• 
  Please support me in the 2010 Ride to Conquer Cancer - last year we were able to raise $6.9 million for the Alberta Cancer Foundation - hopefully we can raise even more in 2010!

  ---

• Search for:

• Pages

  • About
    • Colophon
    • Contact
    • Curriculum Vitae
    • Presentations
  • Archives
    • Recent Comments
    • Shared Items
  • Asides
  • Photography
  • WordPress
    • Akismet Credit Inserter
    • Post Revision Display

• Categories

  • aside
  • digital photography sessions
  • fun
  • general
  • photography
  • work

• Blog under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License
  

Who knew? I just took a blog that had been languishing under MovableType 4.01 and migrated it over to the shiny new WordPress 2.6.3

The MovableType export format is still importable into WordPress with little trouble. I wrote a MovableType template to export all blog post titles and URLs so I could craft a .htaccess file to preserve old URLs, and that took a few minutes to work through reformatting from a plain dump to usable .htaccess structure with Redirect 301 directives. But not difficult, with the help of TextMate and regular expressions

The hardest part – by far – of the process was figuring out file locations, permissions, etc… on the target server. The migration was trivial once I worked that out.

Here’s the MT Template I used to generate the text that got processed into the .htaccess file for wordpress. There’s probably a better way, but this worked for me.

Google Earth. On my iPod Touch. Seriously. This app is fracking amazing. Pinch to zoom or rotate. Tilt the iPod to tilt the view. The controls are so smooth and intuitive that I was actually disappointed when the view didn’t rotate as I spun my chair around. Maybe on a fancy schmancy iPhone 3G? Still – VERY cool app. Well done, Google Earth team!

D’Arcy’s bike commuter tip #32: Always, no matter how early it is on a Monday, and no matter how tired you are, always check your tire pressure before starting a ride.

D’Arcy’s bike commuter tip #33: It is actually possible to ride for 10km on a nearly flat front tire, after discovering that it was nearly flat after riding on it for 4km, by putting all of your weight on the rear tire and unlocking the front suspension fork. Surprisingly, once you get the hang of it, you can actually go nearly full speed on an almost flat front tire if you’re careful about braking and bumps.

which of these things is not like the other? a few other places I’d rather be right now…

I just had to uninstall the TanTanNoodles Simple Spam Filter from UCalgaryBlogs.ca – it’s a simple plugin that uses a dictionary lookup to try to detect what it thinks are REALLY obvious spam comment attempts. But it was a bit overzealous. Instead of just modifying the dictionary to remove some valid words (which words are valid? who gets to decide that? in which contexts?), I decided to just delete the plugin outright so that comments can be posted without censorship.

The problem showed up when a student tried to write a comment on a blog post, and used the word “rape” in the text of the comment. Simple Spam Filter threw a flag on the play, and the comment evaporated. Not cool. The student is now suspicious of the blog service, and is wondering if we’re censoring or filtering their conversations. Totally the WRONG feeling for a productive and engaging blog community. I’ve deleted the plugin, and hopefully assured the student that there was no intention of censoring their conversation.

Fun with antispam. Thanks again, Google, for making this such a wonderful problem to have to keep dealing with. It’s so thoroughly rewarding, having to battle spammers and work to make sure valid content gets around the filters that have to be constructed to prevent spammers from gaming Googlejuice.

I can’t wait for November 5. The silly mudslinging meanness will go away for awhile. It’s not like the ads actually sway votes anyway. Take the high road, people.

I deleted my twitter account. After posting almost 11,000 tweets over a year and a half. And I don’t miss it. I don’t regret it.

Twitter is a strange, unique beast. At first blush, it’s a tool to connect people and to share information.

But that’s not really what twitter is, at all.

Twitter is probably one of the most powerful experiments in behaviorist conditioning ever crafted. Neither Pavlov’s dogs nor Skinner’s pigeons were as well trained as the thousands of people madly clicking refresh refresh refresh refreshrefreshrefreshREFRESH in the hopes of scoring a quick high from fresh information (or worse – using the desktop apps that display the updates instantly).

What twitter claims to do, it does astonishingly well. Ad hoc informal groups, defined and refined by each member according to the people they are interested in. No other service provides quite the same level of transparent control and flexibility for each and every individual.

But when I post a tweet, or read someone else’s, it is not as it seems. It feels as though there is some form of tight connection, a baring of souls, a bond. But that’s not possible, given the limit of 140 bytes of ASCII text.

Which means that twitter is really nothing more than a giant plastic piano, with it’s members the chickens obsessively pecking at keys until food pellets are released. We’re not aware of the keys, the piano, nor of the song we’re being trained to play.

I keep coming back to one thing. Who is paying for twitter, and why? It’s not advertising. At least Facebook is clearly partially financed by advertising revenue.

The only value I see in twitter, from a financial point of view, that even comes close to justifying the expense if providing the service, is to teach The Machine. The constant tweeting, linking, geopositioning updates are providing a vast database which can then be mined. But why, and by whom?

So I decided to opt out of this strange experiment.

One thing I’ve found is that by removing myself from the Pavlovian update/response feedback loop, I feel as though my thinking is clearer. I’m more present. I’m not constantly distilling my life into 140 character chunks, nor am I constantly wondering if there are any @dnorman tweets waiting for me.

Another thing I find is that I now use richer and deeper channels of communication. I’m not trying to stuff conversations into short asynchronous segments. I’m talking in realtime via IM. I’m communicating in more depth via email. I’m writing more and better blog posts.

One thing that surprised me is the reaction from people. Some seem to think this is some extreme or scary act. How could someone possibly delete their twitter account? wow!

But twitter is just a website. It’s not even my website. Someone else’s website. Nothing more. Deleting the account means absolutely nothing. Anyone that is truly interested in knowing what I’m doing will use any of the countless other channels (like, for instance, my blog posts) to find out. Anyone that really cares about what I’m doing is already connected to me on so many other channels that dropping the connection via twitter will have no effect.

So long, twitter. It’s been fun. But I need to stop pecking keys and waiting for food pellets.

now that I’m not obsessively hitting refresh on twitter.com I seem to have so much more free time online. It sounds silly, but my “check in” process used to hang on twitter, and now it only takes a couple of minutes to check in on everyone and everything I care about…

I just deleted my twitter account. I’m not going anywhere. I’m not looking for reactions. I’m not dropping out. I’m still online, still available, and still easily contacted via better channels. If you need to contact me, try the contact form on my blog, or IM (dnorman@mac.com), or Skype (dlnorman), email (contact at darcynorman.net), etc… I’ll likely write more about why I deleted my twitter account, but for now it’s just gone.

I was a hardcore Star Trek geek as a kid. Who wasn’t, really? Captain Kirk going all maverick on the galaxy, finding cool new planets, and nailing hot alien babes. Space is cool! I think I watched every episode at least a couple dozen times – yay syndicated reruns – but for some reason it’s the first motion picture version of the franchise (released in 1979) that really affected me.

V’Ger.

Holy crap. The Voyager space probe, damaged and worn. And pissed off, looking for its creator.

So, we fire off some probes into space. We don’t have the technology to really track them, or communicate with them. 300 years later, one is found by a mechanical civilization, and taken in as an injured entity. Repaired, as well as it could be, then sent home. Hindsight makes it pretty clear that this is at least the precursor to the Borg storylines – mechanical civilizations, attempts to communicate with them, etc…

It brought up all kinds of issues that have nothing to do with science fiction – do we have a responsibility to the things we create? What does it mean to be “the creator”? What does this mean with respect to religion, theology and belief in general?

The effects in the movie are completely laughable – the psychedelic optical effects are stunningly lame compared to the film resolution digital effects of today – but the premise of the movie struck me as profound. Our actions have consequences – they may be far in the future, far away, in ways unimaginable to us now, but our actions have consequences.

Of course, the movie franchise has been mind-blowingly inconsistent. Basically, the even-numbered movies were pretty good (KHANNNNNNN!!!!! KHAAAAAAANNNNNNN!!!!!!!), the odd-numbered movies pretty much sucked, but they all feel like bubblegum pop filler. V’Ger was a game changer though.

← Previous Page — Next Page →