I’ve updated to WordPress version 2.5, and eventually I hope to change over to a three column format, but don’t expect that any time soon. Given I can’t even work up the energy to make time to write coherent posts, reconfiguring the format is beyond what I can do for now, I suspect.
Let me know if any weirdness ensues from the WordPress upgrade.
As of today, February 1 (OK, so I’m 55 minutes late), Random Fate has existed in one form or another for five years.
The nature of blogging, and who blogs, has changed radically in the past five years, as has my life.
Odd are the paths our lives take, five years ago I would not have predicted I would be married to the woman I wed 19 months ago, nor would I have thought one of my biggest concerns would be how the shifting foundation for the swimming pool behind my house needs to be corrected.
Well, c’est la vie as the French say. Life is like being immersed and trying to swim in heavy surf near a beach, you can either fight the waves to try to get where you think you need to go, or you can surf the waves. You may not be going where you think is best, but at least you’re going somewhere, and you’re looking damn cool while you’re doing it.
I’m trying out the Windows Live Writer. Over at The Moderate Voice, some of the contributors have problems with the web interface, and I’ve been promoting offline writing using something like w.Bloggar or Ecto. Windows Live Writer is now on the list of candidates.
It remains to be seen how intuitive it is.
The dearth of posting has caused what low level of readership I had built up seek more productive pastures, and I don’t blame them.
I think I’m back now. I got disheartened by a lot of what I was reading in blogworld, and I felt I wasn’t making any difference at all.
I’ve decided I can’t give up.
…do you?
At the weblog City of Brass, Aziz Poonawalla is posting his morning thoughts during Ramadan. I expect the meditations will provide very nutritious food for thought, as evidenced by the concluding lines from the first post:
In fact, for the next two years, 9-11 will fall within Ramadan again. It is important for muslims to move beyond 9-11 as a context in which we defend our faith and simply embrace our faith on our own terms. The time for attempting to assuage other Americans’ fears about Islam is over; it is time to simply be muslims, and Americans, again. Ramadan this year represents an opportunity for a renewal of our identity as a community like any other in this great nation.
No matter what your faith (and even if you claim to have no religion, you still have a faith), it is always good to test it by understanding the beliefs of others, especially their thoughts during their most sacred holidays.
Well, I’m still around, but so busy combined with completely disgusted with the current state of affairs along with so mentally exhausted that I haven’t been writing here.
So, here’s a post for the sake of a post to keep this blog from going completely dark.
…but holy cow!!! Of my last 100 referrals, 95 of them have been from the Google Images search page. A lot of them seem to be hits on my photos from when I lived in France.
Somehow I got on the list at Google for having a good set of images, I guess. Too bad I can’t make money off of them, or even find a good way of keeping people from stealing my bandwidth to add insult to injury when they use my photos without permission.
OK, annoying blog navel gazing over now.
I’ve managed to reload my old posts, but in the process I broke access to my new posts since the reboot to the new host.
I should be able to recover them, but it’s not like I wrote some deathless prose or had some outstanding ideas in there, but I’ll likely lose the comments.
Oh, well, now on to fixing the layout, post categories, and blogroll, along with trying to generate some original, interesting, and hopefully entertaining content.
I guess this shows how out of touch I’ve been getting with blogworld. The four year anniversary of Random Fate and my blogging passed two days ago without my noticing.
My big reminder is the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster, which I wrote about in my second or third blog entry in the original Blogger site that has been lost in the memory hole.
I miss those early days of blogging.
My former method of comment spam protection was blocking trackbacks as well, so even though I haven’t written much that is being linked to lately, I turned off the plugin that was keeping the spambots from posting. As a consequence, I’m getting comment spam again, but now some is more creative than I recall and at the least provides some entertainment value. Take this joke for instance (it’s borderline PG-13/R rated):
There was once a great actor who could no longer remember his lines. After many years he finds a theatre where they are prepared to give him a chance to shine again.
The director says, “This is the most important part, and it has only one line. You walk on to the stage at the opening carrying a rose. You hold the rose to your nose with just one finger and thumb, sniff the rose deeply and then say theline Ah, the sweet aroma of my mistress.�
The actor is thrilled. All day long before the play hes practicing his line over and over again.
Finally, the time came. The curtain went up, the actor walked onto the stage, and using just one finger he delivered the line, “Ah, the sweet aroma of my mistress.�
The theatre erupted, the audience was screaming with laughter and the director was steaming!
“You bloody fool!� he cried, “You have ruined me!�
The actor was bewildered, “What happened, did I forget my line?�
“No!� screamed the director. “You forgot the rose!�
I’ve put up a test blog to try out different layouts at this URL:
Feel free to look in and comment on the appearance. I’ll ask for specific feedback once I get close to what I want to try.
The Commissar of the Politburo Diktat 2.0 does the incredibly difficult but ultimately right thing in issuing a mea culpa:
I think we (allegedly informed and thoughtful conservative bloggers) should have done better. There were plenty of warning signs and contrary voices. I didn’t want to listen to them.
Stephen takes an action that is beyond the capabilities of many, including the current President: admitting an error publicly and learning from the mistake.
Kudos to the Commissar, and here is to hoping that all bloggers, left-leaning along with the right-leaning, learn from his example.
At The Politburo Diktat there is a back of the envelope estimate of troop levels that might be needed in Iraq to achieve what we have been told is the mission there, along with a brief comment on mission-creep.
What is just as interesting as the analysis is the origin of the piece; the author is a right-leaning blogger who started the Raging RINOs (Republicans and Independents Not Overdosed on the party kool-aid) although he has passed administration of that group on to another.
In an overheated partisan atmosphere such as we have now, considering the source of arguments is more important than ever. This case is not one where the author is trying to discredit the party in power for political purposes, and therefore should be regarded as more credible than what has become typical in blogworld.