Positively Glorious!

Here’s a story. It’s apropos of nothing, but I’ve been too busy to write enough here, so I thought this would make people smile.

I could go on and on about how it’s a story of Social Networking, and how sometimes the world is a better place because we’re closer, or at least more able to contact people for random bits of meaningless and make friends.

It could be a story about how we’re not so distant, or maybe how we’re differently distant.

But it’s not, because then I’d feel the need to actually do a bit of research to support my theory, and post it on mettadore.com, which I know plenty of people are sick of. So, rather than anything meaningful, it’s merely an amusing anecdote.

I was at work, drinking maté, typing away, la la la, work work work, data data data, la la l–

AHH!

I spilled maté on my mac!

Well, the story’s a happy one, because, as you can see from the image of my tweet, physics saved me. That’s not always the case. At certain times, physics is a right bastard, particularly when I’m on my skateboard, or ice skates, or standing on my roof trying one more time to get my Superman Underroos to do their damn job!

Anyway, physics is sometimes a bastard, but this time it was cool.

So today, I got an email message from someone that made me chuckle:

Hi John-

Google led me to your tweet from 1/28: “The surface tension of water is strong enough that water won’t flow into certain sized holes… like those of a MacBook Pro’s speaker.”

I just spilled a (small) bit of iced coffee onto my 15″ 2008 MBP left speaker grill, so the topic is near to me… The coffee seemed to just sit on the grill for the couple of seconds it took me to wipe it off. My empirical evidence supports you theory.

First, I looked on the web for teardown photos to see where the microphone was. No luck. Since I’m wondering if I might have any trouble, I was wondering if you had any more background for your MBP speaker/surface tension info.

Thanks!

I thought it was pretty funny that someone would actually look up “surface tension” or something like that- what a total geek. What was funnier was that I actually looked it up, and started to do a calculation the day it happened, just to see. Now “that’s” a total geek!

Anyway, I sent a message back, mostly to be funny, because I always feel both funnier and more helpful when I connect to someone through social networking.

Hi! Wow, pretty funny connection. Social Networking FTW!

So, no, nothing. No problems and no later developments. I did calculations of surface tension in grad school and the size of those holes are, in fact, too small. However, I will give the caveat that certain things increase or decrease the surface tension of water. “Uh oh? Where’s he going with this?” You ask.

For instance, cat spit. I have some knowledge of cat spit, and it decreases water’s surface tension. Don’t ask me how I know this, it’s an embarrassing situation that I’m still in counseling for. Suffice it to say that if you have a cat, you may want to be careful letting him drink beverages around your laptop (The whole “lack of a thumb” thing is hard for them, but I’ve learned that now, and we’re moving on)

Anyway, I’m not sure where coffee is on this. Whether it increases or decreases it. However, even if it decreased it, it would have to be an insane amount to get into that grill. My suspicion is that the Apple engineers are somewhat sloppy drinkers, and have thought about everything– based on they’re own klutsy habits!

I think your safe. Yay Mac!

Hope everything else is equally peachy.
-J

The whole exchange got me thinking about my New Year’s Resolution for 2009, which I’ve re-resolved for 2010. That was “to be more Irish.” It’s a tough goal. Being Irish is nothing to sniff at. It’s no easy feat, but I’m convinced I can do it if I work hard enough. This exchange bodes well, because the Irish have a saying that a stranger is just a friend you haven’t met yet.

This person shot me an email out of the blue, and email to a stranger, and email to a friend she hasn’t met yet. That’s the cool thing about social networking. We’re all friends.

Yay for Social Networking! (and yay for the Irish, too!)

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. [↩]

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 »

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. [↩]

Over the past few months, I’ve been working with Rediviva Magazine on a special (somewhat secret) community project.  We’re getting closer to a possible launch and I’d like to get some more people involved so I thought I’d put the word out there to see whether there are any local programmers interested in working on it with me. Feel free to pass this around.

Overview

Ideally, I’d like to build a small team of programmers who are interested in building an Open Source Software web application that can hopefully become something bigger than what we at Rediviva want to start with. It’d be ideal if a couple high school hot shots are around who want to work up their resumes for later development jobs, eventually becoming a Project Manager on this one. Continue Reading »

This is a quick write-up on an error I’ve been having with my MacBook and a drive connected to Airport Extreme. It’s really only here so that Google will index it and the info will hopefully be one step in a solution for others with the same problem.

The issue is with my Free Agent drive when connected to an Airport Extreme via USB and accessed with my MacBook Pro, running Snow Leopard, using an AFP connection. I used this drive for a while with no problems in Leopard, and then did a clean install to Snow Leopard without any problems. One day, I tried to access my drive and got the following error:

The server “MettaFi” is available on your computer. Access the volumes and files locally.

Continue Reading »