wake up!

Yeah, what she said: FringeHog: In Praise of Slow Blogging.

Or is it a he? There’s no byline and several authors for the site.

Whatever.

Also, should I get an OLPC (one laptop per child) XO laptop in the buy one / donate one program? They look like they might be a great conference tool. Seven hours of battery life.

Since I started at Yahoo my workaday routine involves riding a shuttle from Oakland to Sunnyvale with a big laptop computer crammed on my lap so I can work, browse the net, or as I’ve been doing lately, blog.

For some time I’ve been thinking that an upgrade to my smartphone, something with a qwerty keyboard, such as a blackberry, treo, t-mobile whatsit, or pocketpc might make a much less bulky alternative.

This past weekend I got myself an iPhone (or jPhone as I like to call it), so now I’m on that bus, bypassing the overloaded wireless, and look my I’m blogging!

It’s not superconvenient. I’m still getting used to the fatfingers virtual keyboard, though the guess-ahead feature, whatever it’s we, definitely helps.

I’m also studying the phone’s interaction design, of course, looking for interesting interaction patterns, but I think I’ll wait till I have a real keyboard in front of me before I elaborate on what I’m discovering and noticing about this new handheld.

Inspirational typo: hamdheld

Now to try to insert a picture or even a link… the hard part.

(Picture was too hard to manage via the jP, so I added the one at the top afterward, on arriving at my desk. Ditto for the link above to the interactive gestures pattern library wiki.)

I’m trying to do more “real” blogging here these days and I feel like my Delicious links just drown everything else out. (Also a twitter follower mentioned being interested in people’s blog posts but not their bookmarks - I am now having my blog posts send notices to twitter - and that kinda made sense to me.)

I am putting a delicious link badge in my sidebar, though, so people interested in my daily (or nearly) bookmarking habits can still find those links there, complete with tags and notes, when I add them.

In reply to apophenia: Twitter questions (curiosity is killing me…):

First, the practical question. Can i quote you?
[ ] Yes, and you must use my real name.
[ ] Yes, but please use a pseudonym and don’t use any identifying information.
[ ] No, please just use this for your own weird thoughts.

Hmm, those options have an excluded middle. I’d say “Yes, feel free, and you may use my real name, my online handle(s), or whatever other descriptor you find useful.” If I have to pick one I guess I’d pick the first one.

1. Why do you use Twitter? What do you like/dislike about it?

I use it to jot down my thoughts and narrate my day and to keep up with what some of my (online) friends are doing and thinking about. I like the ambient intimacy, to quote Leisa Reichelt.

2. Who do you think is reading your Tweets? Is this the audience you want? Why/why not? Tell me anything you think of relating to the audience for your Tweets.

I think my followers are reading them. Is that a trick question? It’s a perfectly OK audience for me, since it’s opt in. There are people, like close friend and family whom I’d like to also read them (if they were willing of course), but there is no invite feature.

3. How do you read others’ Tweets? Do you read all of them? Who do you read/not read and why? Do you know them all?

I read them sometimes via twitterific, sometimes from the Twitter website, sometimes receiving them as text messages. I don’t always read all of them but I do tend to read down till I reach familiar territory, much like the way I catch up on a blog I haven’t read in a while. (Having said that, I scan - I don’t read everything carefully.)

I read people whom I’ve met and a few whom I find interesting or appealing. So I don’t know them all but I think I know (meaning have met in person) 90% of them. I don’t expect any of them to reciprocate necessarily. That is, it doesn’t bother me if they are not interested in following my thoughts.

4. What content do you think is appropriate for a Tweet? What is inappropriate? Have you ever found yourself wanting to Tweet and then deciding against it? Why?

I haven’t thought about it too much. I go by instinct. I guess some descriptions of graphic bodily functions might not necessarily feel appropriate to me, at times. Beyond that I think it’s fair game and the character limit kind of helps.

I have thought about tweeting something and then decided not to, usually because I think it’s too random or trivial, because I’ve ceased to find it amusing in the first few seconds since thinking of it, or because I’ve posted a bunch of tweets lately and don’t want to be spamming people.

5. Are your Tweets public? Why/why not? How do you feel about people you don’t know coming across them? What about people you do know?

My tweets are public. I like doing things in public and don’t mind people paying attention. Therefore (back to the appropriateness thing) I probably won’t be tweeting about things that are illegal or offensive or humiliating (unless I can’t resist because it’s so entertaining or revealing). I don’t mind people coming across what I write. I expect it’s all out there and people will see it and even form opinions about me based on it. It’s all good.

6. What do i need to know about why Twitter is/is not working for you or your friends?

I can’t get the IM interface working and I would find it useful during the workday. There are many people I’d enjoy sharing with on Twitter who are not on the system but I can’t be sure they’d like it (so many people don’t) so I don’t feel comfortable evangelizing.

If you’re an experienced blogger in the Bay Area and would like to work for a cool startup recently acquired by Yahoo!, in Berkeley, then you may want to apply for this new community manager role: The MyBlogLog Blog: Seeking: MyBlogLog uber-user for long-term relationship

They seem to grok the Craig Newmark idea that customer service is a key part of growing their business.

I got tired of the old design and wanted to take advantage of some of the new-er features of the blog software I’m using, so I’ve temporarily redone the design with one of their canned themes. Soon I’ll start tweaking the typography and colors and spacing and such and adding back in some of the features stranded in the old design.

While I’ve been neglecting this and many other of my Mediajunkie blogs in the past year and a half (excuse: full-time work, baybee), I have actually been blogging. While at Extractable I launched a spearheaded a user-experience focused blog called Extra! Extra! and wrote something for it nearly every workday for about a year.

Actually, my commitment was to make sure something was written in it every day, and about 10 to 15% of the time other Extractable folks wrote great content for the blog as well. I just backed it up and made sure there was always something fresh.

Anyway, I am making a job change now. I am currently taking a week off and next week I will start a new job, more about which in due time, so yesterday I used Eric Pierce’s WPexport plugin for WordPress tp expprt all the entries, remove the ones that weren’t mine and then export them into this here blog (wake up!).

I added that link just now because all of this is context-dependent. For example, this entry will be echoes at X-POLLEN (aka xian’s running monolog) and then when it says “this here blog” it will actually be lying (well, sort of, because recent imported entries will also show up there). I mention that because as I imported the entries I noticed that many of them are written from a “we’re here at Extractable” perspective that will probably sound funny in this blog. In fact I removed the posts bragging about site launches - most of which were written by others anyway - and a few other entries that were really company-specific.

I thought about whether the posts belong here or elsewhere (say, at RFB or The Power of Many) or even whether I should launch a new web/user-experience related blog, but that way lies madness. As I’ve written recently, I am now on the consolidation tip and I am going to start either retiring blogs and/or folding their content into this one, so people will know where to point to me and look for my latest stuff, etc.

So I just created a new master “user rexperience” category here and then replicated all the Extra! Extra! categories under it, though I think the exporter lost multiple categories and assigned only one to each entry, but oh well. So this blog is going to become less of a personal journal and more of an omnibus of whatever I’m currently thinking about. I may not need the monolog anymore, either. Have to think that through. My brain hurts. And this is supposed to be my day off.

For some odd reason both of the outgoing mail servers that route mail for me from my various addresses are stalling out repeatedly at the moment. This means I have about seven or eight messages in my queue that aren't being sent out.

This means that I may be trying to reply to email from you but I may be unable. I'm a little distracted today, printing out sample documents for a long meeting/interview, so diagnosing the problem isn't high enough on my priority list at the moment.

Rest assured, I am receiving incoming mail just fine and I'll figure this problem out probably by tomorrow, unless, like so many other Internet issues, it decided to just go away on its own.

I tore down the monolog at x-pollen and built it back up as a new standalone blog. It was a fake blog before. Now it has its own blog number in my system and for the time being it will only update when I update it manually (at least until I get a crontab working).

I'm going to play around with the new dynamic page generation features in MT 3 and see how they work. If I can get them doing something interesting for monolog then I will probably apply what I learn to Telegraph.

It's tempting, though, to just use something like CivicSpace which has a built-in news aggregrator and seems to know how to the do the cron stuff itself without asking. It's gotten very easy to install and even though I'm not a social movement, for the sites that combine content from multiple blogs it might turn out to be the best solution.

Hallelujah. Jeff's Spleen is producing its... er, bile? once again! But that design, it's so 2003....

I'm the same way. I love it when you can talk about all music as popular and good, popular and bad, unpopular and good, or unpopular and bad. I love magic squares. Is it because they're very small databases?

The constant music is a reminder that I like to sing, especially when no one else is around to here, and that I like to dance, alone and in company. Singing unlocks my voice somehow my light-opera expressitivity, my comic whimsy, it loosens my neck and shoulders. Dancing gives my body a way to tell me where it feels sore and where it feels stuck. I have to pay attention. I at least don't make the patterns worse that day.

I wondered recently if our sinews in our muscles can get twisted like a telephone wire. There are times when repeated backward Pete Townsendish windmill armswings feel as though I am unspooling a tightly wound rope of jute through the shoulder joint.

Christian Crumlish's personal weblog, most recently called X-POLLEN, has been renamed. It is now called wake up and has been moved to xianlandia.com, as a more appropriate domain for Christian's personal effects. Christian feels strange writing about himself in the third person and will stop now.

You can also call it "xianlandia" or Christian's blog or really anything you like if you don't like the name wake up, which just came to me and who knows how long I'll stick with it? I'm fickle like that.

This, really, is the switcheroo I promised a few weeks back.

I just explained where the X-POLLEN blog went but what happened to the x-pollen.com domain? For now, I'm parking the site that aggregates all of my weblog posts, the site I call monolog or xian's monolog, there. In fact, it's not really all of my weblog posts, but just those published by the (Movable Type) software that runs on that same server and hosts a number of group blogs and guest blogs. I try to include writings from other sites in the sidebar, but I haven't come up with a universal solution for that, especially when you factor in blog comments posted elsewhere.

I might move it over to a me-specific subdirectory at the site, eventually, and turn x-pollen.com into a showcase for recent entries from all the blogs hosted on the site, featuring all the great writers I'm hosting. (Then I can relaunch Mediajunkie as an aggregator site featuring external feeds.) One step at a time, though.

As is inevitable when not doing a three-step switch between two items, I munged something along the way. In this case, the monolog stylesheet. So the site's design is raw old-skool vintage 1993-era HTML right now, till I come up with something new.

orkut is still pointless but at least now the friends you see on your home page are random intead of nine princes in amber.

now i'm paring down my communities, most of them have little or no action or real point at all:

it's kind of like a patchwork quilt or the ersatz coat of arms the confirmation workbook from my progressive Catholic school encouraged me to invent to symbolize the important milestones or themes of my life (as of age eleven, I guess).

Freaky software malfunctions are currently making it nearly impossible for me to reply to email in the normal way, so if you need to hear back from me soonly, try calling me. If you don't have my number or don't know anyone who does, then that's probably just as well.

There's a weird dislocating feeling, having my ordinary email-reply method broken. It's like a phantom limb, but it's also a release for tense brain muscles that have been poised for incoming mail for about 11 years straight without much relaxation. I've been warming to the phone lately, and am finding that face-to-face still takes the cake, but the competition for that time can be pretty fierce.

I am receiving email, so don't worry about me not getting your messages. Other ways to reach me include posting to your blog (and pinging me so I know to look), contacting me via orkut, or looking for me in the chat-o-sphere. I usually check into Yahoo! Messenger and #joiito at least once a day.

Need an invitation to orkut? Let me know and I'll send you one.

Once consequence of my "damn the torpedoes" approach to web presence is blundering ahead and trying stuff without knowing what the final shape will need to be. I hope to learn from the consequences and if my tools make the work malleable enough and I pay attention, things will keep getting closer to what I would dream of if I didn't have insomnia.

So, I am about to do a little renaming among my personal sites. At various time I've kept my personal journal (stuff about my life, stuff I only expect people I know to find interesting, but stuff nonetheless that I am willing to have anyone know about me) under various names: Breathing Room, Still Breathing, Shallow Breathing, bodega, x-ism, and most recently X-POLLEN. More recently still I rededicated xianlandia.com to be a multhithreaded view of my various bloggish writing (anything I'm managing on my own server, with links to stuff hosted elsewhere).

But originally X-POLLEN wasn't supposed to be a journal blog. It was one of the names I toyed with for my e-publishing presence, and in fact my Movable Type content-management installation run from that domain. It just makes more sense to me that the more whimsical, less semioticky xianlandia (pronounced the way Latino DJs say "discolandia" - "ehhh-see-own-lon-deeyaaa!) should be the name for my drivellous personal blog, and let x-pollen go back to being grand central station for stuff i'm doing and connections I'm making. So be it and so it will be.

For the six readers of my various blogs, this may be momentarily confusing. people looking for monolog may find my personal journal there instead, and not notice the absence of scintillating political analysis, blog gossip, and anemic arts news. People used to reading my personal blog will find at that address or in that RSS feed the whole panoply of stuff I write about ("who knew Christian was an anarcho-syndicalist entrepreneur?") and not notice the large sign i'm sure to add to my templates saying "looking for my journal? it's now at xianlandia" at x-pollen and "looking for my full feed? it's now at x-pollen.com" over at xianlandia).

There may be a few bumps in the road, but now, all six of you, you can't say I haven't warned you when it starts happening.

So Dan asks me if there’s any way he can keep up with my blog postings all in one place, instead of scattered over numerous sites depending on whether it’s a journal entry, something to do with the arts, political, random and briefly noted, or experimental (I’m probably forgetting something).

Well, now there is. It still needs work, but I’ve converted the xianlandia.com domain over so that its home page is something I call monoblog, a complete recent listing of my blog posts, at least those hosted here at Mediajunkie/Open Publishing (that is, not including experiments over at TypePad or my one remaining Blogger-managed weblog, Uncle John’s Blog).

There’s no syndicated feed for monoblog yet, but it’s a step in the right direction if you want your one-stop xian online blather shopping.

UPDATE: Changed the name to monolog for better punability.

Well, I bit the bullet, installed some perl modules and migrated over the entries in my LiveJournal, bodega, from January through October of 2002 (and a single entry from June of this year) to this X-POLLEN weblog.

I've been doing a bunch of migrations moving other sites from Radio to Movable Type and from Blogger to Movable Type. This one relied heavily on advice from Amanita.

When I hit the one year mark over at Radio Free Blogistan I added the MTOnThisDate plugin and started showing entries from the previous (or next) year on main and archive pages at RFB. I may do the same thing here. I intend to keep drilling back and adding old journal pages to this one repository.

Next is the couple-three entries done at Shallows using Blogger. That will be easy. Then I need to extract the Still Breathing entries from Diaryland, and finally, I'll have to manually convert the handcoded pages of Breathing Room. That will take me back to 1997. The only earlier weblog-like thing I did was a crisis journal called "The Daily Barbie" that is more properly part of Enterzone and not the kind of personal blog/diary represented by those other sites and this one.

OK, someone managed to ping my trackback ping metablog, so once again I'm trying to ping it myself. This post may disappear.

off the top of me head:

• Jeff Green


• Dan Brodnitz


• Nicholas Meriwether


• Robert Meriwether


• Jennifer Crumlish


• Arthur Crumlish (pear and fills)


• don't get me started on Crumlishes!


• Jeff Tiedrich


• Justin D'arms


• Doris Lessing


• Louis Menand


• Christopher Hitchens

I guess these headlines will grow stale unless I manually republish the page. Hmmm...

Getting closer on adapting a perl script to aggregate RSS chronically and xlate it into HTML.

My dance card is full now at least through May, and I'd like to spend a week or so in Greece in May or June this year, and with this flood of steady, varied, remunerative work I suddenly find myself more productive in other areas as well.

I'm applying what I've learned and practiced over the years to my own ongoing projects and I find that things are coming together nicely, as ever in fits and bounds. I still have goals, I'm still striving, but I don't feel so impatient. I don't feel like I'm wasting my time.

I just made a kind of console page for myself, for my PEP (personal expresion platform) project. It's brain-dead simple, just a list of direct links into the entry pages of my various blogs and other website publications, with a place fo ropening my current offline writing projects as well. It's one-stop shopping. I'd better password-protect it.

...

Been geeking around on a PC again. Borrowed a Dell for an upcoming documentation project and been bidding on Thinkpad's on ebay for another project. (Found out I'm going to be working with Molly on the project I can't talk about yet, which is cool!)

So after I wondered about using my new camera part-time as a webcam, I remembered that I own a Logitech cam that was gathering dust because of nonexistent OS X support. But since I have this Dell machine just sitting here, I plugged it in, got the driver, downloaded some freeware, and started streaming an image called x-cam.jpg to my xianlandia.com server. Then, since I recently copied the golden boy image over on the x-ism experimental textpattern blog, I figured maybe my personal blog could use that real-time 'ere I am J.H. warts and all circa 1997 cam view, maybe with a clever caption once I think of one.

It's very home page-y and not very bloggy because it's just streaming out there like old time live TV with no backup or archiving.

Don't know how long it will last. Sorry about the backlighting.

Test category-based trackback ping functionality between this blog and metaxian, which really sohuld be and eventually probably will be just a category of this blog.

Now move along.

Just now finally got around to upgrading the version of Movable Type driving this X-POLLEN blog. Since I installed version 2.5 there was a 2.51 upgrade and possibly a 2.52, and then the recent more substantial release of 2.6, quickly followed by bugfixes 2.61 and 2.62. So I managed to avoid a lot of interim upgrades.

Now I have to poke around a little, make the comments closeable (Textpattern has a nice feature that makes comments close after x amount of time, such as two weeks), maybe choose a Create Commons license for my various MT-driven sites, see what else is new.

I also finally installed pMachine today. It looks kind of cool but probably not worth switching anything over for. The pro version has some droolworthy features but then the teaser's for the upcoming pro version of MT sounds awfully good too.

It wasn't the first time I failed to close a tag correctly (in this case the STRONG tags surrounding the song same in the template for iTunes listings), and it won't be the last time, but I've fixed it now, so here's another example:

I did something very bad to Internet Explorer 2.2 for the Mac and now it crashes whenever it tries to start up. I downloaded a replacement and installed it but the problem remains. Something in the configuration or preferences must be triggering the problem, I suppose.

As side effect of this is that I'm using Chimera and Safari a lot more, which makes me face up to the design problems with this and other pages.

No progress, yet, but at least I'm facing up to them, right?

It's funny, though, that I'm experiencing this as a forced fast. I'm sort of waiting to see if I feel a need to get IE working again. About the only thing it has that I might like to have is up-to-date cookies in the Well's web interface (Engaged) so that I don't have to find my place again in the few conferences I've been able to keep up with lately (mostly flame.ind).

I guess if it gets to be enough of a problem, I'll deal with it. For now I'm preferring Chimera over Safari, and that's not just because my design for RFB renders badly in Safari.

before:

Birdcage from the album "Shmo's Sampler" by Stew and the Negro Problem

after:

OK. Now to post and test the search links.

before:

Birdcage from the album "Shmo's Sampler" by Stew and the Negro Problem

after:

OK. Now to post and test the search links.

When I feel like referring to or quoting from the music I'm listening to at the moment, I want the reference to be succinct and to link to a search for the song title, album name, and band or artist name (as opposed to just a search for the band name).

This format is still not as nice-looking at Scot Hacker dotted boxes:

x

Random example of distracted markup: &&and&;

For readers of my X-POLLEN blog via (an RSS) news feed, which includes LiveJournal friends reading the xpollen user Mark Pasc setup for me, I apologize for the way the feed just resent something like seventeen recent posts.

I just made a minor administrivial change to this blog's archiving nomenclature. Posts are now stored in calendar directories (YYYY/mm/dd, of course, so they sort intuitively) with the filename for the single-post archive file constructed from the entry title, which makes the raw URL a tad more comprehensible. This replaces a serial system in which a typical post would be called /000171.html or something like that.

The new format rides on the URL, saying "this is a post about whatever_the_filename_says posted on mm the ddth, in the year of our Lord 20YY). The old one said "this was xian's 171 post (give or take 40 or so comments and who knows how many deleted drafts)."

But this is inside baseball.

And completely irrelevant to LiveJournal users, who ordinarily don't have to deal with URLs like that and see my blog as one of their friends in their own personal design.

What I'm more concerned about is that I hope MT did not take it upon itself to delete the old-form addresses for the first 56 posts or so, as that would of course break any external links pointing into the site. The storage hit is minor to accommodate duplicates of those original posts, though there's a chance of splitting subsequent followup comments before old and new locations, so may I should think about using symbolic links or mod_rewrite to redirect incoming links set to the old, serial URLs.

What is annoying is that I specifically declined to "rebuild" the static site Movable Type's becaused I knew I had to work out a backup or migration plan for the address changes and had not done so yet (in my lurching, hurry-up-and-wait progress). Still, it seems that I goofed or MT took it upon itself to regenerate the pages, at least for the RSS news feed, so that's why I'm worried.

In the worst case, if MT munged the old URLs outright, then I may have a tedious cleanup job ahead of me. If both versions coexist, then I can work out a better solution in due time.

At this point even my eyes begin to glaze over.

Recommended Thursday morning pickup: Patti Smith doing Land of 1000 Dances (sort of).

A passing police siren summons up a strange being dragged away from my computer door knocked in dystopian fantasy image momentarily, before it is dispelled by a feeling of "surely not here."

"Divine to define, she's moving to divine. So say so. So say so."
The Great Curve, Talking Heads

B's new blog... I just posted about it at artsflow.

I'll be pinging this entry to see if I can get my other blog posts listed here automatically on the category page (x-pings).

I am up to my ears on a project right now, with deadlines coming fast and furious, and I'm taking today off.

I'm well aware of a number of pressing email messages in my in box awaiting my reply and I hope that my correspondents can forbear a while longer as I get my act together. I am not ignoring anyone deliberately. I read messages as they come in, and if I can't reply off the top of my head, there's sometimes a lag until I can find an opportunity to organize my thoughts and respond cogently.

My SBC Pacbell account's email server is down at the moment. It's this server that handles any mail to my widely known pobox.com forwarding adress, which is where most of my custom or vanity domains currently point.

If the problem persists, I'll redirect pobox to my minimal Earthlink account used for traveling (that I won't need soon now that SBC/Yahoo! are supposedly going to provide dialup from anywhere in the US).

A few of my addresses don't go through this bottleneck. The only public one is my address at Waterside, my literary agency. If you know that, feel free to cc me there until this problem goes away (but not forever, please! I hate getting two of everything forever).

Hate to do this, but there's no other way. Technicalia, but not interesting. I'll report if anything becomes interesting.

Having ceased posting new content to bodega, I haven't exactly been tearing it up over here at x-pollen yet (which paid LJ users can add to their friend's list as http://livejournal.com/users/xpollen/.

I am sorting things out, though, in my slow rambling way, and in the meantime this stuff is being picked up by RFB's x-pollen channel, along with a lot of other stuff.

For some reason my Escape key suddenly doesn't seem to work, at least in the context of "vi". It's essential in that program for dropping back out of text entry mode into command mode (for such things as, oh, saving and quitting).

I can't find any references to broken Esc keys in tiMacs anywhere online, so I don't know if this is common or rare, if it's a crumb under the key or a short of some kind, or even some bizarre kinds of software failure/bug/feature.

It sure makes editing simple text files (such as, oh, .htaccess) a lot more difficult, especially since TextEdit seems to insist on saving stuff as RTF instead of allowing simple text files. What's up with that?

MOVABLE TYPE :: Personal Publishing System

MOVABLE TYPE :: Personal Publishing System