Very witty spoof interview between Brian Lamb and Paul of Tarsus. Final exchange:
BRIAN: What are your long range plans? Any future scrolls in the works?
PAUL: Well, as I say in the letters, the world is going to end shortly… so there wouldn’t really be much point.
BRIAN: The world’s going to end?
PAUL: Yes.
BRIAN: Now, did you write that to sell scrolls or do you really believe it?
PAUL: I believe it.
BRIAN: Is it going to end soon?
PAUL: We are living in the final days.
BRIAN: You’re sure?
PAUL: Oh yes! Many alive today will witness the end of the world. This is as absolutely and undeniably true as anything else I have written.
BRIAN: Paul Of Tarsus, thank you.
More blog work
This theme is called LactPlate. I like the clean look, but the text colours and header font are unfortunate. I’m still exploring the vast world of WordPress themes.
One thing that these themes are revealing is that I have far too many categories. I need to cut them down to a dozen or so. I’ve just found a neat plugin to do bulk category management, so when I get a chance….
In my previous blog (still available here) I hand-crafted a set of pages which I linked from the top of the sidebar. WordPress makes it easy to create such pages (even a hierarchy of such things), so I’m starting to migrate the content from the old files.
I still haven’t done anything with the blogroll and links. In the old blog, this material was hand-edited into the MT index template, with much use of [very] raw HTML. There’s no easy way to import this stuff: I’m going to have to do it by hand.
UPDATE: I think I’ve got the fonts the way I want them, including the mouse-overs, and I’ve started to make progress on the sidebar. I need to find a plugin to provide a better editor for new posts: right now it’s easier to author a comment (with live preview) than it is to enter the original blog item. The default handling for picture uploads is very crude….
UPDATE: I imported all of the entries from my old MT blog into the new one. However I’ve left the original pages around in read-only form to satisfy any links back from search engines and other blogs. I’ve also (just now) disabled all of the MovableType CGI’s, so any attempt to comment on the old content, or use the search function, will simply 404
Anyone who gets to my blog through RSS (directly or via an aggregator) shouldn’t notice any problems; I’ve added an .htaccess rule to rewrite the requests. In the long term it’ll be more efficient if you switch to the correct URI.
Still fiddling
I just installed a WordPress plugin to support comment preview and markup, and it seems to conflict with the complex stylesheet used by my previous theme. So I just reverted to the default theme.
Quick turn-around
It’s less than 36 hours since I got home from Los Angeles, and here I go again: off to Denver. After this trip, I should be home for quite a while – three or four weeks, perhaps….
Test posting using MarsEdit with the new blog
Let’s see what this looks like.
Debugging the new blog
This theme is promising. It’s based on Neuron, which I found at Alex King‘s archive of WP themes.
To-do list: push new RSS links to the various aggregators (and exeriment with an RSS redirector); import my blogroll; test MarsEdit compatibility.
Here’s how I’ve configured comments. The first time you submit a comment (with username and email address), I’ll have to approve it. If I do so, your subsequent comments will appear immediately. We’ll see how this works.
'It's just a goddamned piece of paper'
Yes, I know it’s from Capitol Hill Blue, but it certainly seems compelling:
Last month, Republican Congressional leaders filed into the Oval Office to meet with President George W. Bush and talk about renewing the controversial USA Patriot Act.
Several provisions of the act, passed in the shell shocked period immediately following the 9/11 terrorist attacks, caused enough anger that liberal groups like the American Civil Liberties Union had joined forces with prominent conservatives like Phyllis Schlafly and Bob Barr to oppose renewal.
GOP leaders told Bush that his hardcore push to renew the more onerous provisions of the act could further alienate conservatives still mad at the President from his botched attempt to nominate White House Counsel Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court.
“I don’t give a goddamn,” Bush retorted. “I’m the President and the Commander-in-Chief. Do it my way.”
“Mr. President,” one aide in the meeting said. “There is a valid case that the provisions in this law undermine the Constitution.”
“Stop throwing the Constitution in my face,” Bush screamed back. “It’s just a goddamned piece of paper!”
I’ve talked to three people present for the meeting that day and they all confirm that the President of the United States called the Constitution “a goddamned piece of paper.”
Best blog design
It’s that time of year… the Weblog awards for 2005. I was tempted to visit by a comment in a political blog, and stayed to review the finalists for the Best Blog Design. I wasn’t familiar with any of them, so I took a few minutes to visit each site. The most stunning image was this photograph on Antipixel, and I almost wound up voting for it. However I finally cast my ballot for Coming Anarchy. I love the details of the design – the presentation of block quotes, for instance – and the way that all of the elements work together to create a distinctive and harmonious style.
But I don’t want to bias you. All of the finalists are worth a visit. Check ’em out, then vote often.
Demythologizing the Beatles
The anniversary of John Lennon’s death leads Andrew to remind us of an excellent – and lengthy – 2001 piece from Reason magazine: Still Fab by Charles Paul Freund. Of course I gre up with the Beatles and experienced them as a purely British English phenomenon. As a result, I’ve never had any reason to doubt the standard account of how the Beatles conquered America and revolutionized rock’n’roll. My mistake.
“But there’s another nagging question raised by the new Beatlemania. Not just who are the Beatles now, but who were they then? New fans may be using the group for their own purposes, but then so did the original generation of fans. The years since the group’s breakup have seen a lot of myth-making and obscuring, in order to fit them better into a pliable narrative of the era and its aftermath. It is worth pausing to listen to the group anew in the context of their own time, because there are some lost chords in their music waiting to sound again.”
A multimodal attack… am I alone, or is this widespread?
On Sunday I noted that my blog was under attack from determined, but clueless, blogspam scriptkiddies. But that isn’t the only attack I’m seeing, and the second version is rather more disturbing – and puzzling.
What seems to have happened (or be happening) is that someone (or more likely a script) has looked up my name and phone number in several on-line directories, generated a plausible but invalid email address from my name (something like geoff53246@yahoo.com – not clear how variable this is), and then fired off email messages to various companies, apparently from this address, expressing interest in their products or services and asking the recipient to call my phone number. So far we’ve received 30 or 40 phone calls from various companies “responding to your inquiry”. The companies include the usual spam suspects – mortgage brokers, part-time MBA schools, etc. Most of these messages wind up on our answering machine, but from the few that we’ve picked up we’ve been able to piece together the above pattern. In some cases the name is correct; in others, it’s reversed. This is consistent with the entries for my phone number in various directories.
So what’s going on? It’s hard to know what to make of it.
I haven’t read about this elsewhere, so perhaps it’s directed against me personally, or against some group of which I’m a member. (Atheist bloggers? Subaru drivers? Mac users? Model airliner collectors?) On the other hand, the variations in my name suggest a dumb directory look-up. Is there some [twisted] rational purpose, or is this simply a random act of antisocial behaviour?
Like millions of others, we signed up for the national Do Not Call registry. This legislation was bitterly opposed by many telemarketers. Obviously those companies that are calling us interpret the forged emails as establishing “an existing business relationship”, so the “Do Not Call” rule no longer applies. This could be an attempt by someone to discredit the registry by flooding the world with “existing business relationships”. Or it could be driven by a single telemarketer who wants to subvert the rules so that they can make cold calls, but is disguising what they’re doing by ensuring that other companies also receive messages.
For a company that relies upon email referrals, this could be a devastating diversion of resources, a kind of DDOS. Perhaps this is an attack on one company (disguised among the crowd), for malicious or blackmail purposes.
This could also be an attack on Yahoo. By generating a huge volume of annoying, expensive messages apparently from Yahoo addresses, the perpetrators might expect that spam filters would be trained to reject all messages from Yahoo.
If you’ve experienced anything like this, or have another explanation, I’d love to hear from you. Normally I’d ask you to add a comment to this blog piece, but due to the other spam problem, comments are presently disabled. Perhaps you could send email to my Gmail account – firstname.lastname@gmail.com. (You can work it out.) Since this kind of attack is almost certainly illegal, I shall also be contacting the appropriate authorities – probably the Massachusetts Attorney General. Thanks.