Digital Whittler

Just checked the bees today and they are doing fine. Looks like they’re starting to fill up the first super, so hopefully they’ll have honey to get them through the winter.

I heard on the B’Dale mailing list that Big Bear Cafe is now open, so I stopped by this morning after driving Anne to work.

I found a few folks sitting at tables outside, still some workmen on ladders inside, and smiling faces behind the counter.

I was going to get a coffee and read the paper but they won’t be selling the Post until Monday so I just got a cup of black coffee to go.

My review: good joe! They serve from vacuum dispensers, not pots on a heater, so the coffee tasted fresh and not harsh.

It’s nice to have a new spot in the neighborhood. It looks like it could be a great local hangout.

This is a half-baked idea at this point that I hope to turn into a more fully-baked post in the future.

Someone asked me today for a good metaphor for a content management system.

[10:46] Bogey:  other metaphors you’ve seen that work for the non techno crowd?
[10:46] IMMarkkennedy: I think of it as a refinery
[10:46] IMMarkkennedy: You want to capture your content in as raw a format as possible so it can be “refined” into a wide variety of products
[10:47] IMMarkkennedy: gasoline, kerosene, WD-40, etc.
[10:47] Bogey:  so, text, video, images, sound all go in…
[10:47] Bogey:  and then get repurposed/repackaged and distributed out
[10:47] Bogey:  to a wide variety of channels
[10:47] IMMarkkennedy: If you start with Gasoline, you can’t ever turn it into Kerosene
[10:47] Bogey:  and formats
[10:47] IMMarkkennedy: yep

Bogey then found this image that I’d like to turn into a CMS/XML-ish image:

My bee colony died this winter, most likely in late January. I had checked on them in mid-January during a warm spell and they were dangerously low on food. I fed them 5 lbs. of sugar fondant but the next time I checked on them, they were dead.

I went out today to clean the hive and took some pictures.

This photo looks like it could have been taken of a frame full of live honeybees. Unfortunately, they’re in perpetual freeze-frame.

Once I brushed away the dead bees from the surface of the frame you can see the sure evidence that they starved to death: a frame full of bees head first in the honeycomb. They died desperately looking for honey.

My first step to getting organized was clearing out the piles of mail and other crap that have been gathering around the house. It took severl hours, but I cleared out all of the piles, filed what needed to be filed and threw away what needed to be thrown away. I also managed to clear up and balance several financial statements. All in all, it was a fruitful, if not exciting, evening. Sometimes you’ve gotta do what you’ve gotta do…

One of my resolutions for the year is to pick an Open Source project to get behind, learn, and hopefully contribute to.

Right now, the options are:

• Drupal
• Joomla
• Ruby on Rails

Right now, Drupal seems like the most likely candidate. I say that for several reasons:

• I have a strong interest in content management systems
• It seems like one of the more flexible open source CMS’s out there
• It’s crossed my radar many, many times in the last year
• It’s PHP, a language I know

Joomla is another open source, PHP content management system, but I just seem to run across Drupal a lot more than Joomla (nee, Mambo).

RoR is interesting to me, and I do think I want to learn how to develop using it, but since Ruby is a completely new language to me, and because I don’t see myself mastering it in such a way that I can contribute good code to the framework, RoR is probably a tool I can learn to use, but not one I can contribute to.

So, we’ll see what I decide to gravitate towards.

One of my resolutions this year is to get organized. I’ve tried this in the past many times, as I know others have, but for some reason it has never really kicked in. I go in spurts: sometimes I’ll get hyper-organized in one facet of my life, but it never carries over to all facets and it never really lasts.

Last year I read about a book called Getting Things Done. It was highly recommended as an organizational technique that techies could understand and get behind. I bought the book and started reading it. After the first chapter or two I told my wife how much I was enjoying it and that I thought I could really take it to heart. A couple of weeks later she asked, “So, how was that book?”

I hadn’t gotten past the third chapter. Suffice it to say, it didn’t take.

But I still like the ideas in the book, and I think they could help me. So, this resolution starts with me finishing the book and blogging about it.

Here goes…

I’ve decided that I’m going to blog my New Year’s resolutions for 2006. I’m going to do this by assigning a category to each resolution and add posts to the category as I progress on my way. It seems like by blogging about it, I can keep tabs on how I’m doing.

Oh, yeah. One of my resolutions is to finally keep a steady blog, so this plan helps get me going on that one, too.

I’ve been following the recent controversy regarding Amnesty International’s recent report on human rights abuses around the world, and in particular the report’s comparison of the Guantanamo Bay prison to the Soviet gulags.

My take: the “gulag” comparison was out of place, but at the same time I can’t help but feel that some of the things that we’re doing in the name of the “War on Terror” are in violation of some principles that we’ve always held dear, and that saddens me.

However, I found something else in the AI report that really got me going: the insinuation that the U.S. is in some way responsible for Cuban human rights abuses.

In the report on Cuba, AI includes a two paragraph summary of the human rights situation on the island. Here’s the first paragraph:

By the end of 2004 there were at least 70 prisoners of conscience, most of them held since the 2003 crackdown on the dissident movement. However, 18 prisoners of conscience were released and many were moved to prisons nearer their homes.

Pretty standard stuff, I suppose, though one might say that it seems to minimize the fact that there are likely more than 70 prisoners of conscience in Cuba.

The next paragraph, however, got my attention:

Dissidents and their relatives continued to be threatened and harassed. The US embargo and related measures continued to have a negative effect on the enjoyment of the full range of human rights in Cuba. (emphasis added)

What? So, AI is saying that the U.S. is partially responsible for the human rights abuses in Cuba? How does that work? Are they deflecting some of the blame for the abuses from the Cuban government itself due to mitigating circumstances such as the U.S. economic sanctions?

Curious, I clicked over to the summary page in the AI report for the United States. Perhaps they make mention of the fact that the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, which they strongly criticize, was the direct result of terrorist attacks against the United States by Al Quaeda? Surely that could be considered a mitigating circumstance worthy of mention.

Nope. In fact, the only time the word “terror” is mentioned on the U.S. summary page is as part of the phrase “war on terror.” No mention of terrorists or terrorist attacks. Hmm.

So I clicked back to the summary page for Cuba and read the whole thing. Surely, they must have some explanation for their claim that the U.S. is responsible for Cuban human rights abuses.

There are two paragraphs (three sentences) in the Cuban summary that relate to the U.S.:

In November, for the 13th consecutive year, the UN General Assembly passed a resolution calling on the USA to end its embargo on Cuba.

In June tough new sanctions by the US government on Cuba were introduced, restricting Cuban-Americans’ cash remittances to relatives on the island and limiting family visits between the USA and Cuba to 14 days once every three years. On 8 November US dollars ceased circulation in Cuba and were replaced by Cuban convertible pesos, following a decree by the Cuban Central Bank.

Um, that’s it? How does that make the U.S. responsible for having a “negative effect on the enjoyment of the full range of human rights in Cuba?” If the U.S. hadn’t taken this action, would there be any less prisoners of conscience in Cuba? If the embargo was lifted tomorrow, would the human rights situation in Cuba improve at all?

I am no supporter of the U.S. embargo on Cuba. In fact, I’ve long thought that it should be lifted immediately because it is counterproductive. And, I believe that the embargo violates my human rights to travel wherever I please. But I don’t have any fantasies that lifting the embargo would make Cuba any less of a human rights abuser. If anything, it would make the Cuban population a little less poor, but that’s about it.

So, to me the fact that AI tries to blame the U.S. for Cuba’s human rights abuses is far more egregious than their mischaracterization of Guantanamo as a gulag, and in my opinion it does far more damage to their reputation as even-handed observers. An even-handed observer would clearly put blame for human rights abuses in Cuba solely on Fidel and the Cuban government.

Chris MacDonald has started the DC Podcast Network, a site for bringing together quality content producers in the DC area to one place where they can generate audiences through the synergies that may exist in their content.

I’m looking forward to interesting things…
DC Podcast Network

David Brooks nails it today, pointing out the lack of perspective on all sides of the Newsweek Qu’ran-in-the-Qu’mode story…

Bashing Newsweek - New York Times

Wonkette hits on something that I’ve been thinking for the past couple of days:

Sure, Newsweek maybe should have shown a little more restraint before publishing their Koran-in-the-commode story, but I think it’s a little much for the White House and others to be so indignant about the whole thing since I still think it’s likely that things similar to what was reported have happened and may still be happening in Gitmo and other places. How will they look if more substantiated accounts emerge?

Best to leave the scolding to others, methinks.

Wonkette - We Come Not to Praise Newsweek…

Though it may not be accurate or appropriate, I have to admit that my first reaction when hearing about another Italian hostage was, “Well, of course. It must be pretty well-known amongst the terror ranks that Italians pay top Euro ransoms for their citizens which would seem to make them more valuable targets.”

In these hostage situations there are really no good options, but paying a ransom to terrorists is still the worst of the bunch.

Reuters.com

So that’s what that was…

I was on the phone this morning when I heard what sounded like military jets flying over head. When I looked out the window, I saw a small plane in the sky. I thought it was odd because I know we’re pretty close to restricted airspace. I guess it wasn’t a drill:

CNN.com - U.S. Capitol, White House briefly evacuated - May 11, 2005

I started a new Meetup group for Washington area Podcasters. I was kind of suprised there wasn’t one already. I hope we get a good turnout for our first meeting on April 21st. Guess I’ve got to do some publicity for it.
The Washington Podcasting Meetup Group

Shea Shackelford produced the following story for the much-hoped-for podcast that we’re trying to put together as a demo project for the Center for Community Change. I think it’s pretty damned good.

Listen Here

Now this is something I could have used at various points in my career. It’s always good to have a starting place for those times when you need to code a tricky regular expression.

Regular Expression Library

So I’m in Richmond, VA for a couple of days for work. We just got done teaching a day-long course and we’ve wandered up the street to the Capital Ale House. In addition to over 200 beers they offer free Wi-Fi. So, I’m blogging, checking email, catching up with news (Tarantino is going to write and direct the next “Friday the 13th” movie? Awesome.) and drinking a Bear Republic Racer 5. Gotta love that technology

BTW, the Bear Republic is pretty good. I got it on draft. It’s pretty hoppy and has a sweet taste to it. Nice.

They also have a “buy a Guinness, get a free glass” special going. And you know what I say: “If it’s free it’s for me!”

Hi, Shea!

Craig’s list is simply amazing. Today we were cleaning out some closets. We decided on several things that we flat out wanted to just get rid of including a CD player, an electric blanket, some snorkel gear, and an area rug. So I posted 4 notices on Craigs List. And within an hour and a half I had 25 responses. Granted, the stuff was free, but still, that’s a pretty good response rate for a Saturday night.

This is a pretty cool Java applet that lets you visualize the popularity of any given name in the last 100 years. My favorite: Porfirio. Apparently no one has been named Porfirio since the 1950s

The Baby Name Wizard’s NameVoyager