early December. I came to the conclusion that things I wasn't paid for went to the end of the line in terms of priorities until I got a job.

I start work Monday, 10AM.

I'm back.

tap, tap, is this thing still live

I'm coming out of a long, long dive and starting to feel the urge to blog again, more soon I think.

Disk Warrior 4

Every once in awhile there's a disk failure that Apple's utilities just can't handle, or only fix partially. At times like that, Alsoft's Disk Warrior tends to do the trick. Fortunately (or unfortunately) by the time I get another round of disk problems OSX has iterated another version and I have to go whip out the credit card for another copy.

Good product, even if it takes forever to run.

Technorati Claim

Technorati has an interesting "claim this blog" service. To use it, you just post and include a string. Here's mine:

Technorati Profile

And off we go.

Well, That's New

I had my first building evacuation today. It was a fire. I'm safe, nobody was hurt. We all got sent home.

Technology Day

Most of my time at the computer today is spent catching up on Asterisk developments. In my day job, Avaya maintains the phone switch, an "old reliable" system called Legend (associated with Merlin, Bell, Lucent, and now Avaya). For the recent change on daylight savings time, Avaya was perfectly willing to program the switch for us for a minimum price of $250. I ended up doing it myself and it took me about 15 minutes.

Asterisk, by contrast, is a completely open phone switch. You can see all the source code, you can compile it yourself, you can maintain it yourself. You just have to know what you are doing. The difference is astounding because once you're freed from the limitations of outrageous support fees, the sky's the limit.

All that's really needed to complete the system is to make the interface a great deal less user hostile. User friendly this is not. But there's hope, Asterisk is coming to the Macintosh platform. I expect that by 2008, things will be much better.

It's been awhile

For the few, the proud, those who still occasionally check in on this humble outpost, I have not died. I have, instead, been intellectually hibernating, Real Life (TM) having recently taken me by the neck and shaken, quite firmly.

In any case, I'm back. Let's see how long I can stay this time.

Note:

There's an Original Reporting IV sitting in draft mode. I'm horribly blocked on it but it'll eventually come out. Until then...

This thing live?

I'm no longer backlogged. Still busy but I'll be coming off hiatus now. Let's see how long I can stay off.

The ragged edge

Sometimes there's more important stuff than blogging, more important than being right, winning attention, even maintaining correspondence. I've been trying to do too many things at the same time and something's got to go.

This is it.

I'll probably return to writing, hopefully soon as it gives me a vent for certain forms of stress in life and helps me keep sane but for right now, I've got to triage.

I've been getting sloppy in a few ways and it's showing. I'm not happy about it though I've been in something of denial. A good friend called me on it yesterday and today I read the note. Enough.

And for all my friends out there, thanks.

Got to Move Soon

I go through mood swings in my writing. Sometimes I want to write posts. Other times, it's comments that get my juices flowing. Unfortunately, my current arrangements don't allow for comments so when I get in a "comment" mood, I end up commenting in other people's conversations and not on my own blog's. I've got to change that.

Now if only I could afford it.

Yay! I'm back

Thanks to Bruce Rolston, (my blogfather) for fixing the little technical hiccup that's kept me from blogging the past few days.

Posting Irregularity

I'm back, for now. That darned real life is getting in the way of my personal crack habit known as posting to this blog and, if I value my family and its economic success, things are likely to stay that way for some time.

Then again, I feel inspired right now and every time I say something like the above paragraph, I get the strange impulse to prove myself wrong. To my remaining crop of regular readers, apologies, and I'll try to get some posts up with regularity. 3 a day on average (my New Year's resolution) is far, far away from what's going to happen.

Connectivity Restored

It's so nice to be back

Been Off the Net

I hate it when ISPs don't have round the clock coverage...

Gah!

12-15 hour days are really cutting into my blogging.. Bleah!

Hope to get something up soon.

Bulk Speed Blogging

I'm going to try a little experiment and see if I can write something about every blog I read today.

semi-hiatus

I just got dumped with a large amount of work. Posting will be erratic and probably low. I hope to climb out of this hole in the next three weeks.

Under the Weather

Absolutely miseravle, confined to bed, cranky as hell, if my wife doesn't take away the laptop, I have a lot of unhappiness to share.

Ah, So Much Better!

I've finally found a good renicer for Mac OS X. All Unix variants come with some way to prioritize code but usually they're ugly CLI utilities that require opening up a window and typing. Process Wizard works well and has entirely eliminated a problem I've been having with Safari chewing up all my CPU cycles and freezing up on me.

Hats off to La Chose Interactive for making some nice bits of freeware.

New Year's Resolution IV

Last New Year's, I made a resolution. There are 366 days to 2004 and 1249 entries with a 2004 timestamp on them. Miracle of miracles, I actually did do more than 3 posts a day, 3.41 to be more precise. So what's to do this year? I think more of the same but less dreck and more substance.

It will be a harder challenge as I've got a new project that I'll be a regular contributor on, The New Rule Sets Project newsletter. If you have a bit of spare change in your pocket, you get to read pieces by me where I've not only put a bit more thought into the details but have an editor to polish up what I'm saying.

On a more personal note, publicly writing down a new year's resolution worked so well that I'll add one more on a more personal note. As the baby year 2006 comes in, he should see me with a weight on the south side of 200 lbs. Now that's a scary resolution for me.

Oddball Programming Hiccup

In my alternate life, I've been using NetBeans 3.6 IDE to do a bit of java programming. My ambition is to create a GUI driven java based html parser. I just noticed that 4.0 came out so I downloaded the thing and imported my project. Ugh, it wouldn't compile in 4.0, giving me an error that it couldn't find org.netbeans.lib.awtextra, something that it absolutely, positively had to have in order to use absolute layout. After a bit of googling, I couldn't find a quick solution so I experimented. If you reassign the layouts, even swapping to grid bag layout and right back to absolute (which is netbeans proprietary), the compile works.

In fact, with netbeans 4.0 everything works a great deal better. Normally I wouldn't write about these little triumphs here but maybe Google will pick up the article and make it easier for the next guy to quickly fix. The purpose of the project for me (besides keeping the rust off my coding skills) is also to be able to get some form of data pulling tool to spice up the blog with so that I can publish datasets that would be of interest to my readership.

Signed Up for Blog Explosion

I'm not sure I like Blog Explosion yet but I signed up anyway. At worst, I'll get a bit more traffic by just being included in the directory. At best, several future blog explosion users will use the link above to sign up and help me out.

test torrent post

trying my first torrent
Brainwashing 101
[insert torrent url here]

New Year's Resolution III

Ugh, what a slacker I am. Counting this post, I'm 46 posts off of the pace that will allow me to actually completely fulfill a new year's resolution for once, the one I made on 1/1/2004. Since this is a leap year, that's 1098 posts of profundity and inane drivel. Since this is my 923rd post of 2004, that's 175 posts to actually fulfill my promise. This means that I've actually got to average slightly more than 4 posts daily (no days off) to hit my target.

Feh, never happen.

Personal Note II

It looks like I may finally be shaking my cold. Blogging should get somewhat better.

Nice County/State Map Library

The University of Texas has a good collection of US census maps showing every state in separate files with counties drawn out and labeled. This would make the perfect raw material for future elections or other analysis of the voice of the people.

Personal Note

Apologies for the low output on the blog lately. I've been having very high output in my (most) personal life. Since Wednesday, a GI bug has been getting me down. So far, I've dropped 9 pounds but hope to be turning the corner soon.

Administrative interruption

I'll be light blogging for a bit. A death in the family is making it impossible to concentrate properly.

10.3

I recently wrote that I broke down and ordered OS X 10.3. Well, it finally arrived and I installed it today. First impressions:

1. It's tightened up the UI quite well, making a lot of small improvements that individually don't count for much but collectively are worth $40.
2. The improvements in mail are real and feel very nice. Thread identification is done very well (it highlights related subject lines when you click on an email). Upgrading was seamless, it just asked if I wanted to upgrade and a few seconds later was done with all the back end work. It's a $20 value.
3. Safari has the aforementioned general tightening up and miscellaneous improvements to its credit. There might be more but I'll give it a value of $10
4. UI scripting takes a great leap forward in this version. The ability to script any program that uses native widgets is a huge step forward here. In 10.4 it's going to be opened up to those without programming talent but I've got a little bit of that so I get to use it now. A $60 value for the programming savvy
5. X11 is now out of beta and comes as an optional install. For those who know the joys of Fink, this isn't that big a deal but taking all the work out of installing X Windows certainly is nice. I'll call it a $30 value
6. XCode is a major improvement. Being able to automatically compile over multiple machines is great. $75

I'd go on, but the major point is already demonstrated, it was definitely worth the money.

Ugh! Breaking Down

Skype did me in. I've been hoping to skip an OS generation but I have to break down and buy the current version of Mac OS X, version 10.3. On the bright side that get's me the new XCode programming framework, much better GUI scriptability, and, the clincher, the ability to use Skype on my mac so I can talk to my wife as she jet sets across Europe (actually, going to visit her parents in Romania).

The downside is that we're $119 down because we didn't wait for 10.4 to come out.

I've Got the Laptop!

Now if I can stay awake, I'll be liveblogging my impressions of the debate this time

TTLB Graduation & Blogtank

I've been a flappy bird in the TTLB ecosystem for awhile but today have graduated to being an adorable little rodent. Thanks to all who have recently linked and keep visiting.

In other internal news, I've also got a few more amazon referral purchases under my belt, enough so that the blogging think tank project has it's first bit of actual cash coming up at the end of the next period. It's 0.1% of the total I've decided to collect before going live so that means I've probably got plenty of time to fill in all the details before I go live with this thing.

Welcome Instapundit Readers

No, this is not Bruce Rolston's Flit, though he is hosting me. This is Flit(TM), run by TM Lutas, you everyday average libertarian-romanian-byzantine-catholic network administrator. Feel free to wander around. Working comments are accessible via the permalink (the timestamp under each post).

Trademark?

Prof. Bainbridge suggests that blogs should be trademarked. That's just fine for most blogs but I do wonder how I should render my own blog name...

The Hits Keep Coming

Off to a client this morning and as I'm heading downtown I find myself car #1 (lead car) in a 9 car pileup. Oh, the joys of pain killers and muscle relaxants...

Again.

Actually it wasn't that bad this time but I'm cranky and unhappy and uninclined to write about the sad state of affairs I see around us.

Minor Site Tweak

Yup, that's me going to my first masked ball. For those who have always wondered who is this mysterious TM Lutas

B-)

Paul Krugman, my reader?

I was going through my daily read and noticed some Oxblog commentary on Paul Krugman where he quotes Campaign Desk. I'm a significant participant in the Campaign Desk forums, which means that if Paul Krugman heads over there (and he's likely to have done so) he'll have read me.

I don't know whether to be flattered or feel dirty.

I'm going to wash now.

The Waiting Game

Ugh, I'm going through a few serious life changes right now simultaneously. Unfortunately, I can't write about it and working through it is consuming me. I'm probably going to continue to have low output for a bit.

(of course, writing those words always tends to get my creative juices flowing so who knows). As soon as things clear up and I can write about certain topics, I can guarantee you'll be interested, appalled, and entertained, in short the usual shall return.

Comment Workaround

If you wish to place a comment, it turns out you can, even though the lying "comment" link doesn't work. Hit the permalink (the timestamp to the left of comments) and you'll see the individual post with the proper comment entry form.

HT: David Mercer

Administrative Notes

It looks like comments are going to be out for the count for awhile, until BruceR gets back from maneuvers. Oh well, somebody's got to stave off the collapse of the Canadian military until Canada realizes how bad off they are in this area. On the bright side, I've been categorizing my posts since the very beginning and have just got around to putting in code so you can see them too. Category archives are active so you have another method of taking a look at my posts.

Please Stand By For Comments

Some parts of this site I can control but others... are opaque to me. Somehow, someone has monkeyed with comments and the commenting system is out. I've sent up a flare. Please stand by.

Barnett Correction

A prior item about technology in the sys admin force drew a snap on the wrist in email from Tom Barnett (who is remarkably accessible for a guy who's quietly going on about the business of changing the world). It seems that, in the end, a badly composed/misunderstood sentence was the cause of the tempest in a teapot. For the record, here it is "Why? Because you cannot technologize your way out of that problem set: it simply requires significant numbers of well-trained troops." That problem set being stitching an occupied country together and attaching it to the Functioning Core. The start of that process is generally going to be military heavy and it's not what we're training or equipping our troops for.

Dr. Barnett is very much on board with technology on the Sys Admin force. And I'm very glad he didn't let my misunderstanding live on.

Computing Shortage

Due to circumstances beyond my control, I'm getting a lot less time in front of the computer. Blogging will continue but it will likely stay light this week. Keep checking in.

A Question for the Readers

Does anybody know how to price out a round trip to Baghdad? e-mail me if you have the answer.

Testing, Testing

For those who participate in comments, you already know that Bruce Rolston shut down Flitters. Now I have to figure out how to tie off the bloody stump on this end.

Please bear with me.

Just Got Back From Hospital

No, not for me, my younger daughter needed some imaging, which was given under anesthesia (otherwise it's impossible to get a 4 month old to sit still). We get results tomorrow.

Cool, I'm a Baritone Today

Usually I'm a tenor but a nasty bit of something brought home by my son has turned me into a very deep baritone. A cranky, sore throated, deep baritone. I've been fighting this off for about three days and it's getting nasty. Blogging will be variable. The crankiness tends to increase output but all other symptoms tend to work the other way.

Stop back later anyway.

I'm Getting Stale

I read the same blogs daily with minor changes and detours and I'm getting a bit stale because of that, I think. So I went over to The Truth Laid Bare's Ecosystem and went through all the blogs bigger than me that had updated and saved them as a separate list. I skipped over the ones that were on my regular reading list but included a number that I recognized as rejects from that list that I'd deleted. Hopefully the new material will spark new ideas and posting subjects.

Post Notice

I tossed up a religious/chicago article over at Chicago Boyz. It's on my conception of Catholic Rites and how the laity can use them to avoid bishops who absolutely foul up (think the pedophila scandal level of screwup) without leaving the Catholic Church.

Blogging Will Likely be Light

I type for a living and over the weekend strained both hands. Blogging will likely be light and short. Then again, whenever I say something like this it usually clears up any sort of lack of inspiration to write right up.

Check back anyway.

An Apology

Now, I've stepped in it. My bosnian correspondent did not appreciate being published one bit and demanded that I pull the blog entry. I won't be publishing his further (very interesting) followup because of his now expressed desire but I also won't be pulling the entry. I do believe that blogs are publications and writing a blogger is not too different than writing your local newspaper. You should not be too surprised if what you write ends up in the paper, especially if you're good at writing. You might demand a correction but not a recall.

But I should have handled things better and I am sorry for it.

Upcoming Developments

As soon as my account gets finalized, I'll be occasionally posting over at Chicago Boyz concentrating on economics and local Chicago affairs for my postings there. The bulk of my material will likely still be posted here.

WW II Posters

After seeing a bunch of WW II parody posters, I finally found out where most of them are probably coming from. This is something of a referral post for myself. After going through the archive, there are a few that I'd like to do myself. Off to look at MacGimp.

Will Be Blogging More Later

Microsoft Access is the devil's RDBMS, I tell you.

Clients and deadlines.

Ah, Back Up!

No, I couldn't get to the site either. It was a problem over at the hosting site and took out all of snappingturtle.net. It seems to be much better now. Thanks to all who worked hard to get things back up.

I have a long and a short article on backlog so those should be coming up shortly.

Visit early and often fellows.

Bear Update II

It looks like NZ Bear is still going through adjustments and for me, it's all good. for the first time, I've gotten out of my reptilian stage and am now a flappy bird. It's 8 more unique links (blogrolls are best) to adorable rodent, and 24 more unique links to marauding marsupial.

The question is, why care? For a few reasons. Many moons ago when I helped out with The Patriot over at SUNY Stony Brook, I saw real journalism first hand. We were a student publication but entirely advertising supported. The kind of politics we were advancing (heavy libertarian) neither would have permitted us to take coercively extracted student funds nor would the student government have likely given us an allocation (our reporting on student government antics was rather... severe).

I'd like to get back into public policy journalism, at least as a side line via this blog so I know that at around 10k readers people start treating you seriously for revenue generation purposes. Increasing links both increases hits via the links themselves and increases the likelihood that people will click on my blog based on the NZ Bear list itself.

But beyond making Flit(tm) a viable commercial property I'd like to see unique and interesting voices being able to blog on the payroll as part of a virtual think tank. To that end, the first $10k of income from the blog is going to go towards establishing a nonprofit so that hitting associated blogger's tip jars will be tax deductible donations and people who would do well on the writing end of professional blogging don't have to waste a great deal of their time on the finance end so that they can devote more time to thinking profound thoughts and furthering the public interest.

Bear Update

I'm just so confused. TTLB doesn't update for a long time and now... I just dropped a huge number of links, it's got the right traffic numbers, and I've improved about 300 places in the rankings.

Is anybody else out there noticing oddness going on with the Bear?

Trolling for Links (a Pro Kerry Post)

VodkaPundit offers a bounty in the form of a link, to the first person who defends the 'first I voted for it before I voted against it' statement on supporting the 87B funding allocation to support operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

I don't think I can manage to spin this as exactly helpful, but it is, in the narrowest sense accurate. The real problem is a general one, the problem of horrible civic education in the United States. The truth is that legislation is often loaded down with various special pleadings designed to garner extra votes, votes that would not have been forthcoming if the measure were simply an up or down vote on the issue addressed by the bill title. This phenomenon occurs more often in the Senate than in the House which has better rules on the subject and more central control regarding the amendment process.

All sorts of votes happen in the Senate in the struggle for the soul of a bill with various factions voting on both sides of adoption at various points. What Kerry was trying to say was that he supported the idea of supporting the troops but at a certain point of additional pork, irrelevant legislative language, and bad policy prescriptions, it makes sense to vote against final passage and immediately get to work on a better bill.

Sometimes this strategy even works, improving policy, which is why just about every Senator does it at one time or another and the inside baseball nature of the strategy is why every Senator running for President gets slammed for it. This also at least partially explains why so few sitting Senators get elected to President.

So is Kerry a courageous man of principle for his vote against final passage? 11 of his Senate colleagues think so.

I'm Tired and Bored

Writing the same old thing is starting to get to me. I see the same dynamics starting to operate with the blogosphere that I despise about regular mainstream journalism. It converges on story themes and you get sort of a pack phenomenon where everybody's talking about similar things. It's a presidential election year so a great deal of election blogging is going to go on. It's a big decision but is starting wall to wall Kerry/Bush coverage in March a bright idea? I don't think so.

I'm not sure how I'm going to manage it but I'm thinking about how to avoid the mind-numbing bore fest that seems inevitable at this point if we all keep going down the pack mentality road.

Posting Light Today

My regular computer is busy getting its directory rebuilt (wonderful as Macintosh's are, it is possible for their disks to degrade) and so I'm on my wife's portable for now. DiskWarrior is very thorough but it's not the fastest tool around.

Most of my speed difficulty is born of the fact that I've gotten awfully used to a five button mouse (yes USB multi-button mice and macs work fine together) and I'm currently typing in my lap.

I'm sure I'll think of something to post, though so check in please.

Minor Outage

Hmm. It looks like the system was down for a time. Oh well, I can't complain about the hosting price...

Sidebar

In blogging, I've been concentrating so much on the writing that I haven't done much about formatting or creating the sidebar that I truly want. Most of the links to the left are leftovers from Flit's original links though slowly the two sidebars are diverging.

I'm including a book list, starting with The Pentagon's New Map. I've always been susceptible to the libertarian disease that you should, "just go read this book". I know that it's not the most effective way to convince an awful lot of people but I've got the itch so this new section will somewhat scratch it.

Evergreens

Every once in awhile I stick something into Moveable Type's Draft category. Most of the time it's something that will hold, is not time specific, or it's incomplete. I like to call such items evergreens and they are a source of inspiration for further writing.

I just went through some recent evergreens and found a few just sitting there complete that I've forgotten. In future, I'll stick evergreen in the title to distinguish them from my usual stream of consciousness punditry.

Behind, Behind, Behind

2:16 PM CST. I just finished with my reading from yesterday. Boy am I falling behind.

Blogging Goodies!

I just got my first bit of blogging related swag. Yeehah.

Oh, I'm perfectly willing to do book reviews and anything else that would get me advance copies...

New Year's Resolution II

I just got teased in e-mail over a minor punctuation error. My correspondent speculated that I was getting tired due to my New Years resolution to post an average of 3 a day.

When I responded to him my post count was 247 over 38 days for a total of 6.5 posts per day. With this post my average goes to 6.526316 (according to my handy dandy OS X calculator).

Boy am I slacking.

Brain Stuck

I've been writing and writing this weekend and it all turns to crud. I expanded my daily blog list in an asian direction and it's affecting how I think. Asians are so different and unfamiliar to me that I never quite know how they are going to jump (even though I have a very good friend who is korean) and there are so many of them on the express train to modernity that only a fool ignores them and their habits. The problem is that when I think, it interferes with current writing output.

I'm still managing to keep my output above my target 3/day average but its tough. It astounds me that the PRC hasn't flown to pieces yet. It shocks me how cruel and indifferent the people of the ROK are to their relatives and co-ethnics in the DPRK. And Japan's trip into demographic suicide territory is being handled in a very puzzling manner to me.

Fixed Now

Thanks to this thread and the fine advice of kadyellebee I figured out what the problem was. The mystery is how float:left; ever got taken out of the style sheet in the first place.

ERROR!

I go out, everything's fine. I come back... UGH!

I've been concentrating on the substance end of things and generally leaving the form alone. It looks like I'll have to reverse that for awhile to get the sidebar lined up again.

Please be patient (and come back please).

Welcome New Readers: How'd You Get Here?

I've had popularity surges before, but usually I can figure out where the hits are coming from either by looking up Technorati, TTLB, or looking at Sitemeter stats. Alas, the hits spike, you get a few that stay but most of the benefit goes away after a few days.

The last few days have been different.

I did my usual weekend traffic crash and jumped up on Monday and I've been going steeply up since then. I can't figure out why because my linking stats don't seem to be going up on TTLB and It's not a sudden spike of traffic, just a steady increase in incoming flow.

I'm missing something, but what is it? Am I getting linked by blogs that aren't in TTLB or Technorati's database? I'd love to know.

I'm Back

A small permissions error kept me out of the blogging game for the latter part of yesterday and I'm already backlogged!

Look for catchup blogging today, maybe tomorrow.

Oooh Pretty Shiny Blog

Due to Bruce Rolston's day job commitments, he seems to think that there is a small but nonzero probability that he will be forced to put Flit on hold at some unspecified time in the future. Prince of a guy that he is, he is providing me with a segregable blog that I have much more control over and could survive such an (I think unlikely) eventuality.

Thanks Bruce!

Things will likely get a bit more lively here and I may branch out in new directions. We'll see. I'm still being hosted by Bruce Rolston and as long as he'll have me I will continue to do so. I'll always feel a debt of gratitude for his past and continuing service to get my writing career off the ground.

Essay Blog

My thoughts don't always run in blog form. Actually, they rarely do. More often, I have an idea, and chew it over from several different angles for a time, refining and revising it until it's one of those gems that I know well, can defend from almost any angle and can use as a support in other discussions without having to worry much about it being successfully debunked.

Unfortunately, Flit doesn't currently offer me the ability to create such essays in the manner I like. So what to do, what to do...

I ended up creating a small space on my .mac account as sort of free reference library. I've got several works in progress there and will be adding more as the mood strikes me. Currently, the most complete one is on our upcoming "Red Queen" economy.

This should not affect my output on Flit except to improve it by creating more support documents and links to buttress my pieces here. As it's my space, I'll also probably put any truly controversial stuff there, rather than here, though I'll probably announce it here as well.

I'm back

Ah, back from NY. Unfortunately, my old iMac seems to have taken a hit in the power supply so I'm stuck borrowing my wife's iBook. Looks like light blogging ahead...

Blogging on the road

I'm on the road this weekend so might be blogging a bit light until Monday evening. I'm visiting my folks in NY.

Stream of Consciousness Sunday I

Ah Sunday, a good day to turn off the normal filters that keep me semi-coherent during the week and let my id out for walkies.

- Can the difference in being willing to accept international treaties between the EU and the US be explained by the major EU powers' greater willingness to simply abrogate inconvenient treaties much more easily than the US would do the same?

- If Galileo's trial was really about him sticking his nose into scriptural interpretation and demanding the Church adopt his position before all the evidence was in, doesn't this give scientists an entirely new lesson about the Galileo affair?

- What kind of nutcake idiocy is this 'blogger alliance'? Is it just juvenile hijinks or a byzantine conspiracy to get the mainstream not to take bloggers seriously? I'd announce a "You've got to be kidding" alliance but even my id has more dignity.

- When will the idiotarians realize that not treating people seriously when they say they want to overthrow your government and make you a second class citizen is out and out bigotry? Will they ever be ashamed of not treating our opposition with respect?

- With the BBC going to publish its archives on the net free for private use, how soon will we be able to get Internet appliances that look and function like a TV but 'tune' into a web stream?

- In the same vein when will we get TVs that separate out the picture tube from the electronics? I'd pay to replace the board so I can get HDTV, TVoIP, etc but I don't need a new tube. Why isn't some manufacturer addressing this market?

All publicity is good publicity?

I just discovered Technorati and it's inbound link tracking service. Of course, the first thing I did was look Flit up. I found something of a puzzler. Does anybody know what language this article is written in? It's something latin based but I can't quite make out what's being said just that they're talking about me (though they don't spell my name right). Some of the articles are in English so even the monolinuists of the anglosphere can easily read some of it. Buscaraons, a mystery.

Correcting an oversight

I made a bit of a goof in my cell network article and did not link back to Steven Den Beste's USS Clueless. I went back and fixed it but thought it deserved seperate mention as well.

Off to Texas

I'm going on a business trip over the weekend. I'll be updating from there on SDB's comments regarding power networks (if I can get on the net)

Is this thing live?

Testing... Testing...

Somewhat to my own surprise, Bruce has very graciously granted me front page posting abilities. I will seek to entertain, inform, and not let you all down (especially Bruce). I'm sure it'll be a fun ride for all.