Monthly Archive for February, 2006

A new address!

Published
by
Dave
on February 23, 2006
in blogging
. 3 Comments

Yesterday I bought a new domain name and set up my own website for this blog.

From now on, dear readers (all four of you), please point your browsers to the following URL: davesmidlife.com. And if you point to my blog in your own blog, I would be most grateful if you could change this address in your links.

I have been thinking that I might want to explore working with WordPress, but I really wanted not to have to direct people to another URL. Since there just aren’t that many people pointing to this blog (yet), I figured I might as well go ahead and set up my own domain/website.

If you are thinking about using your own domain name for a Blogger blog, here is a good article by Sarah Lewis at Dave Taylor’s site, telling you exactly how to do this.

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A snow day!

Published
by
Dave
on February 14, 2006
in midlife and teaching
. 1 Comment

Since I live in the mid-Atlantic region of the United States, I got the benefit of a massive snowstorm this weekend. I’m outside of Washington, and we got hit pretty hard–although nothing like New York City, which had the largest single-day snowfall on record (27 inches in Central Park).

We had heard it was going to snow all day Saturday and into Sunday morning. When nothing much had happened by 7:00 PM on Saturday, my high-school-age daughter and I pretty much gave up on getting a day off for snow.

But while we were sleeping, it snowed like crazy. At the end of it all, we measured about 14 inches on the deck of our house.

Since I’m a schoolteacher, this meant that I had the day off from work yesterday. This is a rare and unpredictable treat in the winter. My wife, who has a “real” career, had to go into Washington to work, but I got to stay home. I podcasted and ordered baseball tickets.

I’m back on the job today, and grateful for the extra day of weekend. I do wish, however, I had spent some of the day sleeping instead of working on projects.

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Why I can’t stand “The DaVinci Code”

Published
by
Dave
on February 10, 2006
in books and religion
. 10 Comments

The movie of The DaVinci Code is coming out soon, with Hollywood’s Mr. Nice Guy, Tom Hanks. (I actually like Hanks a lot onscreen.)

The book’s been out for a couple years now. I bought it with fascination after Christmas 2003, right at the beginning of the time when it became a phenomenon.

I was appalled. Not because I am a conservative Christian (I’m not), but because it was so horribly, stupidly written.

Any “mystery novel” whose protagonists are much more clueless than I am as a reader is a failed “mystery.” When I could see what was coming three pages before the characters in the story, I felt really disappointed. It was like learning the secret of a magic trick: “Is that all there is?”

The most egregious stupidity, I think, is probably the “mystery” of the code writing–the point when the main guy (whose name I’ve forgotten) makes the stunning discovery that something is written in a “secret code.” Duh. Hold the book up to the mirror. Most eighth-grade kids learn something about DaVinci and mirror writing.

In the NY Times on February 9 there’s a piece by Laurie Goodstein about the film company’s setting up a website for critics of the film to vent. The site seems intended for those conservative Christians who can’t abide the feminist theology that underlies the story.

I was actually fascinated by the feminist theology and the notion of Jesus of Nazareth having a wife. What galled me was Dan Brown’s ham-handed and glib way of presenting this notion in fiction. Somebody should have done a better job with this. Oh well. Brown’s laughing all the way the bank now.

Too bad. It’s a shame such a lousy book has become such a favorite of the theological left.

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Patience, baseball fans!

Published
by
Dave
on February 9, 2006
in Washington DC and baseball
. 1 Comment

Well, yes, maybe it is too early to get excited about the new stadium. But maybe not.

In the Washington Post this morning, a report by David Nakamura and Thomas Heath says that Major League Baseball is “very concerned” about the lease deal. Skeptics and pessimists probably read that as a gloom-and-doom scenario. And a piece by Dave Sheinin points out that much of the Nationals operation remains on hold, basically, because the owners and administrators are all still the same lame duck caretakers who ran the team last year.

However, on the BallPark Guys discussion forum (the best forum I’ve found for talking about the Nationals), the general feeling is that MLB is really just making the DC Council sweat it out for a few days before they, the team owners of MLB, give the only reasonable answer they can to the new deal: yes, we’ll go ahead.

Fact is, MLB doesn’t have a better town than Washington for this team, and they probably won’t get a better deal than what the Council coughed up in the wee hours of Wednesday morning.

But I’m not yet breathing easy about the stadium and the team. Only when both sides have said yes, will I rejoice.

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A baseball stadium for Washington, DC?

Published
by
Dave
on February 8, 2006
in Washington DC and baseball
. 1 Comment

Is it a done deal? Am I jinxing the whole thing by even writing a blog entry on it?

The Associated Press reports that the DC City Council approved a revised lease deal for a new baseball stadium in Washington. We’re waiting to see what Major League Baseball has to say about the revisions. In the Washington Post, Thomas Boswell has weighed in with a column. The local report is by David Nakamura.

It looks like there might actually be a deal for a new stadium, and then soon that there might be a sale of the team from Major League Baseball to a real ownership group.

I am not a huge sports fan, but I’ve always been a baseball fan. When my children were small and we all lived in Nashville, one of our favorite summertime outings was to see the Nashville Sounds play at Greer Stadium.

Before my wife and I lived in Nashville, we were in New York City, and I got to sit in the cheap seats of Yankee Stadium watching the Yanks in the legendary late-1970s/early-1980s phase of the team. I’d take the subway from the west 70s in Manhattan up to the South Bronx and be in baseball heaven for a few hours.

The inaugural season of the Washington Nationals last summer was a lot of fun; and the month of June, when the Nats were in first place for several weeks, was baseball nirvana. They’ll not be as good this summer, probably, but I’ll still attend 10-12 games and love every minute of it.

Can it be that we really do get to keep this team permanently? Can we allow ourselves to truly cherish our very own Nats?

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Another good categories resource

Published
by
Dave
on February 7, 2006
in blogging
. 1 Comment

(I’m on a geeky roll with this blogging stuff. Figuring out del.icio.us tags and categories has been a major breakthrough for me!)

I need to acknowledge the blog where all this category stuff and hacking Blogger and all is explained very clearly: Freshblog: Blogger Hacks, Categories for Blogger and other Blog Tips, Tricks & Tools. John’s series on Blogger Hacks is oh so very helpful.

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Okay, I’m figuring out blogging categories/tags

Published
by
Dave
on February 5, 2006
in blogging
. 1 Comment

I discovered, after posting that last post on the trouble I’m having with categories in Blogger, that the tools I used are working just fine.

So I should point to those self-same tools. There are essentially two tools on my bookmark bar in Firefox right now that are doing the job.

The first is a “Technorati del.icio.us” button by Ted Ernst that makes it very easy to put del.icio.us tags into a blog post.

The second cute trick is the “post to del.icio.us” button. I got this one from del.icio.us itself. Quick Online Tips has a list of these things, including some improvements. The Mozilla team also seems to be working on an extension that will do this.

So when composing or editing a post, you use Ted Ernst’s button to create your tags, and save them in your post in Blogger. Then, while viewing the post page (not the whole blog!), you click the “post to del.icio.us” button, which takes you to your del.icio.us account. Then enter your tags in the box provided, and you thereby associate these tags with that particular post in del.icio.us.

When somebody clicks on a category link in your blogpost, they will be taken to your del.icio.us account, showing all of your posts associated with that tag. Pretty neat!

Serious bloggers may scoff at my “gee-whiz” attitude toward all this, but after two days of searching, I find that simplistic, “gee-whiz” explanations can be very helpful for people who are not initiated. Indeed, it’s a feature of technological language that it can be very exclusive, but that its exclusivity isn’t seen as such by people who have learned what everything means. Once you’re inside, you forget what it was like to be outside.

One question for somebody: where did that domain name del.icio.us come from? What’s it mean?

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My week as a blogger/podcaster

Published
by
Dave
on February 5, 2006
in blogging and podcasting
. 2 Comments

This week I have done several things to improve my knowledge set about blogging, podcasting, and RSS.

I’ve had this Blogger blog since mid-December (not very long, actually), but only in the past two or three weeks have I started to figure out how blogging is different from just typing my thoughts into an open journal. That is, I haven’t really used links all that much, which is why only four of you people in the world are reading this blog right now. The other 27 gazillion people don’t know it exists.

My podcast, The Word Nerds, is hosted at LibSyn, which has made it very easy to do. The downside is that I haven’t ever really figured out how to actually make a podcast, since the LibSyn RSS engine did all the work for me.

Friday, though, I set up a new podcast feed for my German 4 class. The kids are each going to produce a 5-minute podcast in the German language about one of their interests. (I won’t link to it yet because it has nothing but dummy content right now.)

I built the podcast by setting up a Blogger blog under my own account, setting the settings for German language, pointing to a media file that I’ve got hosted at LibSyn, and then using Feedburner to convert my Atom feed to an RSS2.0 feed. Lo and behold, it worked fine (except for a brief hiccup with Feedburner late in the day yesterday).

So even though I haven’t hand-coded my own RSS, I do feel like I had more of a hands-on experience setting up this student-project podcast.

In the meantime I’m trying to figure out how to use categories and tags in Blogger. Since I’m such a rank newbie in blogging, I feel overwhelmed. Blogger doesn’t natively support categories of posts, but I like it otherwise. I’ve seen a number of Blogger blogs that seem able to categorize posts, but for the life of me, I haven’t figured this one out yet.

I did claim my blog feed (actually, all three of my blog feeds: this one, the German class one, and The Word Nerds) in Technorati, but I haven’t yet wrapped my mind around what that does for me.

And yesterday I set up an account in del.icio.us. But once again, I haven’t figured out what that’s going to do for me. I understand that I can keep bookmarks in my del.icio.us account and get to them from anywhere on the Internet, but I can’t grasp how that will help me categorize my posts.

I’ve seen one solution that suggests establishing a different blog in Blogger for each category, and then pointing to those from a “main blog.” But that seems awfully clumsy to me, and I just can’t see starting a whole new blog (and copy/pasting templates and such) for each and every category that might occur to me.

A better solution seems to be to use either Technorati tags or del.icio.us (God, that’s hard to type!) bookmarks to establish categories. A bit of searching led me to a couple of really good explanations of the concept by sam bot (a great conceptual overview) and Blogger Hacks - The Series - Freshblog. Some judicious studying of these two will, I hope, guide me to a better understanding.

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Why do performers perform?

Published
by
Dave
on February 5, 2006
in music and performing
. 5 Comments

I’ve been a performing artist for money ever since I was about 13 years old. Throughout high school and university I thought of myself as a performer. (I’m using the term “performer” because I have called myself a professional musician and a professional actor at several stages in my life.)

Particularly when I was trying to get started as an actor in New York, I used to expend a lot of energy and stress trying to figure out “who I was,” by which I mean what kind of performing persona was most likely to get me hired. Was I a young leading man? A character actor? A comedian? A musical actor? Something else? I never exactly zeroed in on any of those, which might have something to do with my not “making it” big as an actor. (That and my desire to stay married.)

Last night at my church, we had our once-a-year “Open Mike Night,” which is just what it sounds like. Anybody who wants to sing or play something can get on the program. A few dozen people from the congregation come to listen. A handful of folks, some of whom really don’t otherwise get up in front of an audience too much, present their musical tidbits. It’s a lot of fun, and yet we would never dream of putting out a CD of the result. We just do it for fun.

Or, actually, why do we do it?

I was thinking about this this morning. Why does a performing artist perform? For some people it was pretty scary getting up in front of friends and casual acquaintances to sing. You expose a lot about yourself when you do that. It’s not only about one’s singing voice; it’s also about one’s taste in music, one’s confidence in one’s presentation of self to others, even one’s ideology and point of view.

People who perform are famously driven by ego, but this Latin word for “I” can be applied to anyone. Everybody has an ego, and everybody wants his/her ego fed by approval. One of our first urges is for approval from Mom. When our friends approve of our song (recitation, magic trick, etc.), it’s even better. Mom pretty much has to approve, but friends don’t, necessarily. And when strangers approve, well, then you are somebody.

I guess I’ve been looking for approval from strangers all my life. When casting directors and talent agents gave me approval in my New York years, it put me on top of the world. And when I got nothing from them but indifference, it put me into a deep, funky depression.

It’s taken a long time to get a good perspective on this. And I’m still working on it.

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