This whole blog might actually be broken…

UPDATE – found the broken plugin. The blog will live…

Not that I’ve been using this one much, but I see something has broken and I can’t even see the pages any more (the data is all intact as far as I can tell, but none of the messing with theme updates has made the posts show up again.)

Not sure if I’ll come back to fix this one or just purge it entirely. Be aware that at least I do try to keep an eye on this thing, even if I’m not actively using it. Just don’t be surprised if this one starts redirecting to one of my other blog sites instead…

How I know this blog is neglected…

Yes, I know, I haven’t posted anything on this particular blog in quite a while. If nothing else, I ought to post something about OpenStreetMap one of these days since I’ve been playing with it lately.

What’s really reminding me that I haven’t posted anything for a while is the persistent attempts by the festering pustule on the butt of the internet that is “SEO” blog-spammers.

Some spambot keeps trying to comment in random posts to promote some “SEO friendly content” generator of some kind. In order to avoid spam-filters they don’t put a direct link to it, instead, they end their generic “gosh what an interesting post” comment with a request for the reader to Google the search terms that they expect to lead to whatever crap they’re peddling (I refuse to mention these terms as I don’t even want them to become more searchable).

They all get caught by moderation and rejected as spam, so you actual humans who may still be reading these don’t have to look at them, but they are beginning to annoy the heck out of me.

Where have I been? Let me dust this blog off a bit…

Logo for the Ingress gameHas it really been a year and a half since I updated this particular blog? Wow.

I tend to be a bit more active on one of my other, more audio-project-related blogs. However, I’m still playing out in the Big Room as much as I have time to.

Lately, I’ve been playing Google’s new location-based game, “Ingress“. It’s turning out to be a fairly educational game – I’ve learned a lot about my local area playing Ingress.

The connection between those two paragraphs is that I put together an audio show on the subject of Playing Ingress which finally popped up a few weeks ago at Hacker Public Radio. If it’s a topic you might be interested in, give it a listen!

I want a pork-belly-backed currency, before it’s too late!

It annoys me that it’s taken me this long to start figuring out, I think, why and how money works.

I started writing a long rambling post here on the subject, but it’s too much of a mess so I’ll just skip to the punchline.

Our modern currencies are so-called “fiat currencies”. It used to be that, for example, “a dollar” actually represented and could be traded for a specific amount of refined metallic gold. Now, it’s not really redeemable for any pre-specified amount of anything. I don’t really see this as a huge problem unlike some people, but there is a lot of noise lately about how we need to go back to “the gold standard” (i.e. back to the time when a “dollar” was directly redeemable for some fixed amount of gold). My problem with this is that gold is mostly useless, really. If there were really some sort of horrible society-destroying catastrophe, about the only thing you’d be able to use the gold for is as a bludgeon to club people with (gold is quite heavy, at least), or maybe as radiation shielding if you’ve got enough of it stacked around your basement. If we’ve got to go back to an “asset-backed” currency, I think it ought to be pork-bellies. Or wheat. Or maybe heads of lettuce.

Better still, make it a “basket” of all three, so that fluctuations in the value of one of those three things doesn’t screw up the value of the currency. Plus, then you could redeem 3 $1US bills for a BLT sandwich.

What prompted me to start typing, though, was the thougts of how badly at the mercy of economic parasites we are in the modern world though – I’m thinking here mainly of abusers of “intellectual property” monopolies like broad idea patents and eternal copyrights, who demand tribute before you’re allowed to participate in just about any modern activity using the internet or other digital medium. And then the shocking, horrifying thought came to me: “mp3-download-backed currency”.

If anyone needs me, I’ll be over there in the corner, curled up in fetal position, rocking back and forth, and whimpering occasionally.

Moving! Everything is moving!

Including me! But starting with my websites…

The Minister of Rocktology and I just bought a business, after several years of investigation. This means that among other things, I now need to orchestrate leaving my current job without causing too much disruption (the pay hasn’t been all that great, but otherwise my job of the last three years has been pretty nice, and I don’t want to leave them hanging) and shovelling out the Asylum down here and getting it sold, and then relocating my corpus about 1800 miles from here. At least I’ll be relocating to a place that has actual water, high temperatures below 90°F, and isn’t on fire.

As part of the process, I’m finally getting my servers moved to hosting so that I can stop worrying about keeping a physical machine running and the cable company getting paid an exorbitant fee to allow them to be connected to the internet (and my parent’s ISP persistently dropping my emails, presumably because they assume it MUST be spam if the server is on a cable-modem…buttheads.)

If I’ve done this right, you won’t see this post until I’ve gotten the bigroom.org website migrated to the virtual server at the hosting company (and then you WILL see it.)

Once I’ve got that done, I just need to get my mail server and possibly IM (XMPP) server moved and I’ll be done, and I can decomission the decade-old full-sized computer that’s doing most of my hosting labor, and the crippled laptop that’s doing the rest.

More to follow later.

As if I didn’t have enough to worry about already…

Apparently, the Itty Bitty Kitty Committee thinks I don’t have enough to do.

A very small, young orphaned kitten.
Why me? Don’t misunderstand, he’s an adorable little wretch, and there’s no way I’d have suggested the Minister of Rocktology abandon an orphaned kitten, but I still think we are well beyond Maximum Safe Cat Density already.

Here’s some trivia I read somewhere: supposedly, most felines have pretty much the same general behavioral responses and temperament. This means a housecat (Felis catus) is about as amenable to being a pet as, say, a tiger (Panthera tigris).

A very small, young kitten sitting on a faux-fur blanket with a printed picture of a tiger on it
As I remember it being described, the only real difference is that when a specimen of Panthera tigris decides to dart out from behind the couch to attack your ankle for no apparent reason, the effect on your ankle is somewhat more severe, hence the relative popularity of less-bodily-harm-capable Felis catus as pets.

I rate “Kodama” (as we’ve named him) here at around one picotiger worth of ferocity, though that seems to be increasing rapidly as he gets proper feeding and play.

Still…why couldn’t it have at LEAST been a puppy, if it had to be anything at all?…

Into the Outdoors with Dog and Camera

I’m beginning to wonder if I shouldn’t just give in and write a program to auto-generate and post complaints about not having enough time to get anything fun done for me, since I don’t seem to have enough time to do it myself. Unfortunately, I don’t have time to write such a program…

I did manage to at least get out to spend some time exploring wooded sections of The Big Room with my pathfinder dog last weekend though. I’ll have to map it out when I get a chance, but in the meantime I’ve been posting pictures to the piwigo page I set up on my server here.

Can anybody spare a life?

I could use a life, if anyone has a spare one lying around.

a lake inlet in the woodsI do try to get out and wander around in The Big Room once in a while on weekends, though even then I don’t do enough of it. One might occasionally see pictures uploaded via my twitter feed when I am out wandering. Also occasionally my flickr page.

I really need to get some time when I’m not so dang tired to work on things. I’ve got a lot of projects I’d like to work on. I’ll try to post something more this weekend, but now, once again, Sleep calls me.

Good night, y’all.