Tom Edelson

You never forget your first blog.  Later on, your technique may get more sophisticated; but for the shock, the revelation of what it feels like to pour yourself out so intimately, there's nothing like the first time.

My first time was with Radio Userland.  I picked up a copy of The Rough Guide to Blogging, and chose among the blogging platforms listed there.  If I remember correctly, what drew me to Radio (as people "in the know" call it, for short) was that it keeps a copy of all your posts on your own computer.  And ... at least partly to facilitate that ... it's a software package that you install, as well as an online service that hosts the blogs.

I realize that this might not strike everyone as a plus, but what can I say?  I'm a geek.

When I joined LiveJournal last November, my original intention was to split my blogging presence: still to use Radio for posts that were specifically aimed at other computer geeks, and to put things intended for a wider audience here, on LJ.

As it turned out, I didn't do any hard-core techie posts for the next seven months or so; during that time, the old blog was largely moribund.

And then came The Announcement.  Userland Software, the company that runs the Radio Userland site, would be closing it on December 31, 2009.  No more Radio blog, for me or anybody else, after then.

I can't say I'm too surprised.  Radio Userland had at least one big disadvantage in the marketplace of blogging services: it wasn't free.  You had to pay about $40 a year to have a blog there.

Still, I am sad to see it disappear.

What will happen to all the deathless prose that I posted there?  The short answer is that I am in the process of copying most of it to my LiveJournal.

In doing so, I am taking advantage of one of the features of LJ: the fact that you can set the "posting date" of a LiveJournal entry to be whatever you want, not necessarily the actual date on which you put it here.  This is perfect for moving over entries from an old blog: you can set the "posting date" on LJ to be the real original posting date. 

In my case, that means that for entries that I copy from Radio Userland to LiveJournal, the apparent posting date will be the date that it was posted on Radio Userland.  So the apparent chronology of all my journal entries (both the ones copied from Radio, and the ones that were posted here directly in the first place) will also, in a sense, be real: it will be the real chronology of when I [first] posted these entries somewhere on the Internet.

By the way, keeping a copy of each post on your computer, as the Radio Userland software does for you, is actually a good thing ... as becomes more apparent now, when I want to move this content somewhere else.

I rather hope that this journal entry, the one you are reading now, will come to the attention of others who have a Radio Userland blog.  I'm not sure that all those people even know that the service will be closing: Userland Software didn't send out an e-mail about it to their users, they just put it on their corporate Web site (and in an RSS feed to which I happened to have subscribed, which is how I found out about it).

Suppose that you are such a person: you have a Radio blog.  Suppose that you like the idea of moving (at least some of) its content into LiveJournal.  But suppose you don't know how to go about it.  Then I invite you to contact me, and I will let you know how I am doing it.

In fact, if there is any significant amount of interest in this, I might be able to create a more automated method for doing the transfers than the one that I am using now.  Or better yet, if there are several of us in a similar situation, and who have some geek tuits available, we can do it together.

My move to Marshall (a little town in western North Carolina, about twenty miles outside Asheville) is complete. I'm not done unpacking or settling in, but all my stuff is here, and I no longer have a place to live in Cary. This has been true for about a week.

I am feeling good about it. There's the occasional flash of nervousness, of feeling like I've lost the security blanket of the familiar. But mostly, it's turning out like I expected: a good setting for exploring the depths within, but it's not difficult to work in as much human contact as I want or feel I need.

The other day I brought home some take-out Chinese food. The order turned out to contain one of those genetic freaks of nature: a fortune cookie with two fortunes in it. What struck me was that the two fortunes, together, had a meaning that they wouldn't have had separately.

The first one: "Your heart is pure, and your mind is clear, and soul devout."

The second: "Now is the time to try something new."

I have made a decision: I will rent, and perhaps later buy, a "log cabin" in Marshall, NC (about 21 miles outside of downtown Asheville).

This home belongs to a member of Asheville Friends Meeting (Quakers), where I've attended Meeting for Worship during each of my visits to Asheville (now six of them, so far). I've known since April that the cabin was available for purchase. But only in late June did I find out that I could rent it, and move in, first, and then decide whether to buy it. I found out by asking that specific question, after it suddenly it occurred to me that that would be my first choice.

In my previous post, I emphasized climate (specifically, summer heat) as my first and greatest motivation for moving out of the Triangle. So it is worth noting that Marshall, and this cabin in particular, are further up in the mountains than Asheville, and consequently, generally a little bit cooler than Asheville itself. At the moment, according to the feed from Weather Underground on my iGoogle home page, the difference is slight: 85 [degrees Fahrenheit] in Cary, 75 in Asheville, 74 in Marshall.

The processing of moving has already begun; I'm doing it gradually. I won't actually give up the apartment in Cary until Friday, August 21.

Here's my new address:

96 Country Cove Lane
Marshall, NC 28753

My postal mail is being forwarded there already.

If you'd like other updated contact information, contact me directly. (If you don't have any other way to do so, but you are a LiveJournal member, you can use the internal "e-mail" facility provided by LJ itself.) One part of what's available: a link to my Google Calendar, which should, among other things, allow you to to ascertain in which end of North Carolina I am located on any given day.

As I mentioned in passing, a couple of posts ago, I don't much like the summer weather where I live now. Too hot, too humid, and it lasts too damn long.

Where I live now is Cary, NC, in what is known as the "Triangle" region (the points of said triangle being Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill). Most of North Carolina wouldn't be significantly different, weather-wise.

Folks who know me in meatspace have been listening to me complain about the summer weather for years. And for years, they've heard me say that I intended to do something about it, by moving someplace where the summers are cooler. I would talk about one potential destination for a while, then another; but it was pretty well all in my head: I wasn't doing anything about it.

Until this year. This calendar year, in fact, beginning in January. (It could have been a New Year's resolution, I guess, but it wasn't; I don't do those.)

What did I do in January? I made my first visit to Asheville. For those of you who don't know the place, it's the largest city in the far Western part of North Carolina, which is to say, the mountainous part. And being up in the mountains, it's cooler. I'm not under any illusions that Asheville's summers are as cool as those in, say, San Francisco, but it is almost always significantly cooler than here.

I have since visited Asheville and its environs three more times. I skipped February and March, but went there twice in April, and once in late May. I have friends there now ... including some of the members and attenders of the Asheville Friends Meeting.

By now, I am almost certain that I will be moving to that area. I find it attractive because of the weather, and for a lot of other reasons. In almost every important respect, it seems at least as good a place to live (for me) as here, and in several respects significantly better.

I am not yet certain just where in that area I will choose to live, nor when I will make the move; but as to the latter, it should be within a few months. I may need to make it through the rest of this summer in the Triangle, but I really don't expect that there will be another.

Ironically, so far, this summer here in the Raleigh area hasn't been bothering me as much as most previous ones did. I can think of reasons why this might be so: too many reasons, in fact. Perhaps I will speculate about them in another post.

This isn't YouTube, so I don't know how to embed it; instead, here's a good, old-fashioned link to a video that some may find as entertaining as I did:

www.elwp.com/Joe%20Cocker.html

What is it? Joe Cocker, singing at Woodstock, 1969. His lyrics are kind of hard to follow -- just a guess here, but he may have been smoking those rugs -- so subtitles are helpfully provided. Imaginative, funny ones. With graphics. Tag line: "Do you remember the sixties? .... I don't think Joe did."

Nuff said?

I am writing this in the lobby of a Days Inn in Asheville, NC. I'm here, making my second visit to Asheville, because I am thinking of moving here. I worshiped this morning at the Asheville Friends Meeting, as I did on my previous visit, in January.

I am cautiously optimistic that I'm going to make this move.

Part of my motivation is to live in a place where the summer is not so long, hot, and humid. It looks like I'll have the opportunity to spend a fair bit of time here this summer, before deciding "for good" whether this town sufficiently fulfills that criterion.

The visit to Asheville is only the last stop in a long, roundabout journey, which began Thursday, April 2, and will end tomorrow, Monday, April 13, with my return to Cary (my current town of residence; near Raleigh, NC). At the beginning of the trip, I stopped off in Bethesda, MD, to spend some time with a friend (who was also my first wife).

The next destination: Lyme, CT, where my uncle Dave lives. (I've never gotten around to asking him why he chose to live in a town named after a disease. ;-) A week ago -- Sunday, April 5 -- I was there for the celebration of his 90th birthday. My parents are gone, and Dave is the last of five aunts and uncles, on both sides, that I ever knew.

Then I traveled directly from Connecticut to Asheville, not by way of the Raleigh area. Actually, if you look at a map, it makes sense: Interstate 81 is a lot more pleasant to drive than Interstate 95.

The trip has also served as a "rolling meditation", or spiritual retreat. It has given me perspective: allowed me to shift much of my attention from the concerns of the moment to things that are more important to me in the long run.

I believe that travel has been known to do this before.

The time is about right: I'm ready to get home, and get to work, preparing for the next step.

This post was created via the Jabber protocol, from my LiveJournal account, using iChat on my Mac. Cool!

In yesterday's journal entry, I noted in passing that I like to get comments.  So I thought I'd mention that it's now possible to comment on an entry in my journal without being a LiveJournal member oneself.

In order to do so, you will first have to pass a CAPTCHA test (type in some words that have been shown to you in squiggly form; this is supposed to prove that you are human).  And your comment won't be visible to others until I have seen it and blessed it.  Neither of these requirements applies to logged-in LiveJournal users.

Still, I did want to make it possible for the "casual reader" to leave me a comment, if one so desires.  If you do so, remember that I will have no way of knowing who left it, unless you leave some indication of your identity as part of the comment itself.

Thank you.

In the post titled Software bird flies the nest, which appeared on 2009-03-02, I announced the availability of jGnash 1.12.0, a new version of a software package which I help to maintain.  As I said there, the new release should be of particular interest to Macintosh users, since the most important changes from the previous release were fixes for a set of bugs which only affected Mac users.

(Note that when I say "the previous release", I mean the previous one in the 1.x series, namely, 1.11.7.)

I'd like to thank everyone who commented on that journal entry.  I like getting comments on any of my entries: I'm something of an attention junkie these days.  But when the comment expresses interest in something I've helped to produce, that provides a particularly valuable kind of encouragement to continue to work on it.

I think jGnash is a very good program (of course, I'm not biased or anything); but documentation is not one of its strongest suits.  The releases in the jGnash 1.x series, in particular, have no help system built into the program.  (The latest releases in the 2.x series do have one, though I understand it doesn't have much content in it, yet.)

Anyway, consider this a request for feedback from anyone who has a go at installing and using jGnash, and encounters any difficulty in doing so.  I will do what I can to help out.  That applies more directly to the 1.x series, with which I am much more familiar: my primary role on the jGnash team is to make fixes to the 1.x series, for the benefit of those who prefer not to (or can't) use the jGnash 2.x series of releases.  (But if you have questions on the 2.x releases, I will certainly put you in touch with someone who should be able to answer them.)

Which sort of brings us around to the question: who would want to use the 1.x series, when the 2.x series is available?  The short (and incomplete) answer is: many Macintosh users, who can't run 2.x without installing additional "third-party" software.

A much more complete answer is given in the README.txt file, which was included in the 1.12.0 release.  As you will see if you go to the download page for the release at SourceForge.net, this file can be downloaded all by itself.  It seemed to me that you shouldn't have to download the whole 1.12.0 release, just in order to find out, from the README file, that you'd rather be using a 2.x release.

One small problem: as a plain text file created on a Macintosh, README.txt is not maximally readable on Windows.  For example, it looks like a mess in a simple-minded Windows text editor like Notepad.

Oops, my bad.  Here's what I've decided to do about it, for this release: to put the entire README file, behind a cut, in this LiveJournal post.  Then I can send out e-mail to the jGnash users' mailing list, directing them here.  As a side benefit, I make it particularly easy for my devoted LiveJournal readers to learn more about jGnash.

 

( You know you want to README ... )

No, he (or she) is not actually my dog. The original of the image may be found in this album at Ringworld.org. It (the image) is by Kristene and [/or] Scott, who apparently live in the Minneapolis area; and since the title of the album is "Dog Park", I suspect that the dog isn't theirs, either.

Their newer work may be found in this collection of albums at Picasa.

And in case you're wondering why I'm telling you all this: well, it seems like The Right Thing To Do to give them credit; but also, the original image is under a Creative Commons license with attribution required, so here goes: "Images are © Scott and Kristine Dier 2000-2004".

Lifted, with thanks, from so_zanie:

Entertainers Paul and Storm propose a well-thought-out solution to one small part of the homeless problem.

And the tune is catchy, too.

A woman hangs up the telephone, then turns to her husband with a puzzled look on her face. "Bill," she says, "some man just called and said he wanted to eat the cat."

Back on Friday (2008-02-27), I finished something that I'm very glad to have done. I released a new version of a software package, jGnash 1.12.0.

jGnash is a personal finance program. You know, like Quicken. It doesn't have as many bells and whistles as Quicken for Windows, but it should meet most people's needs. And, unlike Quicken, jGnash has the same functionality on a Macintosh that it has on Windows. jGnash works on Linux, too, where Quicken, last I heard, isn't available at all.

And jGnash is open source. And free.

This particular new release is especially relevant to Macintosh users, as I will explain below.

 

( read more ... )

 

Actually, this one is a riddle. I'll post the answer, as a comment, in a couple of days, if no one guesses it before then.

The legend is that a well-known English saying was given to a Japanese student, enrolled in a beginning English class, who was asked to translate it into Japanese. The resulting Japanese text was then given to an American student, enrolled in a beginning Japanese class, who was asked to translate it into English.

The end result of this double translation was:

"a hidden crazy person"

What was the original saying?

If you don't pay your exorcist, do you get repossessed?

OK, this is week-old news, and it's lifted from a blog that has a heck of a lot more readers than I do: Dave Winer's Scripting News.  But maybe I have one or two that he doesn't. 

On Monday, 2009-01-19, he wrote:

---

For me this was the most emotional moment of yesterday's concert at the Lincoln Memorial: Pete Seeger and Bruce Springsteen leading a chorus of This Land is Your Land.  

All those people singing, and Pete Seeger after all these years -- he can still lead a crowd in song. 

---

Pretty damn emotional for me, too.  So get out a box of Kleenex, if you're susceptible to the old-folkie weepies (you know who you are).  But whether you're susceptible or not, watch the clip.  It will be, ahem, five minutes well spent.

I saw this in the form of a one-panel cartoon, on a newspaper comics page. I thought I'd have a go at telling the story without the picture:

A man is sitting behind a desk. One knows that it is his desk, his office; that he is in command here.

In front of the desk, in two reception chairs, are a man and a woman. They look concerned, but hopeful; one senses that they want to believe what the man behind the desk is saying to them, and that they are beginning to do so.

He is wearing an earnest expression, and a clown suit, with full makeup and wig.

"Forget military school," he is saying. "Nothing will toughen up your son like clown school."

I'm sure you're familiar with the Great Axiom: "Whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger."  But have you ever worked out its consequences in detail?

To do this, we need just a couple of additional premises, each of which, I'm sure you'll agree, is hard to doubt:

1. You were alive yesterday.  (If not, you wouldn't be able to read this.)
2. You are alive today.  (If not, you really shouldn't be reading this.)

Now every day, every living person has many, many experiences.  It follows from this, together with (1), that you had a great many experiences yesterday.

From (2), it follows that each of these many experiences shares at least this property: it did not kill you.

From the foregoing, together with the Great Axiom itself, it follows that you had a great many experiences yesterday, each of which made you stronger.

So you are a great deal stronger today than you were just yesterday.  Multiply this by all your yesterdays, and we can confidently conclude that: you da man.

Or woman.  Or child.