Category: Meta


Would you believe…

Filed Under: About Me, Hobbies, Meta, Server by Lord Andrei — 2 Comments
2010.03.12

I miss Max.

While it seems that I have little to show for it. I spent the entire week working on this blog. I’m really trying to detach myself from LiveJournal once and for all. Admittedly, on LiveJournal you have an easily wired audience. I will probably end up cross-posting summaries and links back here. But I think that my time with Frank the Goat is finally winding to a close.

Sadly,  even when I think that I can muster the emotional drama of a 14 year-old-girl (Will no ill-respect to my 1t cousin that I’m just beginning to get to know) I just don’t feel like posting it. Im not hungry for the responses from the 300-400 people who I don’t really follow anymore. I’m more interested in going back to the heart.

For me, I want to post what’s inside me. And if people choose to read it. They do. If they don’t… Amazingly, they don’t. Trust me, I’ve got metrics proving the latter. People are not reading my writings in droves. (I’ve always wanted to use that one.)

So, this is what I have to show for one week. An off-handed meta-post?

Well, no. I have spent the last week using the LiveJournal importer from my WordPress install. This is (IN THEORY) a nifty tool that brings down your posts, your comments received and puts them into your stand alone blog. I point out “in Theory” because it took me the better part of a week to figure out how to use it without throttling my server, spamming the internet, and finding the bugs in the code. (Which mind you… I haven’t found.)

Most of this week has involved me deciphering Object-Oriented PHP code. A talent that would have come in handy perhaps BEFORE my interview with the company that might have used me as an OOPHP dev. I basically found where the problem was over a few days. This involved me learning more about the language, figuring out how you debug ‘live PHP’, and shoving in a {en:Kluge} fix to get the thing to finally pass through. (If I get really bored and find myself to have time, I will talk in detail about the technical hoo-hah that I went through.)

So, here we are, a week later and only one new post of which you my faithful reader are….um… is…um….reading. However, on top of that, my recent post on being a caregiver for someone in chronic pain picked up two more comments. I also added 2915 old posts and some 12,480 comments from LiveJournal. Now admittedly, about 450 are currently pending approval because they were left as screened. Some had private info, some were screened due to the nature of the post. And so on.

One of the other problems was that I’d spent the last year pushing my aggregated daily twitters into a lone post on LJ. Those 230 posts need to be given their own post-category. The reason for that is to get them off the main page when on comes to the blog. (I’ve at least gotten the most recent 20 or so to vanish.)

Then there’s all the remaining stuff to do. I want to have my twitters auto post to this blog. I want to have summaries post to LJ with a link back here for commenting.

All this amazing work without a whole lot of content to wrap the work around. Wow, I could make an entire post on that theme. (rolls eyes)

But for now, it’s time for me to attempt to get sleep before 2 am.. or I suppose 1 am since the clocks are going to freak this weekend. More on what’s on/in my head soon.

Til then. Umm…

Witty Sign Off Line.

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My poor little neglected blog…

Filed Under: About Me, Meta by Lord Andrei — Leave a comment
2010.03.02
Classic Maxell Print Ad

The Maxell Wind Blown Guy

When I made Tosocnet, it was to give me a place to talk about a topic I felt I had the ability to talk about at length. This unfortunately ran into the two walls of not wanting to talk about a really great idea in the field that was fueled by EVERYTHING I saw; and further was fueled by wanting to talk about non-field items that just wouldn’t fit.

So I made this blog. And I was freed from those two walls.

Yeah, be careful what you wish for. With absolute power comes absolution. Once a cliché three times a socket wrench.

Basically, I looked at myself and said, “Okay, write something.” I stared back and chuckled much like Goofy™. I have a friend who can basically start talking and run for an hour or more. She can move from topic to topic and you really just sit there like the old Maxell print advertisement (See above picture). She’s wonderful, but you can get lost looking for an on ramp to the conversation. The reason I bring her up is that the one thing that drives her nuts is to look at her and say, “Pick a topic to talk about.” She goes blank.

The Zen story of the Centipede asked how she coordinates her legs so that she doesn’t trip and then next moment she can no longer move.

I find that I write when I have something to write about. I find I don’t write when I motivate myself to write. Lately, life has been too busy (and for a man who’s unemployed, that takes some effort). But honestly it’s been for lack of motivation to write on a topic. I watched the winter Olympics with a heavy focus on skating. I’m not going to write about how the Russian Men’s Silver Medalist needs to learn what being a gracious competitor is. I’m not going to write about the fear that Mao Asada may not be alive in a year if her country goes after her. I’m not going to write about how cool Shaun White is. (Though he really is)

There’s always politics. Yeah… not so much.

See, when I write about a topic; I rip it to shreds. I really don’t have the patience or the energy to actually pick apart what’s going wrong in government. I really don’t have the knowledge or experience either, but that fact doesn’t really stop most people who post on the topic.

So, I feel that if I have topics to write on, I’ll write more often. I’m actually going to be taking the questions I get on Formspring and dumping the answers here instead. I figure… my words… my space… err should I “™” that last bit?

That’s all for now. As a clever 16 yr old twitter user from my neighborhood posted this past week, “Hello ‘2 hrs past my bedtime’ we really need to stop meeting like this.”

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Oh no. Another blog.

Filed Under: Meta by Lord Andrei — 4 Comments
2010.02.01

I’d been thinking about this for a while.
I’ve had this domain longer than I can remember.

This of course leads to some basic questions:

  • What happened to the old blogs?
  • What makes any of us believe this one will work where the others failed?

I’m a pack rat for those who don’t know me. I rarely throw anything out. In the digital world this can be a nightmare. I’m pretty sure I have Eudora mail and pine mail archived on zip and bernoulli disks in boxes. My IM contacts are almost never purged and my address book has more groups than some folks have contacts.

I intend to leave all my existing blogs (e.g. LiveJournal, Tosocnet, etc) intact and running. I think there may be cause to post to them on occassion. It is also a constant reminder to me that I was still looking for something and these remnants served the basis of me finding my way.

In the case of LiveJournal two purposes were served. First, it introduced me to the medium of online blogging and the (then) next level of social networking. Two, it showed me the limitations of that technology. The limits of the technology being primarily control.

In the case of Tosocnet the problem was once again control. But this time the site was controlling what I could and couldn’t post. It’s no secret that I’ve been working on “An Original Idea(tm)” in social networking for a while. With Tosocnet, I found myself constantly walking that line between, “This isn’t relevant to Social Networking” and “This tips the vessel of knowledge too far and tells everyone my ideas.”

There were times I wanted to post about things as mundane as my family and hobbies. But they just wouldn’t scope into Tosocnet. There were times I wanted to post complex embeds, charts or polls and they just wouldn’t work in LJ. Then of course there were times that I wanted to discuss things that on Tosocnet would be too obvious about what I was working on.

So, I start again. Hoping that this blog will be the blog that leads home. Wait, no. That’s “Quantum Leap.”

So, I start again. I don’t know what I’m going to post. I’ll also (as always) be interested in what I don’t post.
But with luck…

This will be something worth keeping.

-Salut…

-A

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My standing rules for random IM message senders.

Filed Under: About Me, Meta, rant, Rules by Lord Andrei — 9 Comments
2006.06.15

This is taken from my IM profile on AIM.. I’d been meaning to write this down.. Here’s an early draft

I don’t actually expect anyone to read this but here are my basic rules for IM. The problem is that the average person who has a personality that messages me out of the blue will either not violate these rules in the first 3 femtoseconds of the conversation and I won’t be motivated to send the link. OR… The person will violate at least 2 in an even shorter amount of time and is probably too damned stupid or illiterate to make it through this paragraph let alone the rest to figure out why I just don’t have time for their waste of space on the internet.

The list so far…

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First Entry

Filed Under: lj, Meta by Lord Andrei — Leave a comment
2001.10.18

I saw this service surfing from another user’s site. I don’t know if I’ll tell which user at this time. Other readers may already be able to guess. I just wound up poking around to see how someone was doing.

This is my place. Very ego-centric, huh. These comments will be me as I feel with not too many inhibitions.

Today’s comment will be on the following conversation I had:

fiannaharpar –>(11:02:20 AM):What all SCAdian-wise are you doing? The last we talked about this, you were concentrating more on the OTO.
lordandrei –> (11:03:34 AM): I’m trying to do both. This is hard because, “No man serves to masters.” The trick is that I’m trying to be the master and make the activities mine not the other way around.
fiannaharpar –> (11:05:21 AM): Well, you can serve two masters, but you have to figure out *how* you’re going to serve them.
Extra deleted

It is no secret to those close to me, either physically or emotionally, that I have….a way to go. Organization is not my forte and I have let myself get burned and burned out many, many times.

Continued in next posting…

Edit:20061125 – Adding tags making changes. Inserted LJ User IDs for she and me
Added:20061125 – I learned about Livejournal while looking at chite‘s web site. At this point there’d been much history and distance between us. Eventually, the two of us would find mutual interest in discussing episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer through one of the LJ Communities. In reflection it is one of the reasons that I appreciate LJ as a tool with very positive potential.

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