Monthly Archives: April 2007

Dear President Bush

I read today that you said:

“I believe strongly that politicians in Washington should not be telling generals how to do their job.”

I believe very strongly that you are dead wrong about that.  Politicians in Washington should be telling generals what their job is, and set constraints on what they may and may not do while doing their job.  Technically, the primary responsibility for that rests on one politician, the president, which, if you don’t remember, would be you.  However, since you strongly believe that isn’t your job, I am very happy to see congress is trying to fill in.

I look forward to the day when we have a president who is both willing and capable of fullfilling the responsibilities of the office.

Move On Piles On

MoveOn is trying to capitalize on John McCain’s recent gaff. I really wish they wouldn’t, because this is what they have come up with for a fundraising e-mail:

Have you seen the video?

At a campaign stop on Wednesday, Sen. John McCain was asked what to do about Iran. His response? He sang “bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran” to the tune of the Beach Boys’ “Barbara Ann.”

Seriously.

Seriously, yes, I have seen the video. Some bellicose little weasel tried asking a rambling question about, basically, bombing Iran. From what I could tell, McCain, by singing his little song, was mocking the whole premise. I don’t know what else he said next, because all the clips I’ve seen, including the one MoveOn links to, cut off there.

I don’t like McCain, but I dislike an adolescent pile-on more.

I’m thrilled that American politics is conducted at the level of teenaged innuendo. As much as I’d like to point fingers at Karl Rove, he’s just a symptom of a systemic infection.

contemplating a blog move

I’m thinking about moving this blog.  I started in August of 2001 on blogger.  At some point, I migrated to Movable Type, and then, a few years ago, I migrated to WordPress.  Along the way I’ve spent a little time blogging abroad on both LiveJournal and Salon’s blog community and some day I may merge those posts with the posts here.

These days I’m looking at renting over on WordPress.com. I’m curious about what it will be like plugging this blog into the community there and I wouldn’t mind turning the building maintenance over to someone else for a while.

It should be easy to do.  It’s simple matter to export my posts off my own server and import them into theirs.  They’ll let me continue using the geekfun.com domain, so I should be able to make the transition seamless for my existing readers, and I’ll be able to make another seamless transition if I want to self host again in the future.

I’ll have to give up my Google ads, which isn’t a big deal since they aren’t bringing in much money.  I’ll also have to give up the traffic trackers I have now.  WordPress.com has nice stats, but I’d like to maintain continuity.  The big unknown is that a lot of my posts are marked up using Textile, which relies on a plugin to generate ordinary HTML that WordPress.com doesn’t seem to support.  I’ll probably have to write a converter if someone else hasn’t already created one.

I actually tried to do a dry run importing my blog tonight, and it didn’t work very well.  WordPress.com timed out a few times, and now things are all screwed up.  I’ll have to check in with their support on Monday, to get them to clear things out and see if there is anything to do differently before I try again.

My main interest in all of this is to see if plugging in to the wordpress.com community will result in new viewership for my blog.  If it does, I’ll do the same with one of my wife’s blogs, to incubate it.