harpojaeger.com

In the spirit of full disclosure, I am probably going to switch to a different web host sometime soon.  Currently, I use GoDaddy to host this site, and the harpojaeger.com domain is also registered with them.  renaissanceboy.org, my first domain, which now redirects here, is registered with DirectNic, the company I was using at the time.

The reasons I want to switch are complicated.  For a while, I’ve been impressed by GoDaddy’s low prices but dismayed by their site’s operation in a technical sense; it is confusing and slow.  In addition, I have never been fully supportive of their marketing techniques, which are frequently subtly, sometimes blatantly, sexist, base, and calculative.  I have never really devoted much thought to it, but my father mentioned to me that there was a movement afoot to ditch GoDaddy because of these tactics, and he directed me to this article.  It sums up the issues at play very well.

I was already aware of DreamHost, having worked for a client who used it, and the other hosting service the article linked to, LunarPages, looks excellent as well.  I am going to spend some time in the near future researching different services, and will probably make the switch soon.  I think I will also consolidate all of my domain names to the same registrar, ideally the same company that’s doing the hosting.  This should make stuff a lot easier.

I am trying out a poll plugin for WordPress.  If it works, I may start having a Poll of the Week or something like that.  The current one (tonic water) comes from a discussion I had at school about how AWESOME tonic water is.  My classmates were not so refined as I on this matter.  I had a FABULOUS day on Friday because I began it by drinking a glass of tonic water, but my peers remain unconvinced.

Vote, vote, vote.  Unless you are a felon.  ’Cause felons can’t vote.

It has been almost a week since I wrote a post that was an actual post, not a sonnet.  It has been nice to have a break, because I am still gathering my thoughts about how I want to continue blogging, and what form I want this blog to take in the future.  Once I go to college, I think it will probably start to focus more on the things I am working on there.  I am also thinking of starting some kind of separate political blog, whether associated with Brown or not, or perhaps just starting to write more about politics on this blog.

In other news, I am going to see Watchmen at midnight on opening night.  I am approximately as excited as I was for Quantum of Solace, and I have heard good things about this film.

I’ve made some back-end changes to the Exquisite Corpse page. I have been having problems with the script; the component that assigns a unique id to each poem for internal identification was malfunctioning. Sometimes more than one poem would end up with the same id, and since the script that displays completed poems didn’t know what to do, it would only show one. Thus, there were several completed poems that were not being displayed. I think I have fixed the problem by having the script renumber poems when they are completed. This has the added advantage of having the poems now proceed in numerical order according to when they were ended, not when they were begun. It should look nicer as well as operating more smoothly.

What an exhausting week.  We have been working very hard at school, and combined with the fact that I’m getting very little physical exercise in the winter, I have been both physically and mentally worn-out.  It will be good to have a calming night tonight.

Tomorrow I will be in Boston all day at the Berklee High School Jazz competition.  This will be a ton of fun, especially if we win.  It will be fun even if we don’t, though; we will get to see a ton of really good music, and generally have an exciting time.

I have been working on a really cool piece of code that I hope to finish soon.  When I do, I am going to put it up in the Projects section.  It is based on software that I saw demonstrated at Olin College of Engineering when I toured there.  I will say no more until it is finished, but it is really awesome.

I have upgraded this site to WordPress 2.7. This is a big deal. Although the site doesn’t really look that different (read: at all), the administrator backend is much easier to use, and has a bunch of really great new features. It was a rather complicated upgrade, though, because I was not just upgrading a single WordPress 2.6.x install. Rather, I had been running WordPress MU, the multi-user version of WordPress. So I had to manually back up and reimport my data to the site, which took quite a while. I am no longer using MU, since it hasn’t been updated to 2.7 yet, and since I am no longer hosting the LC(A) Plog here anymore. MU was just getting too complicated to administer, as it has special needs. A lot of plugins and modifications built for WordPress don’t work with MU, and my site is a lot simpler to run now.

I heard Alice’s Restaurant on the radio in the car today. I was on the way to Stop & Shop, which turned out to be closed, as was Bigy Y and Wal-Mart. Our pies are going to have to go crustless.
We are on our way to our friends’ house in Ashfield for Thanksgiving.
Over the past 24 hours, I have gained a lot of respect for the New York Times. As the crisis in India has unfolded, they have been posting updates, and, more importantly, calls for information. To be sure, this is not a new or original practice in news agencies; the BBC (another news organization I regard highly) does it quite often as well, but this is at a higher level than I’ve seen before. At the heart of this practice is an admission that one person or entity can’t know everything. The New York Times has been asking for eyewitness reports, stories, reactions, as well as just basic information. This particular incident has been singular in terms of its unknown origins; the “group” that has claimed responsibility is reminiscent of Quantum from the new James Bond movie, ironically enough, in that no one has ever heard of it. Whether it was created as a front for just this particular instance or it has really been operating under the radar for some time, it’s disturbing. I know I speak for others as well as myself when I say that our thoughts are with those who’ve been affected by this tragedy, as well as those who felt so desperate that this was all they could do.
I’ve been thinking a lot about this kind if thing recently. I have a bunch of close friends in Israel and Palestine at the moment, and it has been interesting hearing about their experiences. I also had an intriguing conversation with a gentleman who came into the shop a few days ago. He works in that same area as a peace organizer and mediator. Although we didn’t talk for long, I felt as though I learned a lot just from the way he conducted himself and spoke about the issues. One thing I really appreciated was that he was thoughtful enough to be able to put ideology and beliefs aside and agree that everyone involved in the conflict was acting in a deplorable manner.
Today is a good day to consider what we have and are thankful for as well as what we wish for others. May everyone be as lucky as I and those I know to have family friends who love us, security, and dignity.

Several exciting things have recently transpired. First, I am going to see Quantum of Solace again tomorrow after school with a bunch of friends. I am looking forward to this; I knew I wanted to see it again after the first time – like Casino Royale, it needs further consideration to be fully appreciated.
I have also made some interesting back end changes to this site which are making my life a lot easier. I’ve switched from the WP-reCaptcha anti-comment-spam plugin to Akismet, which is more popular, and, as popular software often (but not always) is, better. Instead of requiring extra input from the user, Akismet has its own database and spam-filtering algorithms which are highly effective. WP-reCaptcha worked perfectly, clearly, since it prevents computers from posting comments in the first place, but Akismet is nice because it (so far) has had the same effect without making the user’s job more difficult. Further updates on the use of this plugin as I continue.
I have also installed the WordPress.com Stats plugin, which ties a self-hosted WordPress or WordPress MU blog (such as this one) into WordPress.com’s stats algorithms. It’s only been running for a day, so there’s not much for me to see, but it has a lot of interesting features, and I think it may help me a lot in making this site more interesting and easy to use.
Finally, I am going to take my recertification exam tonight. For real this time.

I’ve just finished writing a new contact form for the site. Up until now, I’ve been using a WordPress plugin to generate the form, but I got tired of not having enough control over it. It seems to work fine, and looks rather similar to the one I had before.
I also bought a snazzy new Apple Aluminum keyboard and a Bluetooth mouse, taking advantage of my employee discount today at work. They not only look cool, but work much better. Typing is so much easier now, and I have cleared up a significant amount of space – my old mouse was a Microsoft wireless, and it had a big clunky receiver plugged in. Bluetooth is far superior.
Bedtime.

I’ve made a minor change to the script that powers the Exquisite Corpse page, because I’ve noticed a tendency for people to end a lot of poems at once. This is wonderful, except it means that there aren’t always that many poems running, which can tend to slow stuff down since people start getting their own lines back very quickly. Therefore, I’ve modified it so that when you submit a line or end a poem, you are then only prompted with the “start a new poem” form. It’s not meant to entirely prevent people from immediately contributing to another poem; you can just click on the link in the sidebar again to completely refresh the page. It’s just to encourage you to start new poems as well. Hopefully if there are more poems running at once, the general activity will be higher.
Please feel free to let me know what you think of this feature, as I’m trying to make this page as simple and effective as possible.