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So, the Bloated Goat of Despair and I went out for coffee. He's usually more of a whiskey type of guy but I've convinced him that coffee is usually cheaper. Even at the South Bend Coffee Company, the chocolatier in downtown Valpo we usually go. I suppose that it is an omen of sorts that he's gotten to coffee. Even the Bloated Goat of Despair is barely doing his job. And don't get me started about my Bluebird of Happiness: he has Asberger's.
But the BGoD and I have become perhaps too used to each other over the past few years. I've had the moves and marital near-catastrophes and the 3 months of work in the last 16 months. He's had to put up with my wildly illogical swings into pure optimism. My BGoD has despaired of despair. Nowadays he and I just sit down and try to write something that will make money. Or I should say that I try to write it; he just sits there and every once in awhile makes a half-hearted effort at "well, you won't be able to finish it anyway". Which is probably right. As a writer, I make a great lecturer.
He doesn't even remind me any longer about how singularly unsuccessful my life has been. Of course, we both know that if I died today, the world I've lived in would still be radically (that is, in it's roots) different because I have been here. Not that I've done much. My most successful things — getting Alan out of his funk so he could triple his salary; changing the misdirection of a handful of junior high kids; pointing some folks to a God that they didn't know existed — isn't what fills the history books. Sure, they will be telling stories about what I did long after I pass this world. And they are going on to change the world. I stared at leading a movement once or twice, and both times I ran. I take to power like a recovered addict to heroin: you always want it but you hope you never take it again. Of course, lots of people are somewhat worse off because of me. The problem of having power is learning to use it. I learned on my own and it's like teaching yourself how to fire a shotgun while living in a city apartment building. I've never followed the maxim "First do no harm" and as a result, there are some mistakes along the road. Most of the time I believe the good out balances the bad. The BoG disagrees but he's a bastard and always has been.
These little town dreams, are burning away I'm gonna make a last stand start of it - in old New York If I can't make it there, I won't make it anywhere! Oh God! Oh no! - New York, New York
So it goes. Things can always get worse. Of course, I suppose they already are.
My fellow hillbilly over at Can You Hear Me Now? wrote something that perked up my frowns today. He was writing about family trees and how he once visited the relatives who were still in the mountains, from which I suppose both immediate families have descended to the flatter realms.
One thing I found out was that we could all forget about inheriting any "Old Money." All of the money in our family was as new as it gets. No one could hold onto it long enough for it to put on any age.
I should take the opportunity to remind all my blueblood friends that I'm almost as blue as you: Son of the Revolution, Son of the Confederacy, Son of the Union and Son of the Feud (my great-great grandfather was raised in Devil Anse's house). Yep, we've been here since 1635 or so, depending on who you believe. Not perfect Mayflower snobs, but we came over soon enough. We didn't get to the mountains until my ancestor appeared on Hatfield's doorstep back so long ago.
Now everyone raise your glass of "sweet tea" if that's what the relatives are calling it these days and salute the Sturdy Stock whence he and I came, and may they have money new every day like manna from heaven.
A few months ago, I started trying to write better posts and as a result have lost most of the folks who read this. The Power Struggle has one regular reader (Hi, Al!) and a handful of "a good bit of the time" folks (Hi! John, Joel, Jon and Michelle! And maybe Marion!) My stats are mostly for others on this bloghost, who are more personable. Great horny toads! I just admitted that John is more personable now than I am. What happened? How the mighty have fallen! Anyway, on to my old style rambling.
When I took the Human Patterns course, I got an interpretation of the results from one of my classmates. She was pretty insightful, and from the page of numbers gave me this:
"You like to do research," she said, "but you don't research to solve problems. You use intuition to solve problems. You do your research and bring the results to your team, to give them options. And you have to have a team. You need a team. You need to be in charge but you don't have to control decision making. If you bring your researched options to your team and they don't use them, you get very angry."
Spot on.
In The Beginning of Wisdom: Reading Genesis, Leon Kass makes the point that neither the heavens nor man are called "good" in Genesis 1 by God after creating them, unlike everything else. Man naturally tends to worship the heavenly bodies because of their regularity and their importance in man's living. To appease them somehow makes a great deal of sense.
From the point of view of righteousness, indeed for all practical purposes, cosmic gods are about as helpful as no gods at all. The doctrine of creation, whatever else it accomplishes, seems crucial to the Bible's moral-political intention: to bring righteousness and holinesss into the center of human life. [45]
He continues the thought in a footnote:
I'm listening to the posthumously released Mystery Mind. A bit of it is the poor recording of Heard's final performance. Somewhere in this concert, I forget where, he has a heart attack. He goes on with the rest of the performance. Then he collapses backstage and dies later that night at the hospital. Like most musicians, he had no medical insurance and the bills almost bankrupted his wife and daughter. But then his friends — like Bruce Cockburn, Victoria Williams and Buddy and Julie Miller — contributed to a tribute album.
He was an amazing songwriter and performer. A whole generation of Christians in popular and folk music were inspired by his craft. It's over a decade after he died and Buddy Miller just released a new cover of "Worry Too Much". You know, I hope when I die I leave just a tenth of how he affected folks. Alan says that I don't have to worry: someday, thirty congregations will grow up hearing a story about me.
It's out! It's out! It's out!
There's even a trailer from Disney, the magnificent company that has finally allowed me and Trey to stop having to suffer bad Korean copies that only he can understand because I don't speak any Japanese.
Yes, we're geeks. But this is anime from the master. All hail Miyazaki!
Of course, I now have to wait until the copy gets shipped to us....
Michael Spencer (the Internet Monk) has continued to entertain me with his discourses against a variety of shortcomings in the evangelical world. Which means that I am very easily entertained or a severely boring person. I confess to having watched Nick's Invader Zim (I salute thee!) on purpose and I don't have any children of any age to excuse it. Which proves both points.
Spencer was taken back by something he had seen recently:
I was viewing the web site of a church a friend was visiting, when I saw the current sermon series was entitled "Finding the Sweet Spot in Your Spiritual Life." Compulsory video clip of the pastor with a golf pro, borrowing the language of golf to try and communicate the message of the Christian life.
He then said that he had earlier written something about why our big theological terms matter, which I will suggest you read so that anything else here makes sense. I'll just wait right here. I posted a shorter comment but those are optional. No, you go right ahead. There's another episode of Zim coming on anyway.
He makes some good points. Lots of people say that they just want to rely on Scripture alone, which sounds very lofty and Reformational (sola scriptura, anyone?) but it ignores the fact that many of these terms are ones that scripture itself uses, such as "predestined" (or "destined", depends on version) and "justified". But some of the new terms is simply trying to communicate to a new audience the deep, deep truths of the Gospel.
We Christians have certainly been here before, going back to when non-Judaized Gentiles began joining. The Christian faith makes a lot more sense if you understand the books of Moses, for example, and issues of propitiation and justification are argued from an explicitly Jewish reference. Of course, we also got some unintended consequences, especially after the influx following Constantine's victory or whenever we assimilated some pagan culture by adding "Jesus" to their holidays.
[ Continue reading "Do Our Words Matter?" ]If you have wondered what RSS can really do for you, take a look at RSSCalendar, a free (for now at least) online calendaring application. I would use my own schedule as an example, but that would simply let you know how boring I really am.
RSSCalendar is the brainchild of John Pacchetti, a developer from Ohio who normally works on defense applications. He's done some other interesting hacks (Google him) that are interesting, so I hope he is successful with this one. Why didn't we think of this before? He has said that the main problem with calendaring is that developers have always taken something that is really simple for most people and made it complex. RSSC is not meant for large corporations but it will work great for leisure groups.
It's Sunday, after church, after lunch, slush all over the ground and roads, beautiful L (now my age for two months) napping on the couch. So my mind naturally turns toward the Evolutionist vs. Creationist debate. But I will desist and pause, for the debate — which rages even more because Michael Spencer at Internet Monk is thoughful and provocative in describing his own life — has got me thinking again about who I am and why I am. It has gotten me to think about my beliefs, my position with Christ.
My beliefs on the issue are complex and therefore not interesting to almost anyone. I have seen arrogance and emnity on various sides of this issue, including coming from me. Most of the time, I don't think about it.
In a recent comment to a recent post by Spencer on the creationism vs. evolution issue at Boar's Head Tavern, Steve said that he feared that if he accepted evolution, he would give up all his Christian beliefs:
I have joined the League of Reformed Bloggers, a collection of blogs written by Christians who subscribe to the five solas and one of the Reformed confessions. I'm a member of a Christian Reformed church and subscribe to the Belgic Confession. I don't always write about issues of faith but do from time to time. It comes in spurts. Like my other writings.
I am always a bit fearful of being listed as a Christian. A lot of my views, including subscribing to the Belgic Confession, seem to offend Christians and as we all know by now, my response to the idea that you won't like what I have to say is to not say much of it. A learned reaction from lots of reasons. Perhaps it is because I am ambivalent about my own faith. Or driven by it.
There are some interesting people writing as a part the LoRB. So it's interesting to join them. The Blogroll will now be a part of the sidebar on the main page. I will keep it off the category pages because I am lazy.
Dignan recently wrote a very interesting insider's view of the religious right movement, starting with his involvement with Pat Robertson's campaign in 1988. (Dignan was a high schooler it seems.) He has some pretty solid credentials:
Them's some credentials.
I went to university with the niece of Moral Majority's founding trio. I went nuts with that. I made my way through school writing about Moral Majority for almost every class. At one time I had read almost every academic work on the topic; and many non-academic ones, including Jerry Falwell's autobiography and biography (the latter by Dinesh D'Souza). Robertson was not really on the radar yet, and I did no go through the 1988 election. So all of this was relatively new to me. My faves were Marsden and "Redemptorama". And "The Fundamentalists" which was going to press my senior year. One of my advisors read drafts of it for the publisher and sent along copies to me for my work. If I had gone to graduate school, I would have written on religious political movements. So let's all take a moment and thank Providence for small favours.
John Piper, pastor and doctrinal writer, has put several of his books up for free online reading. Piper is a noted Reformed thinker with a slightly popular bent.
Reading a book online, unless you have to, is still pointless. Once Xerox and Co. get the "electronic paper" initiative in production, it will no longer be true. We'll be able to put the newspaper onto what looks like a flexible plastic pastry board with a dowel rod attached to one end. The black "ink" will be tiny little balls that roll. It will reduce some of the density of line art but it will reproduce no worse than a newsprint page. The real point of Piper's online library is to see whether or not you like the book. Unless you live in a country where you can't read this stuff. In which case, I recommend using a command line encrypter with your PDFs.
There is an ongoing debate in Reformed circles about "reclaiming culture". The PCA makes this an explicit part of their church planting strategy. Others simply engage it. For an example of what this conversation normally looks like, take a look at a few recent blogsphere posts that have dealt with it.
Read the comments in Discoshaman's and Joe's articles for some real fun.
There is certainly something about popular Christian art that gets a rise out of most professional artists who are Christians. Some of this is truly just cultural snobbery. They compare the Left Behind books and Thomas Kinkade to Tolstoy and Rembrandt when they really should be comparing them to popular works like Danielle Steele and ... I can't think of anyone comparable to Kinkade in general circles, but that's probably just because I'm married to a medievalist. But there is something underlying this discomfort with them, something that bothers even charitable artists who enjoy the Left Behind action sequences or Kinkade's craft.
Luckily, I happen to know someone who might have more of an answer. It's not an easy answer, but would you expect it to be?
András Visky has always impressed me with his ideas because they are fully lived out in a way that others are not. They are ideas that tell him what to, rather than ideas that tell him what to tell others to do (ala the Hyper Modernists). I have talked with him and heard him speak and am always changed. I am never changed because I never show up. But with him, I cannot help myself.
The following is from a talk he did in Chicago in 2004, and is Copyright 2004 Koinónia Publishing, Cluj-Napoca, Romania:
[ Continue reading "András Visky on what is good art" ]Anyone else ever notice how similar the Flying Burrito Brothers sound to mid-1970s Larry Norman? I was listening to AccuRadio's Twang channel and noticed it. Maybe it's just me.
Which explains why the Flying Burrito Brothers "greatest hits" is sitting in my discard pile....
From The First Idea: How symbols, language and intelligence evolved from our primate ancestors to modern humans by Stanley I. Greenspan and Stuart G. Shanker:
...a baby first learns "causality" not through pulling a string to rign a bell or other similar behavior, as Piaget thought, but through the exchange of emotional signals (I smile and you smile back). Therefore, this early lesson is emotional and cogniive at the same time. At each stage, new cognitive skills are learned from emotional experiences. Even high-level symbolic and reflective thining employs emotional awareness as part of its defining characteristics. [51]
Rob Schläpfer has an interesting apology for his graceless behaviour in his work as a Reformed Christian. I have not followed the controversy but find the article interesting anyway.
For those of us who live in North America, driving in another continent can be a trying experience. I've sat in front of a gasoline station in Germany and not been able to activate the pump. Of course, I've also done that in Switzerland and Belgium, and always felt quite the fool.
While looking for the answer to that classic Microsoft interview question ("How many gas stations are there in America?"), I stumbled upon Driving In The USA And Canada - Petrol Stations (Gas Stations) over at John Cletheroe's USA and Canada Holiday Hints. It's good to know that British drivers find our driving habits as nonintuitive. And not just the "driving on the wrong side of the road" thing. Cletheroe goes on at length about pumping gas in North America.
Also interesting was the note by Kjetil Fadnes ("Location of Gas Stations") that the number of gas stations in Vancouver, BC has fallen from 248 in 1970 to 39 in 1998. This may be the result of more stations being built on the periphery, or the rise of the massive corner station. It is a stunning decline.
I've been reading the comments of Christians about my age and younger who find no place in the Church. Some, like Feeble Knees, have come out of churches who manipulated them, provided them no room to be in uncertainty or doubt. Others seek out a more meaningful place, somewhere with hope for their belonging.
One of them led me to an essay by Wayne Jacobsen ("The Church That Jesus Builds"). Jacobsen makes a great point: it isn't about doing church right but about knowing Christ. It's all about Christ for us, and there can be no other. We worry about whether we have the right structure or are doing the right things, when we should only look constantly to Christ in complete need. These things then follow, but perhaps not like we think they will. Indeed, as Jacobsen says, "We are so focused on ourselves and what the church should look like that we've forgotten our joy is in the bridegroom — Jesus himself!" Jesus builds the church. Not us.
For whatever reason, I think that András Visky would agree. "I am a tool in the hand of the scriptures. I am the tool. I am the tool through the grace of the Spirit. I am always the tool."
So I hear that. I know that it is true in my own life. My way to true life within the church is to love Christ and follow him in his work in building his church. It's his church. If he wants it built he'll make sure that it gets done. He may invite me into that work with him, but he surely doesn't need me. I can respond to the invitation with joy and not guilt.
What I'm about to say may seem worse than how I mean it. I certainly see how people like Feeble Knees had wretched church experienes. I do not believe that anyone should be manipulated into serving Christ. Or converting. Jason was right when he pointed out how wrong it was to pounce on someone who is emotionally wrought. Jonathan Edwards wouldn't even allow people to confess their sins in church. They were to go home and think long about what they had heard and the costs of following Christ. I really feel for people who have been manipulated, who have undergone spiritual abuse by the church. It's wrong. It's evil. I'm not advocating that people stay in these situations.
Most of our churches, though, aren't abusive. I say without a shred of knowledge. Although I would say that most churches have some form of spiritual abuse going on inside them.
Anyway, Jacobsen implies that the church — this cantankerous, inharmonious, contentious social thing that is the Body of Christ — shouldn't be that way.
But what if that's the way that Christ intended?
As I was wandering the blogsphere tonight (don't ask), I came upon Brother Maynard's post about the recent (2005 Feb 1) broadcast on CNN's Larry King Live of an interview of sorts ("America's Most Influential Evangelicals") with five people that TIME magazine called influential evangelicals in America. The four — Tim LaHaye, Beverly LaHaye, T.D. Jakes, Franklin Graham and Brian McLaren — were quizzed by Mr. King in the usual "let's make non-boring television even though we're just talking heads" style. Since they're all evangelicals, it made sense to code this as "Christian Church Life", but what I was really interested in was how was the complexity of their spoken thoughts. This isn't about the complexity of the persons or their ideas but of the thoughts that they spoke.
After reading the transcript, I'd rank order them, from lowest to highest, as:
I'm moving the company from Eudora to Thunderbird now that 1.0 has been tested. I will give it a try for the next 30 days to see if it works in this environment. I am also testing Above & Beyond and Time & Chaos. Of the two, I suspect that Above & Beyond will work better. I miss the old WordPerfect InfoCentral 2, which used connections to show relationships. Very powerful but unfortunately something that most folks didn't seem to understand. You would link a contact (name and some physical information such as age) to a company site by "Title" field, and the location to a corporation by "Site". Me and L are connected by "Spouse" connection. Children work the same way. It makes it easy to update information when something changes at a company, because everyone is connected to the same site address and main telephone number. You could do some really cool things, and a user community still exists.
As it does for Ecco Pro, which I used back in the mid-90s and loved. It worked more as an information manager rather than a contact list. It got killed like most of the others by Outlook. Hard to beat "free with Office". Of course, we didn't know about all the security issues caused by its very architecture of being heavily linked to all other MS products, including the operating system. T&C and A&B both come from that earlier period. T&C has finally had an upgrade to v6 after years of nothing.
Oddly, there aren't any decent OSS options. I'm tempted to start up a project with some basic code. We could start with the assumption of a Java app that stores both locally and in a MySQL database. I'm not looking for just an address manager but something that I can configure to do some of the cooler aspects of the other PIMs: hierarchical sorting from Ecco; dynamic scheduling from A&B; relational connectors between information from InfoCentral; printing and reporting options from Outlook, plus it's journal feature for projects. Maybe it's just easier to have a bunch of flat files that are searched by Google Desktop or the various others.
I suspect that Thunderbird won't kill Outlook but that it will take out Eudora, just as Firefox will probably kill the Opera browser. Boy, I used to love Opera! So small! So sleek! So wonderful! It still has the best tabbed browsing functions. There was an extension for Firefox but it hasn't been upgraded to work with 1.x.
So it goes.
Well, I missed it. I'm not a big football fan anyway but it did read as if it were a great game. T invited me over to blow off some steam playing Star Wars: Battlefront. What an addictive game! The Hoth ice planet from The Empire Strikes Back is especially cool, but that may be the simple thought of being an extra in that fantasy. A friend of mine had his birthday party the day it came out and we all went over to see it in the second showing. We were, of course, blown away by the special effects. The fact that the story was a grat deal more interesting than in Star Wars wasn't lost on us, either, although we could have had gone with more action and less love story. We were middle schoolers: what would you expect?
I write these entries mostly to "loosen my chops", as my brass-playing friends say. It helps me get into the mood of writing on the computer. It also has an almost zero risk to it: I can put up absolute drivel and it really doesn't matter. I wrote for months before anyone read anything on this — I'm not really a blogger so much as an essayist with a penchant for being too wordy, which explains the complete lack of ongoing conversation here with other bloggers. Most blogging is fairly awful, and I try to fit in whenever I can by not attempting to in any way construct anything that resembles an extended argument. Of course, for someone who can say a simple thing over twenty pages, extending an argument never poses a problem. Making any rhetorical sense, sure.
Dave, the pusher over at Galatic Greg's always says, "Don't go hatin' on yourself!" whenever I come in. "Comic book readers is always hatin' on themselves," he says. I think he just wants more business. He probably needs it as I move out of the mainstream again. I no longer have any friends in the business who work for Marvel or DC. A couple do some business with Image from time to time, but Larsen publishes a wide variety of materials, including Eric Shanower's retelling of the battle of Troy, Age of Bronze and Grist's Jack Staff. I've been reading a good bit from Oni Press (especially Andi Watson) and some of the self-publishing that comes out of the region. Valpo has it's own creator who lives just around the corner from me. We've been trying to get together, because I want to buy a stack of her stuff for me and my nephews, but the weather conspired to have us wait. I've always been a big buyer over at Greg's, so Dave has been trying to get me to start playing this card game where you punch out and build little ships. It actually looks pretty cool — I bought a couple of decks — but one never knows. T has started becoming interested, and he's a long-time gamer. He even remembers my treasured first-edition Traveller. My and John Kovalic's first loves.
I don't know if y'all have been following the conversation between Jason and APFG (see "Childhood and How It Affects You Now", for example), but it has been getting very interesting. They are both very strong people and I have appreciated their back and forth. I think that Jason is younger and APFG is older than me, from what I can guess.
I wish that I was as gracious as APFG. I've really appreciated Jason's comments, for a variety fo reasons, including getting some powerful personal talk from APFG. And I've appreciated the things that Jason and APFG have been discussing.
In the Childhood page, APFG said:
...although I have truly got that you do not wish to be a victim until you move the ownership of the problem from him to you, it is a virtual impossibility to derive a sense of completion for yourself. Whether or not you choose to do this is entirely your choice and the choice need not be made now, it can be made later.
..................
You might decide in the future to accept the gift, and then again you may not. It's your choice of course and it's one that may only be distinguished as a gift some time in the future and it's not as though it needs to be returned to the store, thus I suppose it's kinda sitting on the shelf.
I know that APFG is an atheist, but I hope that he doesn't mind me using this to springboard into a discussion about Christ. It just popped into my head when I read it.
These two ideas are important for me, and I think that they underlie the love of Christ in the Christian faith. That's Christ's love for us, not our love for him that I'm thinking about.
From the Christian's perspective, God ended up being let down by someone else: us humans. He created us and we tried to hedge the deal in the Garden of Eden. And continue to make sidebets. I know that a lot of you don't believe in God, or Jesus as Christ, or the Garden of Eden. You don't have to for this to be interesting: just think of it all as a grand myth that I am taking as true for this argument. Because I think that it's interesting.
God then, in a very odd way, gets victimized. More like a parent gets victimized by a thieving child than a child's victimization by his or her parents. He got a raw deal. He gives humanity perfection and we want a little bit more. "I do and I do and I do for you, and this is the thanks I get?!"
[ Continue reading "Gifts Freely Given" ]New backend for the comments posted on these pages. You really want a TypeKey account (it's free and fairly anonymous, since all you need is an email account, easily gotten from Hotmail or Gmail) because otherwise I will be moderating your comments. This means that commenters not authenticated (with valid email address) will have to wait to see their comments on the page until I approve them. Which might be awhile depending on where I am.
So TypeKey can be convenient.
If I had a fairly straightforward way to use your Verisign or Thwate S/MIME keys, I would. Surely, that's out there! I'll look. Not that many of us are that geeky, but it would be cool to do. I always liked Thwate's idea of being each other's Certificate Authorities. Social software at its best.
I will be blocking all comments with language stronger than PG. I will also be blocking hate speech, or anything that Counsel says can be construed as hate speech. That is a pretty narrow definition, of course. This is not a public space but a publication for which I am responsible as the "owner".
The Creative Commons license remains the same for everything that gets published under manasclerk's The Power Struggle. You may want to add a copyright to your own comments ("copyright 2005 My Name - all rights reserved") to clarify your own rights if they differ from mine. I have non-commercial, no derivative and attribution. You can quote me, but you can't make money or a product on it, and you have to cite me as the author. Or at least my pseudonym.
Please email me if you run into any problems with posting comments as a result of the migration to MT 3.15. I also upgraded MT-Blacklist and may enable DSBL.
I just thought that this was funny. I have no idea what they're talking about. Okay, I have some idea but not much of one.
QUANTUM COMPUTING: Safer Coin Tosses Point to Better Way for Enemies to Swap Messages (p. 655)
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Charles SeifeIn an upcoming issue of Physical Review Letters, physicists describe an experiment in which a fair coin flip is performed quantum-mechanically; if one party tries to cheat, the deception is quickly revealed, something that scientists don't know how to guarantee with classical computers.
Full story at http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/307/5710/655a?etoc
It looks like Dick Grasso won no friends in the new NYSE management. Grasso had worked for the exchange for years before getting the boot when someone leaked that he had been paid US$140M in 2003. The exchange asked Winston & Strawn to investigate the matter and report. You can hear the directors screaming, "We're innocent! We didn't know! We took the blue pill!" The NY Times article on the report today is very entertaining, even though the editors obviously reigned in the reporters who wanted to dance around and sing "Grasso Going to Sing Sing!"
[The W&S report] says that of the $97.8 million [Grasso] received in compensation, at least $43.1 million was excessive. Of the $95.1 million in pension benefits he received, at least $70.1 million was deemed excessive. — NY Times, "Ex-Chief of Big Board Had 'Unfettered Authority'" by FLOYD NORRIS, February 3, 2005
If you've bothered reading Mark Van Clieaf's articles, to which I've posted links here in the past, you'd know that these are people who are already being paid too much saying that Grasso's pay was excessive by at least US$43M. From a felt-fair pay standard, the exchange actually overpaid Grasso by closer to US$70M. I consider that a goodly bit of money, even in these trying times. But then again, I don't earn more than I'm worth (regardless of what BIG and INFOSEC say!).
We have upgraded and it is glorious!
Well, actually it's just that it finally has proper support for non-IE browsers. 'bout time, I'd say.
I had some problems with the upgrade intially due to User Error: I had downloaded the tar ball for Full rather than Upgrade. Silly me. That error kept me from being able to log in, which meant I had to roll back. Doing this the right way is so very much easier.
My initial run, though, with the Windows ZIP upgrade, package didn't work very well. Of course. We run a *nix shop around here, folks! Of course, without shell access, that's pretty much moot, except in the perl scripts.
MT 3.x allows for finer control of the site, which I now need. Back when I was goofing off, it didn't mean a whole lot if I didn't have everything tightened down. I now worry about things and appreciate the improvements in administration that this upgrade provides.
In a comment to a post I wrote ("Seeing András"), G.J. posted a comment about New Pantagruel's upcoming interview with Romanian playwright András Visky. They will also be publishing some excerpts, hopefully in a decent English translation. I speak neither Romanian nor Hungarian — a deficit, surely — and I've not read anything but some talks and a few meditations.
I noticed that they currently have a piece by John Fea, who used to be Valpo's Tallest Fellow and is still an all-around swell guy.
For those of you in Bloomington, that's Pantagruel, not Pantagraph. And, no, I don't know what it means either, although I'm sure that someone once told me....
[UPDATE: