BunkBlog

The meaning of this holiday changed for me in 1989, when I put on the uniform for the first time. It didn’t magically morph back to the earlier, less-informed, view when I took that uniform off for the last time in 2001, though.

When I heard about the Beirut Marine barracks bombing as a kid, it was a remote incident. It didn’t really mean much to me. When I hear about that sort of thing now, I wonder if I knew any of them.

In March, one of the soldiers that I helped train was killed in a training accident. The NSA has a wall of remembrance for people that were killed and who can’t be acknowledged because of the classified nature of their missions. One of my friends just got back from a counter-terrorist “training” mission that involved a lot of live ammo and people who weren’t training aids. That’s what I’m reminded of on Veteran’s Day now.

The LJ crowd tends to the young; the young are usually very liberal and anti-war. Be anti-war all you want, but support the men and women who volunteer to step in front of a bullet for you. To do any less would be churlish.
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Proving once again that /. is a potent source of change, the Distributed Proofreading project has completed 6169 pages so far today, compared to 6281 the previous 7 days. All thanks to one artcle on Slashdot. Coolio.

Now I’ve got something to do at work…

Update: As of Tuesday morning, they’re up to 52000+ pages complete this month, compared to the goal of 33000, and they’re sustaining about 10,000 pages per day since the Slashdot and Kuro5hin stories were posted. What a great public work using spare time. Love computers.
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1. Did you vote in your last elections? Yes
2. Do you know who your elected representatives are? Yes
3. Have you ever contacted an elected representative? If so, what was it about? Tried to get my rep to take care of an Army screwup several years ago – he just said the army is blameless in all things; he never got my vote. I also contact my rep and senators occasionally when issues of interest are up for vote.
4. Have you ever participated in a demonstration? Nope.
5. Have you ever volunteered in an election? What was the result? Besides the Mayfair Hall of Shame in 1988, nope.

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This is silly.
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I re-arranged my designs, so I rebuilt my Store page as well. It’s more coherent and each link only opens one store instead of 8 or more as before. Faster.
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Faked inscription on the famous ossuary supposed to help confirm Jesus’s historical reality.
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I don’t know why kids (and they are invariably 12-15) want to butcher the language to the point of incomprehensibility. I know when I was in school, we would use single letters or numerals in place of words, and so on. But it’s gotten so far out of hand now I can’t even begin to decipher some of the crap showing up on Livejournal.

Here’s a partial list:

• Dun – It’s a real word, meaning a brownish-yellow color. It doesn’t mean “do not.”
• Yew – Another real word, it’s the name of a tree, not the second-person singular. And, it’s not even shorter than the word that should be used!
• Wit – Humor, not conjoined.
• Misplaced Zs – Alwayz, azz, etc. No comment needed.
• Wuz – It’s not any shorter than the real word, so why use it?
• Ur – An ancient Mesopotamian civilization, not a second-person possesive.

I’m only hitting a few of the highlights, obviously. What is really interesting to me is that, because I learned to type at the age of 10, my handwriting sucks ass. But, when I type I am anal about going back and fixing errors. The more you type, the faster you type, and so the less useful those absurd abbreviations become.
But, I’m old so what do I know?
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A day after Democrats suffered resounding congressional losses, one exasperated Democratic political consultant said he was going to put his displeasure into literary form. “I’m ready to write a book,” said Democratic strategist Peter Fenn, whose proposed title would be: “Why Democrats Have No Balls.”

From Salon today.
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Remakes that absolutely must be heard to be believed:

Tom Jones & the Pretenders doing Iggy Pop’s Lust for Life
Johnny Cash doing Depeche Mode’s Personal Jesus

Hilarious stuff, folks.
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I was playing with the various kinds of opacity in Fireworks. Think it’s a bit too weird?

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Because some people think my background graphics for my site are BORING, I’ve revamped it a bit. If you view the site with a Mozilla-based browser (Netscape 6.x or Mozilla are the two biggies), or with IE 5.5 or greater on a Mac, you’ll see it exactly as intended. If you use IE for Windows (any version) or Opera (any version), you’ll see a slightly wrong version, but still readable.

Is the background boring or is it interesting enough?
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Since I’ve been looking at all these other content management systems lately, and even wrote an essay on why LJ is better than Blogger, it occurs to me that the vast majority of CMS-based sites have a navigation column along the left side of the page. Since I’ve got the navbar as a DHTML-based menu system on the top of the page, I don’t fit in. But, the page ends up looking rather wide with the single-column format.

So, I ask you, my adoring public…

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I installed Movable Type this weekend, just to play with (Greymatter refused to install and run), then I went ahead and installed PostNuke as well.

They’re both pretty slick, and they make a consistent site and all that. But, I think the combination of Dreamweaver for site development and Livejournal embedded into my main index page is doing pretty well for me.

For those who maintain both an LJ and a self-hosted weblog, why? Please explain to me why you have both, especially those who seem to post the exact same things in each. Why not just use LJ embedded in your site? It’s one line of HTML.

Seriously, I’m curious as to the reasons folks have for maintaining two different weblogging tools. Entertain me.
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In order to keep languages alive, or at least understandable to future archaeologists, a group named the Rosetta Project has started making micro-etched disks with over 1000 languages written in teeny-tiny writing. Very interesting article on Wired.
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A great funny piece about the various weblogging stereotypes. I think most of LJ users fall into the Teenoger category.
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Hey, Cafepress accepts Paypal now. Neato.
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