Snark DIY

The "Daisy" ad

Nice video version of the famous "Daisy" ad from the 1964 presidential campaign. Credited with damaging the Goldwater campaign by making the candidate seem extremist. Expect to see something like this in 2012 if Sarah Palin wins the Republican nomination

Tools

I discovered, or re-discovered, some command-line tools that should make my life easier. All are old and well documented, but for whatever I never full appreciated them.

1. screen. A GNU window manager. Screen allows you to create and manage new terminal sessions with simple control-key commands. You can even keep two or more open at the same time, though it can get a little cramped on a small terminal window.

2. mc. The Midnight Commander, an "orthodox" file manager. Lists the files from two directories in two separate windows, and integrates with the shell through a command line at the bottom of the screen. Very handy for renaming files and for copying and moving files between directories. Has a very handy and powerful editor, mcedit.

3. Blosxom. The classic minimal blog package. Your blog is updated by copying a text file into the "entries" directory. Can be used with any text editor, including mc/mcedit. mc can be used to blog remotely through its ftp function.

All three of these are good tools for creating, tracking, and posting text files. I can't believe it took me this long to see how all three can work together so powerfully.

TV Tropes quote

Wikipedia is currently the world's largest collection of explained jokes.

No Fair Oversimplifying Our Simplistic Philosophy

Andrew Drucker on the 24 types of libertarians.

Clubbing

Sam Biddle writes a series on being an unemployed philosophy graduate in NYC. In today's episode, he goes clubbing:

Were you to transcribe the conversations taking place, they would all be typed out in Comic Sans. Nobody in New York ever wants to be where they are at any given moment, and so bars and clubs serve mostly as a loud, dark place to text other people and ask what they're up to.

eWriting vs Writing

In the middle of a Slate piece on eBooks, reading, and Marshall McLuhan, Jan Swofford makes good points about writing in a word processor, with no hardcopy to proofread.

I've taught college writing classes for a long time, and after computers came in, I began to see peculiar stuff on papers that I hadn't seen before: obvious missing commas and apostrophes, when I was sure most of those students knew better. It dawned on me that they were doing all their work on-screen, where it's hard to see punctuation. I began to lecture them about proofing on paper, although, at first, I didn't make much headway. They were unused to dealing with paper until the final draft, and they'd been taught never to make hand corrections on the printout. They edited on-screen and handed in the hard copy without a glance. Handwriting is OK! I proclaimed. I love to see hand corrections! Then I noticed glitches in student writing that also resulted from editing on-screen: glaring word and phrase redundancies, forgetting to delete revised phrases, strangely awkward passages. I commenced an ongoing sermon: You see differently and in some ways better on paper than on computer. Your best editing is on paper. Try it and see if I'm right. You'll get a better grade. The last got their attention. The students were puzzled and skeptical at first, but the ones who tried it often ended up agreeing with me.

Tumblr Gem

A command-line Tumblr client that saves entries to local text files. Doesn't do pictures yet, but there's a workaround. From One Thing Well:

Much as I love Tumblr, it�s not perfect. The lack of data export or backup tools makes me nervous, the web interface is good, but requires an awful lot of clicking, and I haven�t been able to find a desktop client that can schedule posts. Enter The Tumblr Gem. It solves all these problems by letting me store posts as plain text files, using a format that�s simple, human-readable and portable.

Pick up the link from One Thing Well. I agree. I'm much more comfortable with blogging clients and platforms that save stuff in text files. That makes Blosxom very appealing, Wordpress less so.

Calcurse

Calcurse is a command line curses-based calendar system for Unixish systems (include Mac OSX). From the website:

calcurse is a text-based calendar and scheduling application. It helps keep track of events, appointments and everyday tasks. A configurable notification system reminds user of upcoming deadlines, and the curses based interface can be customized to suit user needs. All of the commands are documented within an online help system.

CLI Todo.Txt to-do list manager

For people who use the command line and don't like text editors:

If you've got a file called todo.txt on your computer right now, you're in the right place. Countless software applications and web sites can manage your to-do list with all sorts of bells and whistles. But if you don't want to depend on someone else's data format or someone else's server, a plain text file is the way to go. Problem is, you don't want to launch a full-blown text editor every time you need to add an item to your to-do list, or mark one that's already there as complete. With a simple but powerful shell script called todo.sh, you can interact with todo.txt at the command line for quick and easy, Unix-y access.

Requires Windows with Cygwin, Mac OSX.4 terminal window, or Ubuntu. Download here

Joseph O'Neill

Netherland won the PEN/Faulkner Award last week. A tour de force, in that its a Great American Novel with almost no Americans in its, centered on the least American of all pastimes, cricket. A choice quote: "There is a limit to what Americans can understand. That limit is cricket."

Big arsed text file

Matthew Cornell stores everything in one big text file. I mean, everything.

Rereading

I took a quick look at a couple of entires I wrote on Open Diary last year and was struck by how both mentioned that I was more interested in the tools of journalling than I was in writing journal entries; I was especially concerned with which platform I should use (NB, LJ, etc). Funny. The last couple of months I've done almost no online writing at all, and have probably written more in my Moleskine than I ever have before. A lot to be said about going with a choice, any choice.

Phillip Jose Farmer

...died, age 91. He wrote the "Riverworld" series and a total of 75 books and a ton of short stories in a long career. I especially liked And to Your Scattered bodies Go and the Joycean pastiche "Riders of the Purple Wage", both of which won Hugos. Kurt Vonnegut was not always a fan, though.

From the Delicious feed

Village Voice piece on Martha Cooper's photographs of repurposed postal labels.

Tim Ferriss on using Twitter. A strangely refreshing if not contrarian approach to using the service. For example, he recommends following only a few people.

Boston Review piece on Tan Lin, with an introduction by Charles Bernstein. Ambient textuality.

c2 discussion on perishable media. CDs are perishable. Hard drives are not. You're better off putting your stuff in the cloud, if you choose the right host.

Blosxoming

Spent a good part of the afternoon working on installing PyBlosxom here, and didn't have much success. I usually have some serious configuration issue (permissions, directory structure, etc.) and today was no different. It made me rethink the whole necessity of replacing the simple and small Blosxom with the larger and complicated PyBlosxom, given that for all practical purposes they do the same damned thing.

This is a test posting

This is a test of a new blosxom installation.

November 10 2008

Feeling that some parts of my journal work is getting a little darker--especially the bits about my mood and the way I behave when the kids get a little out of line. I don't want to publish that on LJ, as that is a little more public and doesn't need to be shared. I think another thing that needs to be written down is my distraction or distance from the things and people immediately around me. Overall feellings of depression, coming back harder in some ways. Also had a nasty image of suicide the other day--purchasing a gun, driving with it a couple of days later to a woods around sunset, leaving the car at the road and shooting myself without leaving a note. This came after the situation deteriorated on Saturday afternoon, when I lost my cool with AW in the Inlet. Its a typical reaction I had but this was more vivid than most ideations I have. Thinking last night that one of the most important and enjoyable things I do is write a journal, whether online or on paper. This after some time spent on Open Diary. Gives me some hope that I may be able to write my way out of this.