Those images you see in the header are all taken by me, from my mid-life. Most of them have to do with the schools at which I teach. The rest are, I think, from my home or car. They should load randomly whenever you hit a new page or refresh your browser. As I write this, I have nine header images installed. (Rock on, WordPress and K2!)
ArchivePage 5 of 10
The Washington Post reports that the “wintry mix” is paralyzing the DC area. Over at Wonkette, folks who grew up in snowier places than the U.S. southeast are harumphing and growling like 80-year-old curmudgeons that these wimps in Washington can’t deal with a little “frozen water.” Makes ‘em feel superior to the yokel natives, I guess.
Whatever. Washington, DC is not New York or New Hampshire, for God’s sake. I’ve made this argument for about 25 years. Why would a community that hardly ever gets any snow invest tons of money on snow removal preparations? The fact is, the side streets are still slippery and dangerous to drive on.
But the point of this post is to talk about the solitude I’m experiencing today. My wife is running a large week-long national meeting in DC, and is camped out in a hotel in town. My daughter has gone in to work with her for the day, since she’s not at school.
Therefore, I’m at home alone, still unshaven and unshowered at 12:30 PM, wasting hour after hour customizing a couple of blog sites and drinking coffee.
I find that I’m tyrannized by my solitude. My school district has already cancelled school for tomorrow (the only responsible thing they could do, Wonkette, if there’s ice and snow on the roads the school buses travel). Therefore, I have nothing pressing me to come alive, really. My neighbors are already busy shoveling their sidewalks while I’m blogging and taking photos. Guess I’d better go out and be responsible now.
I believe that by the end of this two-day forced vacation from teaching I will have had enough of snow days. Let’s get back to our regularly scheduled life now.
In the DC area we live right at the ice-snow line. North and west of us they get snow. South and east of us they get rain. Where we live we get the ugly, nasty mixture of sleet and freezing rain cutely referred to as “wintry mix.” Heavy ice accumulates on power lines and trees. Sometimes at my house the power goes out for 36 hours or more.
So they didn’t call off school this morning, but they sent us home two hours early. My commute home, which normally takes about 40 minutes, was well over an hour.
Some places get real blizzards, like in this video by a Canadian graduate student. Not us. We get slush. And then a hard freeze.
Well, they did it again. The weather pundits, who had been waving their finger
s and warning ominously as recently as Sunday that the DC area would get maybe 10 inches of snow, once again missed it completely.
This morning, Tuesday, there is not a drop on the ground. No snow, no sleet, no wintry mix. Nothing. There may be some during the day today. This means, of course, that we will go to school today and either drive home in a nasty, dangerous mess, or not at all.
I have to remember, when these kinds of warnings are on the horizon, how absolutely, dramatically wrong the mass-media weather prognosticators can be.
I’m in the middle of a massive server move this week, and I’m getting more education than I bargained for.
I’m trying to move three domains (thewordnerds.org, davesmidlife.com, and daveshepmagic.com) to one account at BlueHost. The BlueHost folks are very helpful, their servers are apparently robust, the company is the beneficiary of many good online reviews, the service is cheap.
As you can see if you are one of the six people worldwide reading this post (ever), davesmidlife.com came over without a problem. It’s a little old WordPress blog and nothing more.
The big, important one is for The Word Nerds. The blog seems to have moved okay, and the forum has also successfully moved (although I still have to install anti-spambot modifications).
I am quite concerned that my iTunes does not see the Word Nerds podcast feed, but it may be too soon after the repointing of my domain name. Maybe the Internet is still looking in two places for my site. (Man, I hope so. This looks unsettlingly like a problem I was having with GoDaddy before I dumped them.)
Also, my K2 WordPress theme for The Word Nerds doesn’t work, so I’m using plain vanilla, with no graphic header and no sidebar links, for the time being.
Several domains that I own, that I intend to forward to the ones above, are not forwarding properly.
I am learning a lot about MySQL, WordPress, domain name assignments, and the Internet in general. However, I would have been happy with somewhat less education and somewhat more transparent functionality.
About a year ago, when the film version of The DaVinci Code was about to come out, I wrote here about my sheer contempt for the novel. I’m a Tom Hanks fan (That Thing You Do is one of my favorite light and fluffy movies), but the DVC film was, by all accounts, a disaster. (I must admit that I did not spend the $9.00 charged by Northern Virginia cinemas to see the thing.)
An entry today in the brilliant linguistics-related blog Language Log reminds me exactly why I hated the novel so much. A post by Geoffrey K. Pullum about a BBC interview with Jesse Sheidlower pointed, in a footnote, to an earlier post about DVC. In November 2004, Pullum took Brown to task for his facile use of an anarthrous noun phrase to open just about every one of his novels.
Reading Pullum’s post was a wonderful validation of my contempt for Brown’s work. A year ago I had developed the uneasy feeling that I was a strange fish for not liking DVC. Everybody else seemed to, after all.
But renowned linguist Pullum’s post reminded me why: Brown’s a hack. (See the November, 2004, post to understand the joke in that last sentence.)
My 17-year-old daughter, who is herself a Beatles fan, gave me the new CD/DVD set Love, the mashup of Beatles music produced by Giles and George Martin for Cirque du Soleil, as a Christmas gift.
I am the original Beatlemaniac, yet for some reason the CD sat on my desk for th
ree or four weeks before I imported it into iTunes. (Maybe it’s a sign of the times that I had to wait until I had a few minutes to import it to my iPod before I got around to listening. Does this serve the Beatles right for waiting so long to join the digital music revolution?)
The album is fantastic. Beatles purists (mostly on discussion forums)Â who complain that it’s “messing around” with the originals must not remember what the Beatles did during their recording careers. They messed around all the time. John Lennon was one of the earliest proponents of reverse-tracking and using found sound.
On the other hand, many people criticized the CD for not being bold enough. And many reviewers seem to share my fascination with the combination of brilliant re-mastering and wild creativity from an authoritative source, the Martins. (Mercifully, the producers did not try to include any of “Revolution #9″ on this soundtrack. Wild creativity does have its limits.)
As a Baby Boomer, I will probably always have the feeling that the Beatles are somehow “cutting edge.” However, listening to and looking at the interviews with surviving Beatles and spouses reminds me that their music is now the music of really rather old people. Classic it may be, but cutting edge it’s not anymore.
But it is great music. I will go to my grave (hopefully several decades from now) maintaining that modern rock-and-roll owes an enormous debt of gratitude to the Fab Four and George Martin, for essentially inventing such things as massive multitracking and stadium rock shows. And the music remains fresh and strong. Why else would kids born in the 1990s be so into it?
Okay, that last post was an attempt to blog a picture from my Flickr account, pure and simple.
I moved this blog to a new server last weekend. I very, very stupidly had my domain name registrar point my domain name to both the old GoDaddy server and the new one, at mwsmedia.com, at the same time. This, of course, caused myriad problems, which are now solved.
EXCEPT…WordPress won’t allow me to upload a picture to my WP space since I moved servers. I have tried setting write permissions on the relevant directories, but I haven’t found the combination yet.
If anybody is familiar with setting WP write permissions from a Mac environment, using Fetch, I’d appreciate some input.
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Nationals stadium: Half and N Streets
Originally uploaded by ShepDave.
The sign is from Monument Realty, the company developing the area closest to the new stadium. It’s going to turn a grungy neighborhood street into a snazzy retail-and-restaurant strip.
Okay, a week and a half after Macworld, I find myself still abuzz about that iPhone.
Steve Jobs may be a genius presenter, but even so, it looks like a really neat product. Yes, I know it’s not open to the installation of other applications, but I don’t run any downloaded applications on the Sony-Ericcson W600i I use right now. The apps on the iPhone (Safari, in particular) are all I’m ever going to use on a phone/PDA.
I won’t buy one as soon as it comes out. I’ll give myself some months to cool off about it, and to let Apple get the bugs get worked out. But I probably will get one. I’m already a Cingular customer, so I wouldn’t have to switch. And I don’t have a video iPod, so that might be a marginal justification for that aspect of it.
Okay, y’all tell me now how stupid and starstruck I am. I don’t care. If it does the things Jobs showed off in the demo, and if it’ll connect up to my Prius’s Bluetooth connection, then I’m sold.