Progress report on my to-do list for the weekend:
Done.
I think I’ve accomplished this. There’s still a lot of tweaking to do with the site, editing colors and whatnot. Oh, and also moving the boxes around. However, I have made the site 20% prettier — more than 20% prettier, in fact. I will be messing with things throughout the day, but I’m happy to announce that I finished my to-do list. BAM.
Here’s my progress report on my to-do list for the weekend. We’ll go in reverse order.
#4 – Make blog 20% prettier
Haven’t started yet.
#3 – Write About page
Done. You can read the about page if you want. I didn’t give it much thought, but it turned out okay. I’m happy with it for now.
#2 – Update blogroll (from default WP links)
Done. I just went to my bookmarks and then added links to the blogs I visit the most. I also added links to my Myspace page and The Chalkboard Manifesto.
#1 – Fix blog archive links
Done. This took me several hours. (I was also watching TV at the same time. I finally watched Office Space.)
The problem was that URLs which looked like this http://www.agnoiology.com/2006/06/ weren’t working. The individual and daily entries were working, but the monthly pages weren’t. The monthly pages would open up my old MT monthly archives. When I tried deleting those index.html files, I’d get a file listing.
First thing I tried to mess around with was the MT templates. I used the individual entry template from Alex King’s solution for redirecting MT to WordPress (very good, highly recommend using it if you wish to make the same switch I did). Well, first, I had to decipher the damn thing and look up a few PHP commands. Eventually, I figured that this was a dead-end and I did nothing.
Second, I fixed it so I wasn’t getting the file listing anymore. But all that did was give me a 403 Error instead of a file listing.
So I tried a plain old redirect using .htaccess. I had to go into WordPress and go back to the old URL system to find that it was using /m?=200606 for example. I made index.html go to this. It worked, but now I was getting that ugly URL. I didn’t want that showing up because it would confuse people and because it was, well, ugly.
Next, I used mod_rewrite for the redirect. It took me a while to figure out what was even going on with mod_rewrite — it’s damn complicated, especially when one does not even know regular expressions. But I didn’t need the regular expressions. Eventually, I surfed google results for a while and found a simpler intro. I experimented with it and finally got the redirect to work. Mission accomplished.
Well, “mission accomplished” in the Bushian sense. I fixed that but broke everything else. Now the individual entries were giving me 404 errors. Argh!
Maybe the .htaccess files in the subdirectories were giving me problems. I tried putting the mod_rewrite WordPress code in the yearly and monthly subdirectories. No dice.
Okay, might the .htaccess file in the yearly directories be giving me trouble anyway? I mean, I had put those in there to allow HTML files to be treated as PHP files. (This has to do with the solution I used to redirect from MT to WordPress.) I deleted that, but no dice again. I put it back. That wasn’t giving me the problem.
I then thought that maybe WordPress was giving me the wrong code to put in my .htaccess file for those more friendly links. I temporarily changed the access to allow WordPress to write directly to the .htaccess file. Uh oh. 500 Server Error. Everything in WordPress was crashing. I manually uploaded the .htaccess file again and everything was well in the universe. That is, everything except my original problem.
Finally, I looked at the WordPress help file for permalinks a bit and something caught my eye about using a 404 redirect. I didn’t even read it through, but I experiment and I actually used 403 ErrorDocument to redirect things back to WordPress. Now the URL looks pretty and it goes where I want. Problem solved.
It wasn’t the most elegant solution. I had to go through and manually upload .htaccess files to all the monthly subdirectories and then delete all the index.html files. But I’m used to that mind-numbing repetitive stuff from work, so I bucked up and just did it. All done. Hooray.
I found this comment interesting:
Good note, and criticism of Peggy — who was too enthusiastic when enthusiastic, and is too negative now she’s negative.
Bush is a pro-life, pro-tax cuts, pro-gov’t spending, pro-amnesty, pro-Democracy in Iraq (and the ME) … positive president. He’s right on life, taxes and Democracy, wrong on spending and amnesty.
But he’s always pretty positive. And has reason to be, as does the country, although not the journalists.
Both Bush, and perhaps Peggy, should be making jokes about the low low low unemployment, low inflation (small misery index), decreasing budget deficit…
and steady progress in Iraq.All we have to do in Iraq is continue being willing to fight, and we will certainly win.
Maybe in 10 years. Maybe in 40 years.Keep fighting …
or lose.
Those are OUR two choices, and also the bad guys.But, as the Iraqi people get more experience with us and with them, and realize they DO have a choice, more are deciding to take the responsibility to fight against terror.
Noonan feels Iraq is lost, she is wrong. We are, slowly, winning.
Dan, you keep doing fine, and this was another good one. (and I love Peggy…)
[emphasis added]
There is a possible third option: fight and lose.
I won two games of Bingo today at the department picnic — on Friday the 13th. Bad luck, my ass.
Maybe Mitt Romney started out a clever man, but you can only tell a lie so many times before you start believing it. Mitt Romney is not a flip-flopper; he has sincerely changed his mind, for the worse.
People like Vic Gold thought that Bush was just giving the evangelicals words. They were wrong. Let’s not take that chance again.
Romney is not the least bad option; he is just as bad as the rest of them.
Conservatives like to trot out the example of the USSR when they say that communism doesn’t work. They laugh at the whiners who say that it was the execution, not the idea, that failed.
Strangely enough, the simple example of Iraq doesn’t similarly discredit neoconservatism. They blame the execution of the war, even though it was flawed from the beginning.
Neoconservatives would use a hammer to conduct surgery and when the patient dies, they’d complain that the doctor didn’t hit hard enough.
Geeze, don’t you morons see that if we leave Iraq, a civil war will break out. We’ll have Muslim fighting Muslim and then oil prices will go up (which I don’t really understand since they’re both on the side of evil). Good thing we can send our soldiers there to die in a far-away sectarian conflict. Otherwise, we might have to pay more for gas, and that’s a sacrifice I’m not willing to make.
I heard this morning on the radio that Nancy Pelosi was giving a speech and then hecklers started shouting, “Impeach Bush” or something like that. It gave me an idea: We should go to every politician’s speech and shout, “End the war!”
The time for decorum is over. We should disrupt them at every chance, so they can’t ignore us.
In eating competitions, the dominant Kobayashi has only been defeated thrice in his career: once by a giant, once by a bear, and once by an AMERICAN!
I’ve decided not to go anonymous.
You know what? I just realized that I have always assumed that politics and my real self would never actually mix. I had just assumed that honesty and politics were mutually exclusive. Maybe it’s true on some level, in this poisoned political environment.
But the disgusting rhetoric and outright lies are threatening to destroy the republic.  For politics, the truth is now more necessary than ever.
If I truly wish to devote myself to country, then I must also devote myself to truth. So if you ever catch me not being truthful, remind me of this.
I’m exhausted. But not exhausted in a good way. Note to self: Find something more exciting next time.
Since today is Independence Day, I urge you to read Langston Hughes’s Let America Be America Again. It is the greatest poem about America — actually, the greatest poem period.
This is probably in violation of copyright, but I can’t help but give an excerpt of the end:
Sure, call me any ugly name you choose–
The steel of freedom does not stain.
From those who live like leeches on the people’s lives,
We must take back our land again,
America!O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath–
America will be!Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,
The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,
We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.
The mountains and the endless plain–
All, all the stretch of these great green states–
And make America again!
I’ve switched over to WordPress. I need to do some work to fix all those dead links, though.
UPDATE: Changed theme. Wow, this is so much easier than MT. I think I’ll use this as a base for edits, which I probably won’t have time for today.
UPDATE: MT redirect successful! At least, for individual entries. Some of my old, old links are date-based. I’ll be fixing those later.
UPDATE: Okay, now the months aren’t working. Arg.
By what I can see, we will probably lose in 2008. But we cannot descend into nihilism from the loss. It only means we have not gained enough power yet. If we are patient, we will transform the way America does politics.
2008 will not be a tipping point. The battle is just beginning.
Alright, I created new databases. I deleted all the old folders. Then, put in all the new stuff. The only thing I think I forgot to delete were some of the files in the home directory.
But honestly, I can’t even figure out how MT managed to revert me back to January 30th, yet again! And all the old side navigation bars showed up! I mean, the whole left column reappears, along with the old bio. I don’t even know where that fucking data comes from!
I’m installing a new version of MT today. Because of the weird issue where my index page keeps reverting back to January 30, I’m going to be deleting MT and then reinstalling it, instead of just upgrading. Hopefully, everything comes out okay. See you on the other side.
EDIT: Here we are at the other side, version 3.35. I’ll be fiddling with templates later.
EDIT: Man, I can’t get my template junk to work right.
I was skimming through SCOTUSblog and I saw something shocking in this entry, Government calls Al-Marri ruling a threat to security:
The Justice Department, denouncing as “radical” a Fourth Circuit Court ruling rejecting presidential authority to seize and detain a civilian captured inside the U.S., asked the Circuit Court on Wednesday to rehear the case en banc, and to overturn it swiftly.
Yes, how dare the courts have the audacity to deny the president kingly powers. Any citizen should be detained by the president, if he suspects they are a terrorist. Habeas corpus, schmabeas corpus. We’re in a fucking war on terror! 9/11 changed everything.
The terrorists could be anywhere! They made the whole world a battlefield, and thus, we must take the battle to them, wherever they may be. I bet the liberal-commie-traitors would love for terrorists to be able to hide on our own soil. I bet they’d love for terrorists to hide behind our ancient liberties and constitutional safeguards. I can’t decide whether I hate them more, or the terrorists.
I’m about to start working, so lately I’ve been frightened about the prospect of people finding me on the internets. Luckily, I share the name of some Christian singer guy, but this weblog still shows up on the second page when you google my name. I don’t want to watch what I say on this weblog; I don’t want to manage my image at this young an age. I want to be as crass as I fucking want on The Chalkboard Manifesto — and I reserve the right to be offensive to anyone.
This could also be a problem if I decide to become a public figure of some sort. One cannot help but be a moron at 20 years old, and I do not want those moronic things preserved on the internets for all to see. A simple slip of judgment can be a disaster.
Things I have said can be easily taken out of context, especially when that context can sometimes be my entire life (or my personal growth during my teenage years.) I believe that people are smart enough to recognize context, but they have to be given that context in the first place. I won’t be able to defend myself.
Of course, certain public persons have recovered from much worse than I can ever do, but I do not have the skills to attempt such a recovery.
So maybe it’s best if I become anonymous, so I can do what I want to do. Alternatively, I can make this weblog private, but that doesn’t solve the Chalkboard Manifesto problem. Furthermore, there’s still the risk that information will leak out even from a private weblog. Writing under pseudonym will not sate my vanity, but that may be the price of freedom.
I’m undecided whether I should really go anonymous, but I’m certainly leaning in that direction. While it may be a tragedy to possibly erase this weblog from existence, I will at least keep records for myself.
Something most people don’t know about me is that I’m a pro-wrestling fan. I just wanted to note here that Chris Benoit was one of the greatest. Just the other week I was commenting on how much more enjoyable he was to watch than many other wrestlers out there. So it was shocking to learn that he was dead when he had so many years left in him to entertain us.
The New York Times has this article on Michael Bloomberg, which contains this offending tidbit:
Which opens the door to a Swiftian modest proposal, one that might appeal to any billionaire independent presidential candidate who knows the art of a deal: Rather than try to win the White House outright — a long shot — an independent candidate could instead try for a king-making (or queen-making) bloc of votes in the Electoral College.
John Swift’s original “A Modest Proposal” satirically referred to eating Irish babies. So, I’m kind of confused about how this is Swiftian — unless my satire-detector is completely off. Yeah, it’s a Swiftian modest proposal, if you also believe that Alanis Morissette understands the word “ironic.”
[Disclaimer: I am only harping on one thing. I make no other claims about the article, the author, or the media, or whatever.]
In reference to this comic on conspiracy theorists, I got this email:
I stumbled on your comic “do you know why we’re in Iraq” and am having difficulty understanding.
Do you mean to say that Iraq is a diversion from the proposed North American Union?
Do you think “conspiracy theorists” is a functional way to describe someone? What does it mean?
Ps. learn more about 9/11
After a laugh, I sent this thoughtful reply:
North American Union? Don’t make me laugh.
The American military invasion of Canada is imminent.
Well, I just cleaned out my school e-mail inbox. I feel so clean and uncluttered. Now, I will keep it clean.
Speaking of keeping things clean, I have something totally unrelated to say. I’m going to be hunting for a new moniker over the next few weeks. This may even end up with me getting a new domain or something.
I was skimming through a copy of Relativity by Einstein in the bookstore at the airport. I remember getting the impression that the book read almost like philosophy. He interpreted facts in a different way. Einstein made a breakthrough in metaphysics, more than anything else. At least, that’s what my uninformed mind thought as I quickly glanced through it.
Did you see that new Hillary video! Oh my god, precisely what I look for in a presidential candidate: the ability to produce a mildly clever parody of the Sopranos!
Ah! What new heights we reach in political discourse!
I will be gone until Wednesday. No updates until then unless I find some time and a free internet connection.
Trent Lott today: “Talk radio is running America. We have to deal with that problem.”
AHAHAHA! Man, these people are totally clueless. The Republican Party is ripping itself apart. It’s going to be great to see these poison-spewers unleash their poison words upon each other.
EDIT: Geeze, I know, I sound like a liberal, but I’m sick of Rove-style politics, and I’ll be glad to see certain elements of the party attack each other.
Here’s an excellent article by Eugene Robinson on the dark legacy of the Bush administration: Fleeting Glory in Albania. Well, it’s excellent except for one glaring error. I sent him an e-mail:
I agree with your June 12 opinion piece in the Washington Post, except for three words: “abusive interrogation techniques.” The English language already has a word for that: torture.
To think that we can bring democracy to an Iraq in the midst of civil war is as absurd as building a time machine and invading France to save democracy from the Jacobins.