Ten Reasons Why

Sigh. I knew the Fates wouldn’t let me take a vacation unhindered.
Got to DCA this morning, 90 minutes before my flight’s departure time, checked in and was told there were no seats on my connection to SFO, but “you’re confirmed on the flight.” Whatever the hell that means. Whatever else it might mean, apparently being “confirmed” doesn’t mean you get to get on the plane.
I got bumped off my connection to San Francisco because US Airways overbooked it and . . . and who knows? I don’t know why I got the bump. I booked weeks ago, I checked in a good 3.5 hours before the SFO flight, etc. End result: there are no other open flights to SFO (or Oakland) until 555pm this evening. Booked on that flight, standby on at least one other in mid-afternoon.
Thank god for free wifi. Unfortunately, only about 1 in 5 of the power outlets I’ve tried in this airport appear to work. I thought my power cord was hosed, but other travelers have confirmed they have the same problem.
So the first day of my vacation gets spent in Charlotte airport, instead of relaxing in San Francisco and joining my friend Tim on his last burrito & bar outing as a bachelor. Bummer.

Personal

I’d been thinking about starting this blog up again for a few weeks now. I didn’t think I’d have something so tragic to write about.
Probably it goes without saying that my thoughts and best wishes go out to the students, faculty, and staff at my alma mater, Virginia Tech, and especially to the families and friends of the victims.
I was working from home today, heads down with all my external inputs (radio, TV, email, IRC, RSS feeds, etc.) turned off, so it wasn’t until mid-afternoon that I became aware of what had happened. It has shaken me up, more than I would have expected it would.
It’s disconcerting to see a community that you’ve been part of suffer an event like this, especially when you see so many images on the news of places you’re quite familiar with. When I was a student at Virginia Tech, I had friends who lived on the 4th floor Ambler-Johnston Hall, where the first shooting took place. I had classes in Norris Hall, where the second shooting occurred. I know these places. They were my places. It was my community. Even though I’ve been gone from Tech for a long time, it still hits close to home.
Back in ‘88-’89 I was one of the editors of the Collegiate Times, Virginia Tech’s student newspaper. I’ve thought a lot about the students working at the Collegiate Times today. What was the biggest story we dealt with back in ‘88-’89? I think a steroids scandal on one of the sports teams. Nothing to compare to what happened today. What a time it must be for those young, aspiring journalists. How difficult it must be to cover what will probably be the biggest story of your life when you are just twenty or twenty-one. Doubly difficult since it is the slaughter of your classmates that you have to cover. As young journalists they must feel a great deal of excitement at The Big Story . . . and, at the same time, a great deal of guilt and dread for being excited while their friends lay dead. I hope they sense the importance of their role of as the student voice of the Virginia Tech campus more than ever. (CollegiateTimes.com is down, and the server is re-directing to CollegeMedia.com, the parent site for the student media outlets at Tech. And I just noticed that the Collegiate Times Online Editor, who has been posting to http://www.collegemedia.com all afternoon is named Christopher Ritter. No relation, if you were wondering.)
Besides my former professors, I only know a couple of people still at Virginia Tech. None of them were likely to have been in either of the buildings where the shootings took place, but I’ve dropped them emails anyway. And I’ve been contacted today by former classmates who I haven’t heard from in years. When something like this happens, you start thinking about the people who shared your life then and you want to reach out to them, even if you’ve been silent for years, because their the only ones who are going to understand your loss in the same way.
The news reports are saying that this is the worst shooting on a college campus in American history. Oddly, one of the other campus massacres that has been mentioned repeatedly was a 1991 shooting rampage by a physics grad student (who also killed himself) at the University of Iowa, where I went to graduate school. My other alma mater. That took place just three months after I left Iowa City, and, unlike today’s tragedy at VT, I knew many people who were on campus at that time.
Then a few years back, in the fall of 2000, a student murdered one of his classmates at Gallaudet University, and went un-apprehended for months until he killed again in February. I had worked at Gallaudet for three years and left just a bit more than a year before the murders there. Again, I was gone, but, again, I knew many people affected by this. It wasn’t the kind of rampage like at Iowa or Virginia Tech, but it held the campus hostage to fear nonetheless.
So this is the third time I’ve watched a campus where I have lived, studied, or worked be victimized by a murderer.
It sucks. It sucks for me, it makes me cry to see a community — my community — ravaged, even after I’ve been absent from it for years
And as miserable and helpless as I feel, I can’t imagine how horrible it is for those living through it.

Personal

Didn’t think you were ever gonna see another post here, didja?
I’ve been on self-imposed hiatus for about a year and a half, but this site is still live, still gets hit from some random search queries, and (at least for a while) still got hammered by link spammers. (More on that later.)
The real news is I’m back blogging, but not here at good ol’ Ten Reasons Why. I’m part of the blogging team for Blackboard’s new blog, Educate/Innovate. Blackboard is my employer, of course, so I get to blog about educational technology and get paid for it.
Well…really, I mostly get paid for the boatload of other stuff that I do for Blackboard as Associate Director of Research & Development, but we can pretend that some micro-fraction of my salary covers the blogging that I’ll be doing on Educate/Innovate. And, hey, guilt-free blogging at work is never a bad thing. No more hiding the blog entry window when the boss walks in my office. ;-)
Anyway, after D’Arcy mentioned that he still had 10RW’s feed in his subscriptions, I figured that it might be worth shaking the dust off 10RW to see if anybody else was waiting for me to wake up.
Anybody out there?
Oh yeah…the spam story.
Sometime last year, I was searching the 10RW archives for an idea I’d written down…oh, somewhere between 2000 and 2004, I guess, and was a bit mortified to find that I’d been the victim of link spammers. I started manually deleting all the spammy trackbacks, but quickly realized that wasn’t going to work.
A few minutes mucking around in MySQL (thank god for the four SQL statements I know) determined that there were roughly TWENTY-SEVEN THOUSAND trackback spams on my blog. Sigh. There followed some minor MySQL kung fu to get rid of all the entries, an upgrade to Movable Type 3.17, an upgrade of the wonderful MT-Blacklist plug-in, some altering of script names, some closing of past comments and trackbacks, yadda yadda yadda. Apparently, good ol’ Ten Reasons Why is relatively spam free now . . . assuming you’re not counting my own writing in that category. ;-)
Hugs and kisses. Come visit at the new digs.

Personal

You’re a presumably semi-intelligent businessperson at another company. You’re writing me to suggest a partnership with my company, further a relationship, provide a referral, ask for help, etc. One very simple rule:
Put your friggin’ company’s name in the Subject line!
Maybe you work for a company that has eleven clients and one partner, but I don’t. I speak with a couple hundred companies a year, not to mention dozens of our several clients. . When you send me some random email with “Hi” or “Need some information” as the subject line, I’m filtering that right into the trash unless I recognize your name (and with the number of people I talk to the odds of that are slim).

Personal

No, you are not imagining things. There is a big pair of stone lips in the header. It doesn’t have any significant meaning; it just looks cool.
You might have noticed some other changes — like just about everything. I started the re-design during the week between Christmas and New Year’s with the idea that it would launch on New Year’s Day. Oh well. A little bout of insomnia gave me the time over the last few days to get it to a point where I can roll it out.
I had to learn some new CSS stuff and a touch of XSL for the new RSS feed. I don’t pretend to be an expert in this stuff, so I’m sure someone much more skilled will recoil in horror at my stylesheets, but it was a fun exercise to learn some new stuff.
One of the cooler parts of the redesign is the new RSS feed. When you take a look at it in a web browser, you might not think it’s an RSS feed, because it doesn’t look like one — i.e., it’s not a page of unrendered XML, but an XSL-styled page with an explanation of RSS and how to use it. However, it is a valid RSS 2.0 feed.
Since I’ve written about the bad interface for RSS before, I’m glad to be able to demonstrate a different approach.
Kudos go to Dave Shea of Mezzoblue who described this approach in Plugging the RSS Usability Hole. I’ve totally cribbed from Dave’s code, since I know squat about XSL. A shout out also goes to Brad Choate for a non-funky RSS 2.0 template for Movable Type
There’s still some sprucing up of the style to take place and I might apply the same approach to the RSS 1.0 and the new Atom 0.3 feeds if I get a bit more comfortable with XSL. But it’s better than raw XML.
Anyway, for the most part, I think I’m about 85% complete on the redesign.
I know that the comment pages (e.g. the pop-ups and the previews) are still styled wrong. I’ll get to that in the next day or two.
The content column (this white column) looks a little hinky when the content is shorter than the sidebar on the left, which only happens in a few of those categories where there aren’t many posts. Not sure what to do about that. CSS gurus? Any ideas?
Also, my primary browser is Mozilla Firebird. I’ve checked the site briefly in IE and noticed at least one error in the comment form on the individual entry archive pages. I’d love to hear more feedback from IE users on Windows and Mac and as well as Safari and Mozilla users on the Mac. (And I suppose Konquerer et al on Linux, but don’t expect to be a priority!)
I’m sure I’ve forgotten or missed some other stuff, so pardon the incorrectly styled comment pages and tell me what you think. Suggestions, feedback, constructive criticism — all welcome.
I’m going to bed now. Nothing like coding CSS to cure insomnia. Sheesh.

Personal, Syndication & Aggregation

I don’t really have a good explanation for the recent hiatus. It began with the flu and then got exacerbated by the holidays and then I started a site redesign that I’ve never finished then things got crazy at work with special projects I can’t talk about and in the middle of all this I remembered that I really enjoy laying in bed reading novels (which is suddenly possible again because the radiator in the bedroom got fixed a couple weeks ago) more than I enjoy futzing with Movable Type templates.
Anyway, the are two reasons why I’m posting today.

1. Apparently the lack of activity here on Ten Reasons Why is quite distressing to my officemate. That, in and of itself, is kinda strange for two reasons:
   1. It’s clearly not a concern for my safety. She sees me five days a week and knows that I am healthy — or relatively so if you don’t count a sort of lingering low-grade sniffle and the limp from last week’s curbside backflip precipitated by . . . well . . . the precipitation. Of course, for all that the rest of you dear readers know I could still be lying in that gutter on Massachusetts Ave. slowly starving to death. Thanks for staying in touch, you uncaring toads. :P
   2. It’s clearly not for lack of witty banter. A full thirty percent of my job responsibility is entertaining my officemate with witty banter. And sixty percent is annoying her with an assortment of muttered curses, grunts, sighs, and other exhortations induced by crappy software or our totally opaque and impenetrable phone system. The remaining ten percent has something to do with educational technology, I believe. ;-)

   Anyway, I think she just wants a shout-out. Attention hound. Witty banter for thirty percent of an eight-hour day isn’t enough for you?!?

2. Bob Mould has started a weblog, which I can’t let pass without acknowledgement, not so much for the quality of the blog but for the quality of the Bob.
   For those of you not in the know, Mould was the frontman for the seminal 80’s punk trio, Hüsker Dü, then went on to release several solo albums, and found another band called Sugar. He dropped out of sight for few years to become a scriptwriter for the World Wrestling Federation (no joke) before re-emerging here in the District, of all places, with an album of electronica and a regular DJ gig at, first, the Velvet Lounge, and now the 9:30 Club.
   Mould’s 1990 album, , has been in high rotation on my CD player for over a decade now. It’s about as tight of a punk-pop recording as you’ll find, but its high profile in my playlist probably has something to do with seeing Mould solo — literally solo; just Mould and a twelve-string guitar — at Gabe’s Oasis in Iowa City, Iowa, on the ‘90-’91 tour to support Black Sheets. That still ranks as the the best club show I’ve ever seen; that one guy sitting in a chair with a guitar blew me away thoroughly with the heart he put into playing for us.
   Fast forward six years past that show, and I’ve just moved to DC and am trying desperately to find a place to live. I respond to an ad in CityPaper for two guys looking for a third housemate. As I’m looking at the house, I notice they have a Hüsker Dü poster on the wall. We get talking about Mould and the conversation reveals one of them was at that same Gabe’s Oasis show in Iowa City six years earlier. Kismet is declared, I’m accepted as a housemate, and 7+ years later those two guys are still two of my best friends. So thanks, Bob — for the music and the friendships that arose from it. :-)

Anyway, I’ll be back blogging when I feel like I have something I want to say again. I doubt I’m gone for good; I’m way too opinionated for that. ;-)

Personal

Hmm. Haven’t posted anything of substance in more than a month. Guess that means I’m on an indefinite hiaitus.

Personal

. . . I’m not dead. Just really busy with preparing to go to Educause and to move into my new condo within the same week.
It’s making me very grumpy. Pity my poor officemate who has to spend eight hours a day with an extremely cranky Greg. She’s not happy about it.
I’m also having some severely wacky dreams regarding the homeowner bit. I would expect some anxiety dreams about things going wrong with the place I just bought, but the crazy part is that well-known actors show up in the dreams to notify me of the impending problems. So far Christopher Walken has told me water is leaking into my walls from the unit above, Alec Baldwin alerted me to rats in the basement, and Brad Pitt (as Tyler Durden from Fight Club, which I saw again last week) broke the news that my movers lost all my belongings. At least he didn’t kick my ass.
Clearly I’m grumpy and insane.

Personal

There’s nothing like spending a couple hundred thousand dollars on a condo in Capitol Hill (about six blocks east of the Capitol, four blocks north of Eastern Market) to make me learn how to use the Microsoft Money application that came with my Dell Laptop.
Now I have a pretty graph that shows exactly how poor I’m gonna be for the next year.
But I’ll own a home. :-)
(Okay, okay, Wachovia will hold the title, but you know what I mean.)

Personal

Leslie Orchard, in a comment on the previous post, reminded me of the Future Culture mailing list, on which I used to be a very frequent participant, starting from around 1993. FC, as we abbreviated it, was a pretty critical component of my technology education, particularly in thinking of the sociological impacts of technology, but also in just introducing me to new technologies (Linux? What’s that?!?).
For a creative nonfiction workshop I took in 1995, I wrote a long piece that was rooted in my early experiences on the Future Culture listserv, particularly about my first meeting with an online acquaintance and the first death of someone I only knew online.
As you read it, remember the time it was written. This was before Netscape, Amazon, before eBay, before broadband. The Internet was email, IRC, Gopher, and Archie. The web was all text and we used Lynx to browse it.
My how things have changed. . . . and stayed the same.
Here it is: The Word and the Body.

Personal