I took the site offline yesterday in solidarity with the Electronic Frontiers Foundation and other organizations to protest impending US congressional action on “copyright protection” bills.
As a published author I’m happy to have the government enforce copyright laws so that I get paid for my work. But the current proposals are heavy-handed attempts by the entertainment industry to stack the deck in their favor. I’m tired of this. I want copyright protections to make sense both socially and technologically. I want due process when someone’s web site is threatened with closure.
GoDaddy did something weird to their hosting packages a while back. When I tried to upgrade my Cryptosmith blog to the new package, it took them WEEKS to do the migration.
So this time I took matters into my own hands. I created a completely new hosting account and I’m migrating the stuff myself.
The site will probably be down for a couple of hours while they switch the domain name from the old host to the new host, but things should come right back up after that.
Continue reading 'A Mini-Migration'»
This is an arcane bit of trivia from the Scouting movement. Traditional scouting groups like packs, patrols, crews, posts, and so on, are chartered through a community organization that is already involved in education and service to youth. This approach arose in England when LTG Robert Baden-Powell collaborated with others to establish an organized scouting movement.
The scouting group renews its charter every year here in the US, and the local Boy Scout council issues a charter to the sponsoring community organization, called the charterd organization.
The local commissioner is a volunteer who visits individual scouting groups on behalf of the local council. Commissioners are usually organized into districts and communities, and take care of packs, troops, crews, etc., in their own neighborhoods. Charter renewal gives the commissioner an annual opportunity to meet with a chartered organization’s leadership, report on the benefits produced by their scouting units, and thank them for their sponsorship.
So, here are my thoughts on how to present a charter.
Continue reading 'Charter Presentations for Scouting Units'»
This question arose in an after-dinner conversation last night. A quick Google search on nearby phones uncovered little to clear up the subject, so I figured it was my duty to post something about it.
I admit I’m not up on the state of the art in zombie movies. Most of my knowledge was acquired from cheesy horror comics in my youth. Of course, everything we know about zombies comes from media depictions: written stories, TV, and movies. So the question of zombie odor doesn’t really apply to audiences. “Smellivision” was never a popular concept.
So, what do zombies smell like?
Continue reading 'Do Zombies Stink?'»
We were out about town the night before elections and found this:
The location is both a church and a designated polling place for the next-day election.
A row of parked cars indicated a meeting in progress. When we wandered past later, the meeting had broken up. Cooler and wiser heads must have prevailed, since the sign had disappeared.
Continue reading 'Election Eve Schenanigans'»
Things seem to be moving forward on much of the proposed Hastings river bridge. The pic below is an artist’s rendering of downtown near the replacement bridge. This shows the ‘arch’ alternative – they still haven’t decided if it will be an arch or ‘cable’ design.
Two additional riverfront projects emerged while planning this bridge: 1) moving the electrical substation that blights the riverfront landscape, and 2) building a pedestrian ‘spiral’ – homage to the long-gone Hastings Spiral Bridge – to connect downtown and the pedestrian walkway on the bridge deck.
Neither of these will be part of the bridge project.
Continue reading 'The Bridge and The Riverfront'»
Joan Walsh of Salon made an apt observation today, when commenting on Rush Limbaugh, who is currently hospitalized. She thinks it’s impolitic to hit Rush on this, even though he’s never shied away from hitting others when (literally) down:
“There’s no liberal Rush Limbaugh, because most liberals don’t have a taste for cruelty as entertainment or political sport.”
I think she’s right, though such high-mindedness does pose a challenge for progressive and/or liberal people. I think that good causes can be promoted with humor and the sharp side of the tongue. Florida Rep. Alan Grayson gave a great example when he argued that opposition to health care reform was “pro death.”
I hope that some day soon our own humorist-turned-Senator Al Franken can find his voice.
Continue reading 'Fighting the Good Fight'»
Jack is the newest member of our family:
3437
He’s a four year old Australian Shepherd whose owners moved into too-small of an apartment. It must have been awful to give him up, because Jack is a terrific dog. He can catch a tennis ball in the air, and he knows “cookie on the nose,” though he doesn’t quite do that one for us (not yet, anyway).
Jack may look a little morose in the picture (I don’t think he liked the flash) but you haven’t seen exuberance until you’ve seen him jump in the air while chasing a tennis ball.
I’ve been using the Canon Rebel XSi for about a year and a half now, and it’s definitely THE camera for aging yuppies. I need reading glasses, and that makes many cameras hard to use.
The Rebel Xsi is a classic single lens reflex – SLR. The viewfinder shows you what the lens sees. It has an eyepiece adjustment so I can use the viewfinder without glasses. In addition, the XSi has an extra large display screen on the back. While I can’t use it to carefully judge an exposure, it does display the camera settings in really large type. Yuppie sized type.
[Update: there's a newer model: the Canon Rebel T1i
. This one boasts 15 megapixels and built-in High Def video capture. I haven't seen one of these in the flesh, but the PR suggests it has a comparably large dispay on the back, and the essential eyepiece adjustment]
Continue reading 'A camera for aging yuppies'»
Real Winter has arrived at our home today. The Weather Service calls it ‘blizzard conditions’ so I skipped the rush-hour trip to a volunteer breakfast in St. Paul.
There is an honest-to-gosh snow drift in the driveway. Next door, I hear Mark running his snowblower. No doubt that’s my exercise for today.
Comments (0) 
Themocracy