OneMind

Welcome! You are looking at my brand-spanking-new release of the four-year-old OneMind blog. I hope you like the new look and feel.

A couple of weeks ago I decided that I wanted to switch my old blog, which was served on Drupal, to WordPress. There were a number of reasons for this. First, I’m finding more clients who are interested in having sites built in WordPress (and not just blogs either) and little or no demand for Drupal work. Second, I had to do an in-depth evaluation of WordPress for my biggest client and was blown away by how far the technology has come in the two years since I last visited it. Third, I really liked the way themes are designed and built in WordPress; I felt I could master them fairly easily and then be able to move on and create my own theme or take more control of the theme I chose. So far, that’s been the case.

There are so many available plug-ins for WP and they are in general so much easier to install, configure and use than those in Drupal (from which WP’s creators clearly learned) that I’m looking forward to a lot more enjoyable times experimenting with various features and enhancements.

Moving over from Drupal turned out to be fairly painless with some available tools and the help of my brother-in-law and sysadmin guru Jeff Soule.

So here we are. New digs. New navigation. Take a look around. Hope you like the place.

I have client Web sites on three different hosting services primarily for historical reasons. One of these days, I keep promising myself, I will consolidate them all in one place. Of course, that’s a non-trivial task so it may not get done for a while if ever.

The most recent hosting service I started using is GreenGeeks. I chose them because one of my clients has two Web sites in the eco/enviro space and is very green in his thinking. I spent several days investigating quite a few green hosting services before settling on them and for the first 3-4 months I’ve used them they’ve been quite good.

Last weekend, though, the server I’m on there experienced a 60-hour outage. The cause, they said, was an abusive user who had crashed the server and triggered a filesystem check that kept going awry and not finishing. My tech guy tells me that’s possible, that it’s pretty anomalous, and that it could happen to anyone. So as frustrating as it was for me and my client, I didn’t blow a gasket. As the outage continued, GreenGeeks was quite good about staying in contact with me, keeping me up-to-date on efforts to repair the server, and apologizing repeatedly. This morning company president Trey Gardner sent another apology in which he explained in some detail how their plans have changed to prevent such problems in the future or at least to minimize their impact. And the company offered three months of free hosting to anyone affected by the downtime.

Am I feeling all warm and fuzzy about GreenGeeks now? Not quite. But did they turn a possible customer-losing situation into a willing-to-give-them-another-chance scenario? Yes, they did.

If you’re in the Monterey area, you might enjoy dropping into the next meeting of the Monterey Bay Users Group-PC. The group meets Friday, August 7, 7:30 p.m., at the P. G. Adult Education Center, 1025 Lighthouse Ave, Pacific Grove. I’ll be speaking about blogging: history, value, tools and techniques.

I can hardly believe this bullshit. I can’t believe Amazon would do it. I can’t believe the publisher would ask them to do it. I can’t believe they’d do it with no prior notification or discussion.

I love my Kindle but I may have to stop using it after this crap. Absolutely unacceptable.

We as a body politic find ourselves held hostage to partisan politics at both the national and state (in California at least) levels. We need to sweep these bums out of office, practically without exception. But I don’t know if this has escaped your attention: there’s no provision for doing that or anything like it. Why? Because it’s the legislators who have to sit in judgment. What do you suppose the odds are of that happening?

My friend and colleague Tony Seton has a clear, incisive piece on this today. In a piece called “Upper Chamberpot”, he calls the United States Senate a joke. There is no leadership coming from either party on the Hill, consumed as they all are by politics and the constant focus on re-election. There isn’t a leader in the bunch. Not one. They’re all followers: of polls, of party policy and of the almighty dollar. His particular gripe today is that they are playing dumb politics with the future of the planet by failing to adopt the massive energy policy shift that is necessary if we are to avoid a global meltdown that could well spell the end of humanity. Tony sees photovolaic cells as the key technology we should be developing, but which isn’t even on the debate horizon in Congress. President Obama, who is starting to make me think he only looks good by comparison with his predecessor, is silent and absent. No leadership there, either.

Meanwhile, in my state, the legislature continues deadlocked over a budget. The impasse has already caused the state treasurer to issue billions of dollars in what are effectively IOUs (which may even prove uncollectible in the future; the biggest banks in the state stopped honoring them late last week). Republicans stonewall because of their view that all taxes are evil and to be resisted even at the expense of a total meltdown of the state. The Democrats, meanwhile, balk at some of the Draconian budget cuts it would take to attempt to overcome a $23 billion budget deficit. Governor Schwarzenegger, meanwhile, struts like a peacock and threatens to veto any legislation he doesn’t personally like. The man can’t even pronounce the name of the state correctly.

They’re all bums, every one. We the people need a mechanism for wholesale replacement of legislatures gone bad. How fast do you suppose we’d get a budget in California — or a sane energy policy for the United States — if the law said that failure to act intelligently and sanely and in the national interest resulted in immediate forfeiture of legislators’ jobs including all pay and benefits and impounding of all their campaign and slush funds?

Yeah, I know. Who’s gonna pass that law?

This article on the American Institute of Vedic Studies Web site raises some thought-provoking questions and points to some potential spiritual-psychological answers as it discusses IT in the context of the current global economic and climatological dilemmas.

The author, Dr. David Frawley, is an eminent authority on Hindu thought and spirituality who has a clear-eyed grasp of the state of the world today as he surveys the limits of information technology, limits he says are being realized in the midst of these global conditions. Among other things, he suggests that perhaps young Indian entrepreneurs hold the key to reconciling the seeming exhaustion of the capabilities of linear-realized IT and the inner wisdom of centuries-old spiritual technology. “India’s new set of young entrepreneurs – who still have the cultural and family heritage of Yoga and Vedanta – can help in such a dharmic reorientation of our present civilization. Let us hope that they awaken to this task because if they do not, it is difficult to see where the alternative may come from,” he writes.

I find it immensely intriguing and suddenly more important than ever before to recognize the huge percentage of computer professionals of Indian background who are working in this country and, perhaps even more significantly, being trained here and returning to their native India where they can blend their cultural and philosophical heritage with the mind-and-material bent of Western philosophy in ways that may boggle the mind in the decades immediately ahead.

Wow. I just finished attending a Webcast from O’Reilly Media about Yahoo’s YQL (Yahoo Query Language) an SQL-like tool for accessing data virtually anywhere on the Web, combining data from multiple sites into an app, transforming and filtering data. Very interesting. Not only that, but the YQL team just released today the ability to change content with queries. This makes it really easy for developers to create new and better-integrated ways of updating things like blog posts, Twitter tweets, etc.

It appears that you can turn any Web site into tabular data that can then be used in your Web app as you would any data from more common sources. The YQL activity is part of the Yahoo Platform team’s effort and is closely related to Yahoo Pipes. Read more

Ever since Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin announced yesterday that she is stepping down as governor 18 months before her term ends, I’ve had a stream of messages from friends and colleagues salivating over the idea of her being able to secure the top spot on the GOP’s 2012 ticket. Through all the speculation over how her strange-seeming decision (I suspect there is scandal lurking here) will affect her thinly disguised desire to run for President, my fellow liberals have been projecting one step beyond that. If, they argue, she starts now and refurbishes her image (a la Nixon in the 1960s), she may well be able to win her party’s nomination if for no other reason than the fact that a popular President Obama would be virtually unbeatable. In situations like that, the out-of-power party often turns to a narrow niche candidate for a sacrificial lamb that simultaneously acts as a sop to the party’s fringe.

I’m not nearly as delirious about this prospect as my fellow travelers. Perhaps it’s because I am not sufficiently sanguine about the voters’ perceptiveness and ability to resist well-done propaganda. Perhaps it’s because I have a sense that Obama may lose a ton of support from the left wing of his own party in 2012 thanks to his discouragingly repeated mimicking of the Bush Regime in a number of major policy areas. Or perhaps it’s because the whole series of 2012 events is just too far off to have any degree of confidence in any aspect of them from this vantage point. But I keep thinking, “Great. But what if she were to get the nomination and then win?”

What an unmitigated disaster that would be for America. She has less than one term of a marginally incompetent governorship of one of the smallest states in the country on her resume. She is poorly read, poorly educated, almost as inarticulate as was George W. Bush (perhaps even moreso, if that could be believed). She is a walking sound bite whose thinking on all the issues on which we’ve heard her speak is shallower than the Great Salt Lake at the same time that thinking is just wrong. While it is true that this country has survived some unbelievably awful chief executives, I am unconvinced it could survive even one term under President Sarah Palin.

We have to keep an eye on her. In unsettled times such as these, fringe politicians can all too easily ride a wave of popularity in their niches and a river of cash contributions from the well-heeled fanatics who comprise the invisible leadership of those niches to undeserved and disastrous victory.

Update Saturday 4 p.m.. Palin may have said she was bailing out of politics. But her Facebook post (as reported by HuffPost) certainly doesn’t sound that way to me. Here’s the concluding paragraph: “I shared with you yesterday my heartfelt and candid reasons for this change; I’ve never thought I needed a title before one’s name to forge progress in America. I am now looking ahead and how we can advance this country together with our values of less government intervention, greater energy independence, stronger national security, and much-needed fiscal restraint. I hope you will join me. Now is the time to rebuild and help our nation achieve greatness!” She may or may not yet know what vehicle she’ll use to continue her pursuit of these objectives but she’s clearly not really going away, either. More’s the pity.