The new blog: wheatblog.com

My blog is now at wheatblog.com.  I've migrated all the posts from wheatdesign.com to the new site.  I'm still working on porting over the comments.  Everything is now running on WordPress.  

I'm leaving this post up just as a redirect, since I use my Blogger ID to comment on other people's blogs.  Once all the comments here are ported over, I'll delete them.    

Comment spam problem fixed (?)

I think I've finally fixed the comment spam problem over at wheatdesign.com. So this mirror-post blog should no longer be necessary (though I'll keep it around for a little while--just in case).

Exhuming McCarthy

I'll freely admit, I never liked the guy. I didn't care for his father either. But my distrust of him grows deeper with each passing day. There are plenty of pragmatic reasons to dislike this administration, but the most significant one is that our president believes himself to be above the law. Worse than that, he has been systematically employing this assumed and unconstitutional status to illegally spy on the citizens of this country, thus weakening the very freedoms that he so often claims to be defending.

My first grave concerns about the administration's lack of concern with legal protocol and human rights came with the Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib fiascos. There, the administration demonstrated its willingness to indulge in detention without charges and torture. It was clear enough, to anyone paying attention, that the administration was willing to indulge in the very practices that we, as a nation, define ourselves against--the very practices that were common in the USSR under Stalin's rule.

I was raised during the final years of the Cold War. During that time, the state of civil liberties in the USSR was every civics teacher's favorite example of what the US was not. "In Russia," they would say, "you have no freedom. There are secret police. Your every movement is watched."

There's an old joke that says, "Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not watching you." Now that line is sounding a lot less funny and a lot more like good advice. The president has already admitted to and proffered a lame defense the NSA's warrentless eavesdropping) on US citizens, facilitated by some telecommunications companies who were all-too-willing to hand over private customer data without a subpoena.

Perhaps our president has a juvenile conception of freedom, seeing it merely as protection from physical harm. For anyone who has given the matter thought, it is clear that physical protection is only one concern among many. In fact, at this point, I would venture to say that we are, collectively, in as much danger from our own government as we are from external forces. We have rules here. Our leaders are not exempt from them. Informing, in secret, certain members of congress (the names of which you refuse to divulge) that you are going to break the law does not make the law null and void. It merely proves premeditation.

It's often said that those who criticize are obliged to offer solutions. I'm glad to do so. If you want to live under the rule of law rather than the whims of despots, it is essential to support organizations that attempt to keep would-be dictators and their cronies honest. You can compile your own list, depending upon how you see your beliefs best represented. For me it includes the EFF, the ACLU, and Amnesty International. Even more important, it is also our democratic responsibility, when confronted with such clear evidence of crookedness, to vote the offenders out of office. The chance for that is coming soon, and I believe it is of the utmost importance.

Projects Update

I've been working a lot on a new community site for bassists: bassplaying.com. It's still in beta at the moment, but I'll be launching it on June 1 (July 1 if we hit any snags, but it looks good so far). The site is powered by Drupal, which I'm really loving right now. It really is a powerful platform for many sorts of sites, especially community-driven sites like this one. Right now, I'm learning to fine-tune it a bit. I'm using Flexinode to create my own custom content formats (for gear reviews and the like) without having to learn all the ins and outs of custom module development. It's a great time saver, but the same can be said for the entire Drupal framework. It's very wonderfully well thought out. I have some cool things in the works for the site that I can't discuss just yet. I hope any of my readers and/or fans of my music who are also bassists will sign up.

While I've had bass sites on the brain, I nabbed a new, easier-to-remember URL for the bassbook: wheatsbassbook.com. It's just a redirect to wheatdesign.com/bassbook/, but it's a little easier to remember.

Gina's semester is over, and my own is as well, so we've been catching up on movies. But that's the subject for another post!

Google AdSense widget + hosting updates

I've been hooked on Yahoo! Widgets (formery Konfabulator) for a month or so. One particularly handy third-party widget is Jehiah Czebotar's Google AdSense Widget, which I keep in "heads up" mode and flip over to occasionally to see if I've made enough to cover my hosting each month (this month I have--thanks!). Something must have changed in the Google API, because v1.1 quit working all of a sudden (the variables it fetches started coming back "undefined). But the new 1.2 version fixes the problem (even though Jehiah.com still lists 1.1 as the current version).

Speaking of hosting, my hosting providor is upgrading soon to include lots of new features including Ruby on Rails. I have been fairly burned out on web development in general of late. But learning a new language is always fun. So I've thought about taking the dive and recoding a few of my projects in Ruby. Right now, I'm just learning the ropes of the language itself. To that end (on Windows anyway), the Ruby One-Click Installer has been handy. It includes FreeRIDE, a handy IDE that makes coding up and working through demos and such very simple.

Duly noted

Just a few things going on that might be of interest to some of you. First, Paul at onfocus.com has a nice post about using Google Calendar which illustrates some best practices I intend to emulate. I think that Google Calendar the big G one step closer to world domination (it's still beta, so go cautiously. Mine just ate the dozen or so appointments I had put in last week). I'm still waiting for Google Word and Google Excel (or, hell, why not Google OS).

John, of Daring Fireball fame is the second person I know of to try a hand a being an independent, full-time blogger. I've really been enjoying his blog of late, so I wish him well. If you dig his site and want to fuel his passion for Mac punditry, buy a t-shirt and support the cause.

I discovered that bloglines has a handy feature that lets you embed your blogroll very easily into your site, so I worked one up. If you use folders to organize your feeds, those turn into column headings. Putting an empty folder anywhere in the list will also create an arbitrary header. So it's fairly easy to control the output without any serious tweaking.