Positively Glorious!

Here’s an announcement, for all you geeky types out there:

I’m finished posting geeky stuff like mathematics, programming and social media on Positively Glorious! and phasing out the Software & Media category here. I will henceforth only post those topics on Mettadore.com.

Why?

Because I have a large number of people who read Positively Glorious! because of my writings on topics non-geek topics, and they don’t want to read geeky topics. Furthermore, I have a number of people subscribed to the Positively Glorious! “Software & Media” stream, and only that stream. Thus, I’m assuming they don’t want to read about spirituality, or my incompetence as an uncle.

So, because I’m one to give the people what they want, I’m creating a Geek-only blog.

From now on, if you want ridiculously long diatribes on topics I don’t know enough about go to Positively Glorious!, and if you want math, programming, social media and other geeky stuff, tune in to Mettadore.com.

I’ve been using the Sociable WordPress plugin for a while now. It’s a plugin that gives instant links to various social media sites, to help you spread your bloggy goodness around the world. One thing that I love about this plugin is the fact that it shows a tagline before the list of links (just look to the end of this post for what I’m talking about).

For me, this tagline has become something of a… well… tagline. Many people use the default “Share and enjoy” tagline.¹ This is probably because most people see the tagline as an introduction to the “link to social media” function of Sociable. Me? I actually like the semi-Shakespearian “ending of a chapter” feeling that the tagline gives. It’s like a way to tell the reader that we’re at the end of this post, this thought, this… chapter. Continue Reading »

1. which is something I’d expect to hear from a space ship’s computer that’s trying to recreate tea, not something I want on my blog. [↩]

Because it’s Christmas, and because this time of gift-giving is so difficult in so many ways, I wanted to take a moment to detail more about what gift-giving is to me. The focus of it being that gifts have meaning.

And, more importantly, the act of giving itself has meaning. Deep meaning.

When I give a gift, the responsibility of that gift lies with me, the giver. It is my responsibility to know this person, to take the time to seek and to listen. It is my responsibility to find that one thing that they secretly want, but would not share with themselves. That thing they feel they don’t deserve or can’t afford.

Then, having given them this gift, I thus remove their guilt of having this thing.

That is the real gift.

The gift of receiving the thing free of the burden of needing justification. If I gave an expensive but unwanted jewel, I’d be saying “here’s meaninglessness in our meaningless relationship.” If I give a treasured but inexpensive trifle, I’m saying “Here is meaning, in the depth of our relationship.” Continue Reading »

You all know them. The people who give gifts of toilet brushes, or gifts of a steak dinner to a vegetarian. As I sit in the house of my wife’s parents during this Christmas holiday, it comes that I have a few spare moments to contemplate bad gifts, culture, and the phenomenon of gift-giving.¹

There is kind of cultural nuance that intrigues me about gift-giving. It is a nuance that I feel every Christmas when traveling home to the culture of my in-laws. It strikes me that every family is a blending of two cultures– whether ethnic cultures as ours, or merely familial cultures. These variations become very pronounced during gift-giving, and Christmas is nothing if not a time of gift-giving.

Coming from a multi-ethnic family, a mixed-race person like me sees these variations from a strange, internal perspective. I’ve seen the nuances of gift-giving from early childhood and never realized them until my training in anthropology placed a lens on the incongruities I’d felt for so long. Though I’d felt the fact as assuredly as I’d felt my own bones and tendons, it was only then that I had words and expression for the fact: gifts have meaning.

Even more importantly: The very act of giving has meaning.

In fact, I realize more and more that it is the act itself that is meaningful, much moreso than the gift.

Continue Reading »

1. This phenomenon has seen it’s share of study in the anthropological field– a great many anthropologists have studied reciprocity in every culture, most famously Bronislaw Malinowski, who’s pioneering work in the Trobriand Islands led to new understandings of gift-giving, and of the highly complex and subtle cultural nuances of so-called “savages.” [↩]

I program in a lot of different languages, everything from C and C++ to Awk and Sed, Visual Basic and ASP to PHP and Javascript. I’m a bit of a jack-of-all-trades when it comes to languages, but the main one for the past 10 or so years has been Python. Python is the language that I automatically turn to when I say “I need to do ${X},” where X is any given task that does not require a UML diagram and user case studies. It’s fast, it’s powerful, and it’s about as comfortable as an old shoe.

Lately, many of my projects– including my really really big one– have been in Java. Since I haven’t programmed in Java since about 1998 (about when I picked up Python, notably) it’s been a hard road. Java has become a harsh mistress. That sweet young thing that was so easy going and flexible so many years ago has grown up to be a cynical, hard-edged woman with a riding crop in her hand.

At least, that’s been my recent experience. Continue Reading »

It’s like camping with a Therm-a-Rest. They tell you not to blow into it. They say it’s important to just let it sit and it will self-inflate. Don’t blow it up. That’s bad.

But everyone does it.

It’s the same with the WordPress core. They say “Don’t hack core,” but everyone does it. Continue Reading »

As Christmas descends upon us, a couple of people have asked me if there is anything specific that I want. This year, I have a very unusual answer.

Software.

But only if that software is Scrivener.

It’s the best writing software, full stop.

I’ve been a writer for basically my entire life, and in that time, I’ve used basically every possible method you can think of to get my thoughts into words on a page. Long-hand writing on legal pads, index cards, typed pages, word processors, early HTML pages, wiki’s, LaTeX, and of course, blogs.

Writing is, to me, basically a matter of taking the emotions in my head and using a painfully suboptimal system to get them onto the page. Whatever that system is, and I’ve tried everything out there, it’s painfully suboptimal– and most of them are just horribly horribly wrong. Never have I found anything that excites me.

Until I found Scrivener. Continue Reading »

This is the second part of a series on migrating a site from a single installation WordPress blog to a WordPressµ multi-user implementation. It assumes you have everything installed and have taken the steps in part 1 of the series.

If you’re not interested in managing WordPress systems then move along. There’s nothing to see here. Continue Reading »

Recently, Positively Glorious! had a major failure and I eventually migrated everything from one blog to a WordPressµ installation. This allows me to host multiple blogs on one installation and save the time of maintaining the 11 blogs I was previously pulling my hair out over.

Later, a friend read about my experience and thought about doing the same thing and I told her I’d get details to her, and then I quickly forgot. I wish I had, because I now have to migrate Radio Tierra’s site so I can host it here as well, and I don’t remember what I did.

Thus, like a good little geek, I’ll write step-by-step directions so that when I have to do it again, I’ll have documentation. Have fun Morgan. Continue Reading »

Okay, people. I know you have the power to change the world now, but sometimes you want to change the world into something that’s just really dumb.

The current explosion of social media outlets sure has its problems. Well, more correctly, it has issues that we have not yet had time to process in such a way that those issues are truly incorporated into our culture.¹

Witness, for instance, the Facebook phenomenon. We can now choose to have a lifelong inability to distance ourselves from people. No longer do you have the opportunity to, say, naturally grow apart from a high school friend whom you haven’t seen in 20 years. Now they follow you forever. The problem here is that we, as a human species, have had roughly 1.5 MILLION YEARS of saying “you know, it’s alright if we don’t see each other anymore.” Continue Reading »

1. Anthropological aside: “Culture,” as used here, is a fairly nebulous, since social media as we use it spans multiple cultures. However, I’m reserving the right to speak of “human” culture in this instance, just as we can speak of, say, Western culture while ignoring the cultural differences between Western peoples or even families. [↩]