I turn on the TV to watch the ONLY REMAINING baseball with any meaning today, the Cubs, and I see the Atlanta Braves and Phillies? Get a clue Fox! And don't give me any scheduling crap. Yeah, it's a double header, but it is THE GAME today. Nobody cares about anybody else compared to this, if they are baseball fans. Get your buts to wherever it takes to cover baseball, or don't cover it at all. Geez!
September 2003 Archives
 | I was out just a while ago, before I came and plopped myself down here in the East Tower, taking a quick stroll around the end of the University Campus that sits just behind and to the side of Old Saint George. I found myself wishing I had a Digital Camera again (the one I had for 7 months had it's main picture snaping button pop out of its place, so now it will only snap a pic if I fiddle with it for a couple minutes and then keep pressure on it with my finger). I wanted to take some pics of the campus scenery and especially some with the towers of Old Saint George visible in the background, to give it the University context. It occurs to me that there might ought to be a lot of "University of Cincinnati" mentions in a lot of our PR and marketig stuff, so that UC students themselves will have more contact with us via the Web as some of our activities and coffeehouses and bookstore and event stuff starts showing up in searches. People who are around and often come to UC will know of us and these special events. |
As I was just saying before I was so rudely interrupted by a slip of the finger, (see my previous post below for the gory details), I am sitting here in the "East Tower" of Pilgrim Place, a sub-section of Old Saint George, here on the edge of the campus of the University of Cincinnati.
I got into town on Sunday night, and stopped in at the Best Buy in Northern Ky. to catch the Titan's score (they won 27-12), and to do my usual perusing of the Best Buy Sunday ad and gawk and drool over the HDTV screens (someday, maybe). I called Larry from there to see if he was "into" any chatting that night, or to wait until the next day when business and activity opens as usual on Monday am.
Yesterday I spent a good part of the afternoon up here pecking out some of the ideas in the form of web pages and their accompanying templates and stylesheets using my trial version of MX Studio 2004 (actually , the individual trial versions of DW, FW, and Flash). OSG is looking to buy the Studio here soon.
It looks as though I am back on schedule to make the trip up here every three weeks. Oct. 12-16 I'll be back (with the family along as well, since Brian and Kelli and Janet are all out of school--- Janet is "Teacher Assisting" for a school in the same county, who are out for "Fall Break" that week. After that, I'll come back again Nov. 2- Nov 5 or so.
I have some arrangements that will enable me to spend pretty much full time on this for x number of weeks (while waiting for other developments to take place on the job front, which all seem to be headed toward finding momentum toward a more fully supportive (financially) job role (or combination of roles). It's back to being exciting more than uncertain --- which makes it all a lot more doable and leaves me free enough from the "dread" of wondering if things are going to stay afloat.
I just started a blog , and after a couple paragraphs, I sit some key (I'm not sure which), and my entire post disappeared (this happened in Radio's editor) and , of course, not uploaded, so I lost the whole freakin' thing. It pissed me off, and so now I'm ranting about it. So there. Now I move on.
What's happened to bloglines.com?. What's up with bloglines.com? I've been using that a lot more lately instead of the Radio Userland News aggregator, since I've been running a lot of DVD creation stuff overnight, and didn't want the Aggregator interfering with that process every hour. But bloglines.com has been unreahbale for the past two days....are they down, knocked out by Isabel, or what?
A quick thought :
Churches must realize they are not going to engage anyone (with a TYPICAL, One-way, brochure-oriented Website) anymore than they should expect that their bulletin would do so. It has to "get the job done" in a personal way, and to do that, there has to be more than schedule information and directions to the Church locaton.
But then again, most Churches only expect their websites to be "billboards", and not resources for engaging people. For me, I want to get a flavor for the thing a Church cares about, and in a way that goes beyond the typical "theological language slogans" that can mean a wide variety of things.
I installed a DVD writer about 3 weeks ago. It had its HP -rleated burning utilities. I also bought Pinnacle Instant CD/DVD (free after rebate). It has a program called Instant Write that creates a virtual drive. All of that seemed to be working fine. My Samsung CDRW was being recognized and I was able to read and write to that drive just fine. Then, sometime after that, my CDRW no longer reads the disks that are placed in it. The DVDRW still reads and writes fine. Windows shows that the drive is there, but it does not recognize a CDROM I place in it.
Continue reading CDRW drive no longer recognizes disks.
Is there a way to have Radio's Home Page show list of postings to Categories, so I won't have to write an entry on the front page to inform readers that "an article about such and such has been added" to "x category" ?
Radio still won't create directories via its FTP. Why not? I notice this whenever there's a new month, and Radio won't create a new directory for the archives. It's driving me batty!
Borrowed from a Google User Group when I did e search in groups.google.com using:
not "asp pages"
A common problem when ASP pages do not display (but html
pages do) is that the password of the IIS
IWAM_computername user is not syncing properly.
Authentication/permissions to ASP pages is a complex area,
but this particular problem is easy to remedy and, I
think, well worth trying. To check this, do the following.
1.) Temporarily assign the IIS anonymous accounts
(IUSR_computername and IWAM_computername) to the machine's
Administrator group. For Win 2K, do this as follows:
a.) Go to Settings, Control Panel, select
Administrative Tools.
b.) Double-click 'Computer Management',
expand 'Local Users and Groups', double-click 'Users'.
c.) Select (double-click) IUSR_computer name
account, select 'Member of' tab, click 'Add' button,
highlight 'Administrator' (group), click 'Apply'.
d.) Repeat above procedure for IWAM_computer
name account.
2.) Navigate to the following file -
C:\Inetpub\AdminScripts\synciwam.vbs
Execute this file by double-clicking it. The hourglass
will display momentarily and then disappear. No other
indication of the program running will appear.
3.) Reboot the workstation. If this was indeed the
problem, ASP pages should now render fine.
4.) Don't forget to remove the IIS anonymous
accounts from the Administrator group.
I found my fix for the ASP problem I was trying to solve yesterday. I found the answer on Google Groups . See My Web Development for details
I've discovered why the Toshiba e740 Pocket PC I got for a great deal last month was perhaps available in the first place: It may have been removed from the shelf of the chain that was selling it due to Toshiba's decision not to offer an upgrade to Windows Mobile/PocketPC 2003. Owners of this mode, many of whom bought the model only weeks ago (like me) , feel stuck. While I can't complain about the price I got, I still find myself wishing I had seen this. I post it here as a warning to potential Toshiba customers of their PDA's (and their other products as well, if this is the kind of support they give).
I've been loooking to see if there is an "unsupported" method of getting the Flash ROM 2003 upgrade anyway (I'd store a backup just in case). So far, all the posts I've found say that the OEM has to supply the upgrade. Surely someone has found a way?
I have XP Pro, and IIS 5.1 I also have .Net Framework 1.1 running, with several apps, including DotnetNuke and DotText (weblog app) all working, as well as my Cold Fusion apps (Cold Fusion MX running as an ISAPI service), and these all work. Just the asp pages are broken. I see suprisingly little on this when doing a Google Search. Surprising because I have done nothing I know of out of the ordinary in my Web development. Anybody heard or read or know anything I might check?
Help! A while back when I re-did my template to fix the non-scrolling text problem, I forgot to save my code for linking to the Category Archive for whatever category that post was assigned. It was located next to the Comment and Trackback links.
It apparently used a built-in function of MT, since I do not see it as an installed plugin, which I would NOT have deleted. I had forgotten it was in my template, and I'm sure I saved it somewhere, but right now I have no idea where.
Can anybody help?
I am trying to learn the ropes of DVD authoring. I got a great price on a refurb HP dvd writer, and picked up a copy of Pinnacle's Instant CD/DVD for free ($40 - $40 rebate). I have about 30 MiniDV video tapes full of family stuff, and many more VHS tapes of more family stuff (including our wedding in 1983, the birth of our son in 1989, and the arrival of Kelli at the airport from Korea in 1999).
The older VHS stuff I want to get onto VCD's or SCVD's. The DV video onto DVDs. My first attempt took about two hours to drop an avi file into the editor and send it to DVD (for about an hour of video). So I'll be looking into VCD, SVCD, and DVD authoring options. This kind of stuff will go into my Video and Movies section.henceforth.
I downloaded PocketBlog yesterday, in looking for a piece of software to use with my Toshiba e740. I got it installed, but in the server configuration (the first step in setup), I receive an error when I click the last button on the page (which is supposed to take the info you just entered and login to the blog config page and get the blog list (my params were for my Movable Type blog)
The error: an error was encountered while running this program: Object rquired:'objRoot'
The support site and yahoo support group for Pocket Blog seems to be deserted, and all the Google links I see re: PocketBlog are from nothing closer than 2002 (on my initial search for "PocketBlog")
Christians should always live uneasily with empire, which constantly threatens to become idolatrous and substitute secular purposes for God's.
The above quote from the same article that has spawned several posts from me this morning, also serves as an ironic twist to the oft-heard cries of the Religious Right about secularism. They fall prey to the most lethal of them all: the call to religious fervor over secular agendas that hoodwink them into supporting them by the carefully crafted inclusion of relgious language, thus adding energy and "public observance" (mob mentality disguised as "unity of ourpose").
For all the cries about "Prayer in Schools" (and the lack thereof), they make no connection between the actions of their government and the ways in which these actions, and their complicity in and support of those actions, speaks volumes louder than the personal pieties that provide the fuel for the School Prayer debate. There is a deep chasm in American popular theology between faith and collective, political, and international behaviour. The power of the "annointing" of such has been handed over the "empire" Wallis describes. To question such is to invite shocked looks and blank stares, so deep has the chasm become and so deeply associated the Religious Right theology with the empire.
More from the Wallis article cited below
Christians should always live uneasily with empire, which constantly threatens to become idolatrous and substitute secular purposes for God's.
The sad thing is, most American Christians seem all too willing to defend the actions of America, and many take greart pains to "baptize" the strategy with God's blessing. This is why "God Bless america" becomes such a painful phrase to me now. Very rarely anymore does that mean anythng other than "All Christians must see it as Bush and the White House sees it", leaving those who pray for the wisdom of God to say instead "God speak to America" in leiu of "God BLESS" America, although theologically, they should be the same thing. I could never put a bumper sticker on my car like that, unless more Christians learn that God's blessing does not align with whatever empire is invoking the name.
From the article cited below (from Sojourners Sept/Oct 2003) , a question that seems to have escaped the comprehension of the religious right, and many others who would not normally identify so deeply with their theology, but have now become swept up in political us vs them....the automatic association of "Christian" with conservatism and Republicanism, and the "others" as "Liberals' and so , it seems, "Democrats".
In the meantime, American Christians will have to make some difficult choices. Will we stand in solidarity with the worldwide church, the international body of Christâ014or with our own American government?
Jim Wallis of Sojourners challenges Bush's "theology" of America and his use/misuse of theological imagery in support of America's current foreign relations and military activity.
"Dangerous Religion George W. Bush's theology of empire. by Jim Wallis"
How can I describe this? It's basically the 21st century version of bathroom reading. Like taking one's favorite mag or newspaper to the "throne" to sit for a spell. Only today, it was my PDA, now able to connect to my 802.11b within the house, to check email , one of which was a notification that a comment had been posted to my blog. I also checked espn.com for some scrores (ESPN is the only sports website I know that provides for mobile user screens. MLB does not, CNN does not, CBS sportsline does not. BTW, anybody know of any who do besides ESPN?)
Anyway, just thought I'd share that with you, crude as it may seem. I guess one could identify this as a new form of Web community or Smart Mob? Maybe not.
TheHeresy.com
Leighton at theheresy.com identifies a good "comebacker" to the accusations that online is a "less moral" place; a "den of iniquity" or some such categorization:
"Many of my personal friends who have entered vocational ministry lasted only a few of years. The reasons are complicated and have been the subject of debate. Many of the people that I know were not prepared for how carnal some of the people in their church were. When they entered ministry they moved from the outer circle to the inner circle where far fewer things are hidden from view. It is very common for people to become disillusioned when they see the dark side of their faith community. I believe the same kind of disillusionment is beginning to happen online. I've been blogging for about a year and a half and I've already be labelled a hypocrite, immature and a cry baby. I have friends that have endured far worse. However I still believe in this form of Christian community just as I still believe in the church. I refuse to let the dark nature of humanity eclipse the good that can be found in sharing our thoughts and stories. "
This reminds me of the Quentin Schultze book that I found to push a lot of my buttons about how quick people are (especially the "unitiated") are to attack the appropriateness of online community from a theological point of view. Schultze took what I thought to be a rather elitist and unseasoned point of view, lifting up the "virtues" of ftf over online on the basis of associating online relationships with some of the "seedier" elements that can iundeed be found in online places. But , as Leighton points out, some of the "virtuous" communities of church-dom are not always as they claim or seem to be. Along the same lines, there are exemplary and personal exchanges taking place online which in some cases far surpass the experience of many today as they seek personal community in traditonal places. Many traditional formats and instances certainly miss the boat and do not touch much of the core of the inner lives of their participants.
I think there is a mutually beneficial interchange to be found between the online and the face to face; between "clicks" and "mortar". Both can support each other. Online can make available an enduring conversation, and even revive old conversations with new dialogue.
