As many people no doubt are aware: LiveJournal laid off over half their staff. 20 out of 28 people were let go. Consequently, I have read a lot of people’s LJ blog entries that are hysterical freakouts. I’m not sure it’s time for people to freak out yet, but it probably is time to think about a possible Plan B. The LiveJournal situation isn’t like JournalSpace’s sudden and instant closure because they forgot to keep backups. If anything, it will be a slow spiral toward death. They’re likely to cut features to minimize bandwidth and resource utilization. They’ll likely increase the visibility and invasiveness of ads to increase revenue. They may get bought by someone who can figure out how they can make a profit (though it didn’t happen with Six Apart nor the Russian company.) It won’t be a sudden closure, but a slow transition to being less and less usable.

It used to be that only people who are a little more techie could get a domain name and install a blog such as WordPress. These days, most hosts (I know of Dreamhost and GoDaddy for sure) have one-click installs that do all the techie work for you. I might also add that, once installed, WordPress has an option to import all your posts from LiveJournal. This makes a good backup of your content (if not the comments themselves.) The comments take a bit more techie work to import.

Once you’re situated on your WordPress blog, there is a great little plugin that lets you cross-post new blog entries on your WordPress site over to LiveJournal. It is quite configurable and lets you enable comments on LJ or disable comments (forcing people to follow the comment links back to your home journal for posting.) I ran this plugin for a little while, but gave up on it for esthetic reasons.

Migrating from LiveJournal to Wordpress is quite easy. I did it back in April of 2007 when everyone was hysterical over LiveJournal for political (as opposed to the current financial) reasons and haven’t looked back. I’ll gladly answer any migration or general WordPress questions folks might have.

Alternately, I’ve seen people start blogging over on social-networking sites like Facebook and MySpace because they have the privacy and friend-lock functionality similar to LJ, but these are platforms that are even less open than LiveJournal. With your own blog, you have ownership of the data and can use and export it however you want. LiveJournal has generously added an export function that lets you grab your entries and comments. Facebook and MySpace, on the other hand, leave your content trapped on their servers. There is no easy way to extract it. Caveat emptor.

Dear Amazon, the price for a two-pack of replacement water filters should not be four and a half times the price of a single.

kthxbye,
-Brian

Similar to the oldest email meme from the other day, I saw a meme on Ned Batchelder’s blog about locating the oldest file in your home directory tree and telling its story.

For me, there are a couple of different ways I can answer this. My current laptop has a slimmed-down home directory. Technically, the oldest file (that doesn’t have a “1979-12-31 00:00:00″ non-date date) is a “todo” from within the OpenSSL library package. I do quite a lot of security and encryption work with OpenSSL and all of the files in this version seem to be dated 1998-12-21. The oldest file not part of a file archive is ~/Library/Fonts/HEADMH__.TTF, with a timestamp of 2002-10-09. It is the “Headline Modified” font from the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society Prop CD. The oldest file that I created myself is a design document for work that I can’t really discuss from 2004-08-19. The oldest files that I can talk about, that I actually created (so, skipping over mbox and Apple Address Book data files) is ~/Code/workspace/pietro_files/sentences.txt, an input(?) file to an online puzzle in the early days of Perplex City. The content of a blog post was used to calculate hidden URLs which could be retrieved and arranged to access more of the story. If I remember correctly, I wrote a simple little app to parse the blog and grab information from the URLs.

On my desktop (well, technically, the old laptop), the oldest file with a real date is 1992-04-28, ~/Data/Old Drives/etc/Sound/eol.wav, a clip from the movie Tron saying “End of Line.” I’m not sure if I downloaded this or recorded it from VHS on the Amiga I had at the time (the PC didn’t have a SoundBlaster), so I can’t say a whole lot about it. The oldest file that I actually created myself looks to be 1996-10-07, ~/Data/Old Drives/etc2/web/enigma/
2600rpt/images/2600_report.gif (and a bit later that day, Card_Page.html), the web version of a desktop publishing flyer I sometimes passed out at the local 2600 [hacker] meetings. This one was some research I did on the patents for credit card magstripes and included information on the density and formatting of the tracks. A few months later, someone had a device hooked up to the parallel port of a laptop that could read and decode magstripes on credit cards, drivers licenses, student cards, and whatnot.

So those are the oldest files in my home directory. My desktop has a /var/cvs repository that has even older files, but that’s not in my home directory, so doesn’t technically count toward this particular meme. Similar to the previous post, I have much, much older files on CD archives, but the likelihood of me digging through those for a meme is pretty low.

I was prompted by a meme in The Bruce’s recent post (which was, in turn, inspired by another post, and so on, as memes are apt to do) to dig through my mail and find the oldest message. On my current machine (a MacBook Air whose home directory had previously been a MacBook Pro, nee PowerBook G4, nee iMac G3, nee Debian Linux on a Toshiba business laptop, nee Linux on various frankenstein PCs) that was May 7, 2001. It is a ticket confirmation to Cirque Du Soleil’s “O” at the Bellagio during the DefCon of that year. That was amongst receipts and confirmations I felt, at the time, important enough to move over to the Mac. Previous to Apple’s Mail.app, I was using Pine and Unix mail directories. I’m confident I have those backed up on CD somewhere. I’m also confident that I’m too lazy to go back and look through those to find older messages. In a related note, my first blog entry dates back to a little later that year: August 29th, 2001.

Looking back on the past year, there were plenty of highlights to be happy about. Due to the economy, the year was not as prosperous and happy as previous years, so does not have as many things to highlight, but still has a few important items.

* New house! (Technically, we got it in late November of the previous year, but we were not really fully moved in until January or February, so it’s on the list) Also: making the jacuzzi functional
* Best Wife Ever. I’m always amazed at how dynamic and adaptive she is, whether it’s her business, social calendar, inventiveness in the kitchen and around the house, fearless career changes, or just life in general. She has always been, and continues to be, great.
* I still have a decent job at a decent company with a good balance between research and development of new products and technologies versus maintaining old ones. This past year got even better because I got a cool new boss who acts as a good buffer between myself and the CEO.
* Yeay for friends and nights out beering with them!
* Building up Kim’s business: getting better at professional photo retouching, fixing up the web store, the newsletter publishing, and all of that.
* Tearing down Kim’s business: on the one hand, it feels all to final, on the other, she’s finishing her degree and will be better prepared to “reboot” her business, if that’s what she wants. Or to start an entirely different company with entirely different purpose.
* Being part of the community, in the form of neighborhood association (or as they sometimes say, “NA”) meetings. Calling them “NA Meetings” always squiggs me out, as I’ve learned “NA” as initials to an entirely different sort of meeting.
* Norman, the semi-feral kitty we rescued from the streets.

I don’t really make new years resolutions. I generally try to improve myself throughout the year, a little at a time, instead of attempting a big transformative change once a year. A few ways I have been trying to better myself and will continue to do:

* I have increasingly been learning that the entertainment value and networking provided by local events is highly important. Everything these days seems like it points back to creating and maintaining local communities–from sustainable “green” living to technical learning, sharing, and creating (so called “barcamps.”) I’ve been to a few of the bigger events (Ignite Portland), but have yet to go to any of the smaller ones like tweetups and things at cubespace, beer-and-blog, and whatnot. I have Portland Barcamp on my calendar and plan on attending other smaller events as time permits.
* I started going to my Yoga For Stiffs class less and less frequently last year. This was partly due to money, partly falling out of a routine, partly moving further away and driving less frequently. I’m not comfortable with a lot of bike riding, especially after dark, and bus transfers to class would have been a pain. I have been researching more advanced yoga and differing forms of exercise, like Tai Chi, that are easier to get to. I’m ready to start taking a few sample classes, but if two new years of Yoga for Stiffs (hence the desire to try something more advanced or different) have taught me anything, it’s that the first few weeks of the new year are overcrowded in such classes and you are unable to get the attention you deserve. I may wait until late January or early February to let things settle before starting up again.
* I have been cleaning up and minimizing the amount of physical crud in my life and will continue to do so. It’s amazing how many useless trinkets, so-called timesaving gadgets, and maybe-I’ll-need-it-someday junk you can collect, never use, take up space that could be better utilized for things you actually use, and eventually end up in landfills. I’ve been seriously getting rid of useless stuff I already have and making great efforts to prevent such kipple from even entering the house in the first place. It’s an ongoing battle, but after an initial purge it takes very little active work, just a little ongoing thought.
* In the past few months, I’ve turned over a new leaf as far as style and looks go. My clothing has gotten less industrial-music, less punk-rock. My hair went from waist-length two-tone to natural color to short. There is still more work to do this year with style and clothes and more self-discovery of what my new style really is.

So that’s the old year and the new year, wrapped as best as these sorts of things can be in a blog entry.

Happy New Year!

(image sequence shameless stolen from Wallace and Gromit’s Matter of Loaf and Death, which I finally got around to watching yesterday. And yes, there is a version sized down to LiveJournal icon specification.)

Everyone is writing “year in review” posts, but it has been a long enough time since I blogged anything of substance that I need to make a week-in-review post.

Yesterday, I spent a half-day at work to tie up some year-end loose ends. We’re trying to ship a single unit of a newly released device by the end of the year so we can technically say it shipped in 2008, but there was a last-minute security hole discovered in the firmware that needed patching. I kept finding myself thinking, in Dante’s voice from Clerks, “I’m not even supposed to be here today.” As a reward to myself, I spent the second half of the day at the Portland Art Museum. I re-upped our membership, which had expired a year or two ago. They had a great exhibit, Wild Beauty, consisting of photos of the local rivers and railroads, mainly from the late 1800s: steam trains, railroad workers, dam workers, native Americans, and so on. Halfway through the day, I stopped for an overpriced tea to recharge my caffeine levels: black raspberry. Wait, no not black-raspberry, but black-tea with raspberry. $2.25. Ouch.

The other night, Kim and I went to Hopworks again. That’s a great brewpub and they’re very proud (for good reason) of how green they are: biodiesel to power the fryers, waste pizza oven heat going to the brewing system, everything built with reclaimed wood, and all that good stuff. It was pretty packed, even moreso than usual. I finally pulled out the hipster PDA and jotted down notes on the beers in the sampler. The first time there I ordered a sampler and didn’t remember what I liked and disliked, and since then ordered things I was a little “meh” about based on the names–which I thought were describing beers I liked, but was mistaken.

We tried to hit up Bar Carlo for Christmas day breakfast, but with the snow, they did not get their food delivery for the day and were forced to stay closed. We did end up there the next morning, though. We’ve never been before and were quite happy. Their whole arrangement seems a little inconsistent, though. It’s almost like they’re in “phase 1″ of a multipart launch. They’ve been open for–what, 6 months to a year? They only serve breakfast (and brunch, I guess), but have a liquor license and the word “bar” in their name. They have a room with pool tables. I get the impression that they want to be open late into the evening, but are not quite there yet.

Speaking of snow, we had about a week’s worth of it. My week-and-a-half of Christmas break expanded to over two weeks because we were snowed in. This was our second white Christmas in a row and our second Christmas in the new house. Coincidence??!? This was our first “real” Christmas, though. Last year, we were nestled in amongst cardboard boxes and crumpled packing material.

So that’s pretty much the week in review. I’ve been reading a lot lately. I finished Anathem a few weeks ago, finished The Design of Everyday Things a few days ago, and have started The City of Ember. The latter is a “young adult” book that we saw the film of a few months ago (I don’t think it was in the theaters for very long.) Overall, I enjoyed the movie (except for a couple of nitpicky parts) and wanted to read the source material, even if it was geared toward teenagers.

Maybe I’ll end up writing a “year in review” post sometime soon.

One of the great things about Portland is not only the availability of green power, but the number of people who actually opt in to it.

Exhibit A: a Hermann Grid Illusion

Exhibit B: a modern Mac keyboard

This explains why I keep seeing crumbs and lint between the keys when there actually are none.

I’m not really all that big on Christmas cards^[1]. Every year I receive a few, but never really get around to sending any. I’m not sure if it’s because I can be lazy and forgetful at times or if it’s because, when facing a mostly blank card with pen in hand, I tend to freeze up and not know what to write. “Merry Christmas!” followed by signatures seems a bit too terse. The “family year in review” newsletter seems a bit too impersonal. Coming up with something special and unique on each and every card feels overwhelming. Such is my dilemma with Christmas cards.

Putting all of that out of the way, I thought I’d share one of the most awesome cards I’ve seen. ariock sent this our way a few days ago:

And if you don’t get the references, shame on you. Go out and get yourself a copy of Portal. If me, the guy who plays two computer games a year (the other was Bioshock) can play it, you can too.

You may be wondering why he didn’t sign the card? He did–it’s just that the note and signature are out of frame in the blank area on the inside of the front flap.

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^[1] Yes, I call them Christmas cards instead of Holiday cards. At this point in time, the holiday is political and commercial and no longer terribly religious. Hey, wasn’t Christ born in July? Aren’t decorated trees Pagan? It’s a federal holiday and I’ll call it what it is, political-correctness be damned. And get offa my lawn, you crazy kids! I would have gotten away with it if it wasn’t for you and your meddling dog!

I was listening to Strange Love last week and the topic of Christmas movies came up–specifically, not-so-Christmassy Christmas movies. There was talk of films like Gremlins and Die Hard–both of which took place on Christmas and had strong Christmas themes, but were not in-and-of-themselves Christmas movies. I might add Brazil to the list. I’m having trouble thinking of any other examples, though.

Do you have a favorite not-Christmas Christmas movie?