Here's the latest twitter posts on tonite's presidential debates, which looks like will go on after all.
Friday, September 26, 2008
can you believe it?!
The Politico reported, that "some House Republicans are saying privately that they'd rather 'let the markets crash' than sign on to a massive bailout."
It could be argued that a massive breakdown of the system as we know it might be just what we need to rethink the way we've done everything, and move toward a true transformation of society for the good of all. But what would happen to those who are already feeling the brunt of the crisis?
Even if the current proposal is a bad plan, and it bails out only Wall Street, it will be better than a massive depression that would spread beyond stock traders. Refusal to agree to a bailout is sheer stupidity. Get the banks and mortgage companies out of the hole before the crisis trickles down even more to the under-employed and under-insured.
Link via huffpo.
It could be argued that a massive breakdown of the system as we know it might be just what we need to rethink the way we've done everything, and move toward a true transformation of society for the good of all. But what would happen to those who are already feeling the brunt of the crisis?
Even if the current proposal is a bad plan, and it bails out only Wall Street, it will be better than a massive depression that would spread beyond stock traders. Refusal to agree to a bailout is sheer stupidity. Get the banks and mortgage companies out of the hole before the crisis trickles down even more to the under-employed and under-insured.
Link via huffpo.
Thursday, September 25, 2008
McCain suspending campain for who's sake?
Chris Dodd, chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, said of McCain's suspension of his presidential campaign,
"I have heard form Obama numerous occasions these last couple days. I have never heard from John McCain on the issue... I'm just worried a little bit that sort of politicizing this problem, sort of flying in here, I'm beginning to think this is more of a rescue plan for John McCain and not a rescue plan for the economy."To see what McCain was up to Wednesday night, check out Letterman talking about McCain canceling his appearance on Late Night. only to appear on CBS News when he was supposed to be running to the plane to Washington.
Monday, September 22, 2008
Thursday, September 18, 2008
ecofriendly lolcat
If only I could get my cats to recharge this way. Actually, come to think of it, they've got plenty of energy on their own!
read more | digg story
read more | digg story
Tuesday, September 16, 2008
trees of richmond after hurricane ike
The news said tonite that some in Ohio will have to wait maybe 2 weeks now before they get their power turned back on. The reporters finally called a wind storm (it was just "high winds" yesterday).
The biggest sign of Ike's impact on Richmond are all the trees that blew over. Most of them were huge trees, I guess because they got the most wind being so high up. There's been some pretty extensive property damage caused by parts of trees or whole trees.
I took some photos today and submitted them to the Pal-Item weather photo page. Here's my pics with a little more description.
This is less than a block from my house. You can't see it in the pic, but the entire sidewalk is popped up like an upside down V. At the other end, where the branches are, a car has been sitting, I'm guessing banged up pretty good from the fall. The car hasn't moved since the storm. Either they can't move till the tree's taken care of, or they're waiting for their insurance company to respond before they even touch it. Hopefully the town will come out soon. Our mayor said "We will get it all cleaned up but I want everyone to know that it won't be (today) or Wednesday. It will probably take us at least a week."
I heard a rumor that a tree crashed through someones' car as they were stopped at this traffic light. It was a huge tree, and would have done a lot of damage if it would have hit a car. I didn't see any sign of an accident the few times I've driven the route since Sunday. To the city's credit, they cleaned up this tree pretty quickly; this is one of the busier streets in Richmond.
This is on the campus at Earlham College, behind the library. There's a parking lot nearby, but not close enough that it would have crushed anything. I'm a little perplexed as to how the bottom of the branch splintered so much.
The biggest sign of Ike's impact on Richmond are all the trees that blew over. Most of them were huge trees, I guess because they got the most wind being so high up. There's been some pretty extensive property damage caused by parts of trees or whole trees.
I took some photos today and submitted them to the Pal-Item weather photo page. Here's my pics with a little more description.
This is less than a block from my house. You can't see it in the pic, but the entire sidewalk is popped up like an upside down V. At the other end, where the branches are, a car has been sitting, I'm guessing banged up pretty good from the fall. The car hasn't moved since the storm. Either they can't move till the tree's taken care of, or they're waiting for their insurance company to respond before they even touch it. Hopefully the town will come out soon. Our mayor said "We will get it all cleaned up but I want everyone to know that it won't be (today) or Wednesday. It will probably take us at least a week."
I heard a rumor that a tree crashed through someones' car as they were stopped at this traffic light. It was a huge tree, and would have done a lot of damage if it would have hit a car. I didn't see any sign of an accident the few times I've driven the route since Sunday. To the city's credit, they cleaned up this tree pretty quickly; this is one of the busier streets in Richmond.
This is on the campus at Earlham College, behind the library. There's a parking lot nearby, but not close enough that it would have crushed anything. I'm a little perplexed as to how the bottom of the branch splintered so much.
Monday, September 15, 2008
hurricane ike in richmond
Yesterday afternoon we got a bit of Hurricane Ike. Of course we're landlocked here in Indiana, but it was some serious wind. I heard someone call it a "Category 1 Dry Hurricane." The power blinked off briefly at the house, but it sounded like others lost their power longer than that. In Dayton, Ohio, some thousands of people are still without power, and could be for at least another week. I drove through the storm, and just about every street I passed had a tree blown down. And they weren't little trees either. I don't think there's such a thing as a dry hurricane, but if it did, I'd say we got one.
Here are some photos of the more extensive damage from the local newspaper's website. More photos can be found here.
Here are some photos of the more extensive damage from the local newspaper's website. More photos can be found here.
Saturday, September 13, 2008
Friday, September 12, 2008
Blog Geek: why blog? why blogs?
When I first envisioned this blog and what its raison d'être might be, I was considering the exploration of blogs and the phenomenon of blogging. I started the Blog Geek section to be a platform for this, and to be more than just a run down of what I like in certain blogs or lists of how-to's that seem to be permeating the metalogging world these days. Like any other blogger, I am interested in these things. I want tips on how to do this well, and I want to share cool content from other places within the blogosphere. But even though I love details and tweeks and patterns, and to share with others what I think is intriguing, how to's and links aren't my reason for being.
The more I go through courses of study in theology, literature, creative writing and critical theory, the more I find that I'm drawn toward the parts of life that go deep into human experience. The surface of life interests me little in comparison, or, if I dwell on the surface for a little while, I get restless and feel compelled to keep mining for what it is that makes this whole tilted world keep turning. Most of the time I can't just watch tv mindlessly; I have to process it, even analyze it. I can hardly have a conversation with others before I say something more nuanced or probing or revelatory than the one I'm speaking with was expecting. Of course these are generalizations, and maybe those who know me better than I can say if they think it's true or not. In any event, I've read myriad blogs in the last five years and I'm past the point of being content with just the surface conversations about blogs and blogging. It's true that blogging keeps changing, so I'm going to share new discoveries from time to time, new memes or trends. But I'm itching to go deeper into the realm of blogs, to turn them over and to turn society over and watch and reflect and then share here what I think I might have found. And I'm sure I'll find more than just hilarious quotes or curious images or intriguing stories. What I hope to bring to this blog is what these elements of blogs and blogging mean for our society today.
toothpaste for dinner
Without being too hasty to grant blogs all the power, they do make an immense impact on our world. As media becomes more accessible to more people, some wonderful (and some not so wonderful) things can take place. Major news outlets can be scooped, lose or gain readers, or be held accountable because of citizen journalist bloggers. Media like video, podcasts, poems or news articles can pass through the screens of thousands of readers or viewers or listeners in the blink of an eye. One could say it's really just the Web that makes all this happen, and it would happen regardless of the presence of millions of bloggers. That is true, but the nature of that sharing would be vastly different. Indeed, the methods and even the paradigms of sharing content has evolved drastically just in the past ten years (as long as I've been a citizen of the Web). At first, it was email. Copy and paste the url into a text box and send it off to one or three or thirty of your friends and enemies. Discussions by groups likewise took place over email. Remember when Yahoo! Groups was the only platform for most groups, when it was a sign of your hipness that you could navigate something that complex? I joined group after group after group, and that was how I got articles and had discussions. If you had a website, you were cool because you knew this strange language called html, and make your page look anyway you wanted. Sort of. It was pretty static (and webpages still are, in comparison to much of the innovation that's taken place since). And then there was Myspace. I know I'm jumping ahead. There was of course a progression from an Angelfire page that was fairly clunky to update and that your friends really didn't look at anyway to Myspace, a dynamic, cool, media rich, easily updated page that your friends could leave comments on.
Actually, the stepping stone from websites to social sites was the blog, started by a very small handful of geeks, back when geek wasn't thrown around nearly as much as today. The blog started out on those old html coded pages. (Now I'm going from my memory of Biz Stone's book Who Let the Blogs Out? that I would recommend to anyone interested in the styory behind blogging.) Someone would put up a link to a page they liked or found important, typed a line or two of text describing the link or their opinion of it ("I found a very cool webpage on the trendiness of Angelfire pages. Check it out!"), type in the date when the link was posted, then click publish. A few days later, they might find something to share again and post it to the same page, this time above the previous entry. Each time they added, the list got longer, with the most current content staying on the top. Eventually someone figured out how to make the process easier and created Blogger.
And the rest is, as they say, to be covered in the next post. Suffice it to say, the Web has gone far in ten or fifteen years, and so too has our society. It seems like we've been lving through leaps and bounds ever since, and blogs, I think, help--and continue to help--lead that movement of society, for better or worse. Technological progress isn't necessarily good in every case (take global warming, for instance), and I'm not out to argue that blogs are all good all of the time. But I am saying that blogs both reflect and are reflected by society, and will continue to as long as they exist. And they won't exist in the same way for very long, which is why I find this whole genre so exciting to participate in and discuss.
If there are any topics you'd like to see discussed here, let me know in the comments. I'll try to find a good history of blogs to link to, and I think I'll continue to write about that history in my next post on the culture and meaning of blogging. But then I might change the topic. You'll have to stay tuned to see.
The more I go through courses of study in theology, literature, creative writing and critical theory, the more I find that I'm drawn toward the parts of life that go deep into human experience. The surface of life interests me little in comparison, or, if I dwell on the surface for a little while, I get restless and feel compelled to keep mining for what it is that makes this whole tilted world keep turning. Most of the time I can't just watch tv mindlessly; I have to process it, even analyze it. I can hardly have a conversation with others before I say something more nuanced or probing or revelatory than the one I'm speaking with was expecting. Of course these are generalizations, and maybe those who know me better than I can say if they think it's true or not. In any event, I've read myriad blogs in the last five years and I'm past the point of being content with just the surface conversations about blogs and blogging. It's true that blogging keeps changing, so I'm going to share new discoveries from time to time, new memes or trends. But I'm itching to go deeper into the realm of blogs, to turn them over and to turn society over and watch and reflect and then share here what I think I might have found. And I'm sure I'll find more than just hilarious quotes or curious images or intriguing stories. What I hope to bring to this blog is what these elements of blogs and blogging mean for our society today.
toothpaste for dinnerWithout being too hasty to grant blogs all the power, they do make an immense impact on our world. As media becomes more accessible to more people, some wonderful (and some not so wonderful) things can take place. Major news outlets can be scooped, lose or gain readers, or be held accountable because of citizen journalist bloggers. Media like video, podcasts, poems or news articles can pass through the screens of thousands of readers or viewers or listeners in the blink of an eye. One could say it's really just the Web that makes all this happen, and it would happen regardless of the presence of millions of bloggers. That is true, but the nature of that sharing would be vastly different. Indeed, the methods and even the paradigms of sharing content has evolved drastically just in the past ten years (as long as I've been a citizen of the Web). At first, it was email. Copy and paste the url into a text box and send it off to one or three or thirty of your friends and enemies. Discussions by groups likewise took place over email. Remember when Yahoo! Groups was the only platform for most groups, when it was a sign of your hipness that you could navigate something that complex? I joined group after group after group, and that was how I got articles and had discussions. If you had a website, you were cool because you knew this strange language called html, and make your page look anyway you wanted. Sort of. It was pretty static (and webpages still are, in comparison to much of the innovation that's taken place since). And then there was Myspace. I know I'm jumping ahead. There was of course a progression from an Angelfire page that was fairly clunky to update and that your friends really didn't look at anyway to Myspace, a dynamic, cool, media rich, easily updated page that your friends could leave comments on.
Actually, the stepping stone from websites to social sites was the blog, started by a very small handful of geeks, back when geek wasn't thrown around nearly as much as today. The blog started out on those old html coded pages. (Now I'm going from my memory of Biz Stone's book Who Let the Blogs Out? that I would recommend to anyone interested in the styory behind blogging.) Someone would put up a link to a page they liked or found important, typed a line or two of text describing the link or their opinion of it ("I found a very cool webpage on the trendiness of Angelfire pages. Check it out!"), type in the date when the link was posted, then click publish. A few days later, they might find something to share again and post it to the same page, this time above the previous entry. Each time they added, the list got longer, with the most current content staying on the top. Eventually someone figured out how to make the process easier and created Blogger.
And the rest is, as they say, to be covered in the next post. Suffice it to say, the Web has gone far in ten or fifteen years, and so too has our society. It seems like we've been lving through leaps and bounds ever since, and blogs, I think, help--and continue to help--lead that movement of society, for better or worse. Technological progress isn't necessarily good in every case (take global warming, for instance), and I'm not out to argue that blogs are all good all of the time. But I am saying that blogs both reflect and are reflected by society, and will continue to as long as they exist. And they won't exist in the same way for very long, which is why I find this whole genre so exciting to participate in and discuss.
If there are any topics you'd like to see discussed here, let me know in the comments. I'll try to find a good history of blogs to link to, and I think I'll continue to write about that history in my next post on the culture and meaning of blogging. But then I might change the topic. You'll have to stay tuned to see.
Sunday, September 07, 2008
Webscurity: 'american pie' lives on through gustav
Tuesday, September 02, 2008
Webscurity: gustav loves jesus, kids and dudes
Thankfully, Gustav passed over Louisiana (at least in comparison to Katrina), leaving Jesus, childhood and Dudedom still in tact.
(pic from NOLA.com)
Blog Geek: following google chrome
So Google is supposedly releasing their new browser Chrome today. I read about it last night at Google Blogoscoped, along with a possibly leaked comic book (after which Google decided, in the interest of "access to information for everyone," to publish the comic book on their own Books site), and I've been waiting ever since. Google's very own blog says the browser is to be released today. When I ran a search for the download, I found the download page at the top of the results, and an interesting blog entry right below it.
It appears that someone, either accidentally or purposely published the page too soon, and even the cache page was removed from Google, but not before a few screenshots could be Blogoscoped. I'll continue to follow the saga on Technoratti and the Google blog. And keep my fingers crossed.
UPDATE 3:27pm Finally here. Only I'm on a Linux machine, and all they've got ready at the moment is the Windows version. It would help if I could still download the Windows version on Linux, since my Windows machine is dial-up only. I guess Google can't make everyone's life easier.
It appears that someone, either accidentally or purposely published the page too soon, and even the cache page was removed from Google, but not before a few screenshots could be Blogoscoped. I'll continue to follow the saga on Technoratti and the Google blog. And keep my fingers crossed.UPDATE 3:27pm Finally here. Only I'm on a Linux machine, and all they've got ready at the moment is the Windows version. It would help if I could still download the Windows version on Linux, since my Windows machine is dial-up only. I guess Google can't make everyone's life easier.
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