I’ve finished converting everything on this site to WordPress. In general, I’m quite pleased with the transition process and I believe that I’ve made everything look as close to the old site as possible. The one thing that’s missing, that I couldn’t resolve technically, was the use of newspaper columns for my articles. When I tried to apply them to my WordPress theme I ended up with some columns being wildly different heights than others – and it seemed to do so randomly. I was never able to determine why this was happening or how to fix it. However, although it was an interesting formatting feature, I don’t think I’m really losing much by not having it.

I’ve meant to post here several times recently, but never seemed to get around to doing it. Hopefully that will now change.

This is a very quick post to say that I’ve now switched from Moveable Type to WordPress. I like working with WordPress a lot more, however there’s an extensive amount of work I need to do on the site as a whole to re-integrate everything and “skin” it to look like it did before. As of this moment, things still don’t look right immediately – and I don’t have any of my personal, non-blog components hooked up properly either.

I’ve recently discovered (because I never comment on my own blog entries) that comments are no longer working. Instead, when trying to add a comment, I get a nice error message that doesn’t tell me anything. The software my blog is currently using is Moveable Type. I’ve been using this since version 3.x was released, several years ago. I’m not exactly “unsavvy” when it comes to researching a problem and fixing it; in this case, however, I’ve had no luck determining what the problem is. (After looking into a few things that did no good.) It’s not just me either – the problem is also affecting Michelle’s blog.

I may end up having to export my blog entries and comments and either completely reinstall Movable Type (then import) – or simply switch over to WordPress. This is the other leading blog software, and one which Michelle is now using at work for her church’s Web site.

I find it annoying that I recently had a bunch of spam comments appear here – despite the fact that adding comments the normal way doesn’t work. That may also be a good indicator that I should give WordPress a try and see if I like it better. In the meantime, however, you can read everything I write, but – unless you’re a spammer – you won’t be able to comment…

I just read a news story about some people who showed up for Halloween as a KKK member and one of his victims (somebody dressed up in “black face”). They showed up at an event at the Campbellford branch of the Royal Canadian Legion, kicking off a firestorm of protest and indignation over the blatant racism being portrayed.

I’m all in favour of being sensitive to the climate of people around you. That’s why I recently argued that the owners of Burlington’s own breakfast spot, Russell Williams, should seriously consider changing the name of their restaurant – given the recent events surrounding the serial killer of the same name. I recognize that the restaurant has been in existence for a long time, and that there is nothing wrong with the name per se, but a name change might lend a degree of sympathy towards the situation, fending off any criticisms by people who are upset by the association and generating good will on the part of the owners. Some people might react by saying that there was no need, but others might nod in appreciation. As a business, I see more of a potential downside to not changing the name.

In the same light, as in the case of the KKK costumed party-goer, if I do something that seriously offends a lot of people, or which I believe will offend a lot of people, I should carefully consider if I really want to do it or not. Of course, that never stopped the likes of Sacha Baron Cohen, Tom Green, or, in the past year, Joaquin Phoenix, all of whom have gone out of their way to deliberately offend or cause extreme reactions. And perhaps that was the intent of this costumed pair. In which case they likely deserved the reaction that they got. Or maybe they were just so short-sighted as to not realize what would happen. Then again, maybe they really are racists and simply don’t care. For either of those situations the reaction is still just as deserved.

However. There’s another part of me that can’t help but think about Halloween in general. As it’s become in modern times, it’s a celebration of the grotesque and macabre. The “very best” outfits are those that revel in death, destruction, and the callous mistreatment of others by the characters being portrayed by those dressing up in their likeness. Do we really want to say that it’s perfectly okay to dress up as hideous, depraved monsters – and make fun of those who’ve been horribly mutilated and mistreated? How is it okay to be perfectly content with that message but still get riled up over somebody dressing up in a KKK outfit? Surely torture and murder would seem to be at a higher level of moral repugnance (and unacceptability) than just racial intolerance. If it’s all just in fun – why is it that some things still can’t be?

I’m sure it has something to do with both the fact that the KKK outfit is representative of a real-life situation – and also that it symbolizes events that are still too recent in our collective conscious for us to easily forget. I don’t think that anybody would have a problem with somebody dressed up as Genghis Khan – but they would almost certainly have a problem with somebody dressed up as Hitler. While both represent the same level of moral reprehensibility – one is so far in the past that any sense of immediate outrage has long ago passed, making it easy to accept the “fictional myth” rather than fighting against communicated personal pain.

I recently decided that I’d investigate getting a new keyboard for home and work. Up until then I’d been using a Microsoft Natural keyboard for a few years and had quite enjoyed it. For any touch-typist, it makes things easier and reduces strain on your wrists – but I suspected that there were still better keyboards out there.

I decided to get a Freestyle w/VIP accessory from Kinesis. They have another model, the Advantage Pro, which might end up being even better, but it also has a learning curve of several weeks and I wanted something that I could just start typing on right away.

In addition to the keyboard, I got an Evoluent VerticalMouse, which is like a regular mouse except turned 90 degrees so that you’re “shaking hands” with it rather than holding it with your palm down. This is a much more natural position for your hand and arm to be in, so it relieves stress that way too.

Of course, I got a set of these for home and work. It didn’t make sense for them to be in one spot but not the other. I got Michelle one of the mice for her to have at work too, but not the keyboard as she wasn’t too sure of that one right away. (If she gets used to it at home, I will see about getting another one for her at work.)

So far I quite like both of them. I’m not able to control the new mouse quite as well as a regular mouse, but I’m getting better at it. I’m also able to type on the new keyboard just about as well as the old one, and I think it will improve a bit as time goes on.

After months of work again, on and off, I’ve got the new server online. For all that I wish I hadn’t lost it all earlier, I actually did learn some new things rebuilding it from scratch once more.

In the process, I also had a look at the latest Horde / Imp for a Web-based email alternative to SquirrelMail (which I’ve liked using, but I thought it was time for a change). I was surprised that the interface was still not tightly integrated and that a changing message count was not properly reflected in the UI elements. A curt and non-helpful response told me to use Dimp for that instead. I took at a look at it, but it had its own problems. I’d used it once before, had a problem, and, back then, had also run into non-helpful responses from the developer and its membership. I finally gave up with it, and that’s what led me to SquirrelMail.

I finally scrapped Imp – again. This time, I decided to try RoundCube. It’s still in early development stages (although I gather it’s been around for a while) – but they’re doing it right. While it’s basic at the moment, the interface seems spot on from the beginning. It seems to me as if that’s the correct approach – don’t throw all sorts of things together until you can get the basic framework looking good and working well.

I can recall a time in my past when I didn’t mind using phones. After over 5 years in a support position, however, where my regular routine has been to sit waiting to pick up phone calls, I hate the things with a passion.

Not only do I despise having to use the instruments, if I hear a phone ringing it immediately fills me with a flight or fight response. I get tense and start to feel stressed. I’ve turned the ringer on my phone at work off. If I’m sitting at my desk, I’ll see the light flashing instead. So I’m aware that somebody’s trying to contact me – but at least I don’t have to put up with the sound that now reminds me of an emergency alarm and some terrible disaster that requires me to drop everything else I’m doing to deal with it.

I now also have a sense of disdain when it comes to phone communication. I can think of hardly anything at all that’s so urgent that it requires I be contacted immediately – and I now associate any phone call with a demand for instant attention. Almost anything that needs communicating can be communicated by leaving a voicemail or by sending me an email. In some sense, I feel as if I’m dealing with post traumatic stress – and the sound of a phone ringing always sets is off.

If I’m on my own, I almost never answer the phone. I don’t give the caller the satisfaction of knowing that they can control me by having me pick up at their whim. Almost every time the phone does ring, I’m in the middle of something else anyway. I don’t see any reason to interrupt what I’m doing to pay attention to this other thing. Whatever it is, it can wait for when I’m finished what I’m doing and want to deal with the communication.

I’m aware that most people don’t feel this way. It’s a side-effect of what I’ve been doing with my professional life over the last few years. I’ve spoken to others in the same field, and they all feel exactly the same way. The more you have to deal with waiting for phone calls as part of your job, the less you ever want to deal with them in your personal life unless it’s a necessity. Others in the field also understand when I explain all of the above things to them.

If I lived on my own, I would still have a phone – but I’d leave it unplugged. I would only plug it in if I needed to make a call, or once a day to check for messages anybody might have left. If I didn’t have a phone at all, that also wouldn’t bother me. In some ways, I’d be grateful to not even have the option.

Michelle doesn’t understand this. I’ve tried explaining it to her, as has somebody else I work with and who gets it, but it’s not something that she can appreciate. As she can’t understand my reaction, she laughs and thinks that I’m just lazy and making excuses. This is the furthest thing from the truth. I am quite sincere in my position here. If we’re doing something together and the phone rings, I will ignore it. Invariably, she will always ask me to see who it is. As soon as she asks me this, I start to feel that sense of panic I’m familiar with at work – and stressed out over the fact that I’m now being told I have to deal with this immediate, interruptive, demand on my attention. It’s not good. I’m also aware of the fact that my reaction has been growing steadily stronger over the past year. After being told to look at who’s calling, I will increasingly frequently snap at her and be in a bad mood for longer periods of time afterwards.

The same thing happens if she answers the phone, it’s for me, and she passes it over. I can positively state that I almost never want to speak to that person right then – and for similar reasons as above. Worse, is when she picks up the phone and passes it over without saying anything herself – thereby preventing me the choice of not answering, and putting the burden on me to deal with the person at the other end right away.

I’m going to have to come to some sort of agreement with her over this – if only in order to manage my sanity and make sure that our differing approaches to the phone don’t negatively impact our relationship. Perhaps even something as simple as making sure that the phone is always in reach of her so that I don’t need to be forced to deal with it myself. And if it’s for me, letting me know who it is but not just picking it up.

I don’t generally have a problem with the phone if it’s Michelle or Glen calling. Those are the only two people who, most of the time, I’m happy to talk to right away. (Although there have still been a few times I’ve let even them go to voicemail.) And I have no problem at all with the phone ringing if I’m actually expecting somebody to call. In that case, the call has been planned ahead of time – and there’s no feeling of panic or urgency when it happens.

All of my work over the past few months to upgrade my servers has been lost. I ran into some kind of compatibility problem between ESXi 3.5 u4, and then later ESXi 4, and my server hardware that caused networking to / from my virtual machines, the ESXi server, and my workstation to stop. The longer after an installation, the more often it would happen – and it was also preventing me from backing up my virtual machines over the network in any way. (Backups would start, then networking would die.)

In the course of troubleshooting and trying to recover from this, I managed to lose the virtual machines stored on the ESXi datastore. This was entirely my fault as I’d become so flustered over methods of fixing things without losing the VMs that, at one critical point, I reinstalled without having copied the data off to a 2nd drive.

The end result is that I ended up going back to a version of the single old Fedora server I’d been using months ago. I got this up and running under Workstation on my personal computer. Since then, I’ve rebuilt a Gentoo firewall, and have been working on another new version of Gentoo for Web and mail.

The transition over to that will likely take me a few more weeks. The good news is that I’m now familiar with the new operating system and it won’t take me as long to get things going as it did the first time around.

My server, currently turned off, will never be turned on again. I will cannibalize parts from it instead. Whenever I do move over to a dedicated server in the future, it will be a completely new system.

Shortly after Christmas, I bought myself something I’d known about for a while but didn’t have the money to afford – an electronic book reader. The one I picked, mainly because it’s the only kind available and/or really usable in Canada, was the Sony Reader. I went with the PRS-505 model, even though the newer PRS-700 had just come out. After spending a lot of time reading reviews, I decided that I didn’t really need the additional features of the 700 and that I would prefer the crisper and more viewable screen of the 505. The 700 is touch-screen and, because of the additional layer on top of the display, the contrast isn’t as good as that of the 505, requiring the use of the 700’s “side” lighting to view the same text as the 505 could read without any lighting (the 505 doesn’t come with a side-light). I figured that none of the physical books I’ve read have come with built in lighting, so I didn’t require that in an electronic book reader either.

In the months since I started using it I’ve become a total convert. I love it. I find it so much easier to hold and carry around, and I like the fact that I don’t need to deal with any kind of physical page turning. At first, I wasn’t completely comfortable with the lack of tactile indication as to how much of a book I’d read. (In the physical world, I can tell by how many pages are in my left hand, how many in my right.) I still don’t have that feedback, but it no longer bothers me. The best part is that it’s always the same size. Even if the physical book equivalent would be huge, the electronic version is always the same – with the only noticeable difference being the number of pages (screens) to be flipped through.

I have shopped for books at Sony’s eBook Store and while there have been a few titles I’ve looked for that have not been available, I have so far has no problem coming up with reading material. Clicking and downloading to my Reader is so much simpler than going in person to a book store. I miss the feel of browsing for books, but the shopping process itself is far easier – and there’s no waiting at all for your purchase to be delivered.

My own reader is the silver model, but I bought Michelle the red model for Valentine’s Day. I thought that red was appropriate for that. I’d mentioned electronic book readers to her before but she never showed much interest. As soon as I bought mine and showed it to her, though, she wanted one herself and kept dropping hints that I should be buying her one for her birthday. I got her the red one ahead of that date. Like me, she has preferred using it to physical books. At the time that I’d got it for her she’d recently bought herself a few books with Christmas gift certificates. I bought and downloaded the electronic equivalents for her. She gave the physical books away and hasn’t thought about them since.

I bought myself a different case for mine at one point, from Tuff-Luv, and used it for a couple of days. Although I liked aspects of it, and at first thought that I’d end up switching to it permanently, I came to realize that I didn’t like the way it looked. For me, it just wasn’t as pretty as the stock case and I didn’t feel “pride” in handing my reader to somebody in that case to show it off. I’ve since switched back to the stock cover. I do, however, have something else in mind. When I got my reader, and was researching various things about it, I came across the excellent Web site MobileRead. In its discussion forums was the news that Oberon Design, who make some really beautiful leather journals covers, among other things, and who’ve created covers for Kindle readers, are working on creating covers for the Sony readers. Their work has just come out of the beta test phase and they should be selling these shortly. I will definitely be picking a couple of these up when they are available.

The one thing about these readers is that I no longer have any desire to buy physical books again. I will also be telling friends and relatives to hold off on doing so. If they want to buy me a book they can give me an online credit at the Sony eBook Store instead.

I haven’t posted anything in a while. This is because I’d been working on moving my server from its old operating system (Fedora) to something new (Gentoo) – and that process took a bit of time. During the transition, I didn’t want to post anything new because, if I did, I’d have to worry about transitioning the new post in addition to the entire set of posts that I’d already moved over.

I did finally get my server up and running on the new operating system – but, by then, I’d kind of lost momentum and I didn’t feel the urge to create new entries for a while. I finally feel like doing so again. I’ve “saved up” several topics, so there may be a bit of a flurry of activity as I now get around to actually putting them online.