Cafe Bucky

Peter Arnett and Geraldo Rivera, sitting in a tree…

I can’t believe these two. First, there’s Peter’s lapse of judgement, giving an interview to Iraqi TV. Then, it gets worse, Mr. Grandstander
himself, Geraldo “what do you mean, it’s empty?” Rivera draws a map in the sand, giving away operational details… Oy!

It’s not so surprising that Geraldo is in trouble. What is surprising is
that the military would allow him to be an embedded reporter in the
first place. Geraldo was once one of those kids on the playground
that would say “I swear, I won’t tell anyone, you can trust me!”

So, here is an idea… these two can make it up to the American
People… how? Exchange Peter and Geraldo for all of the American
POWs currently being held by the Iraqis. Seems fair to me.

Before I get too far along in developing this blog, I thought
it would be good to take a moment and make a pledge about
a few things. Some “what can be expected from me” items,
if you want to read it that way.

History

I won’t rewrite history. Once I post, that’s it. I
won’t delete it. I may go back and fix typos, or in a
rare case, clarify something [in brackets like this].
I may add or update a link within the post. For the
most part though, I would like to treat a post as
if it were a newspaper item.. you can’t run out on
streets and gather up all of the copies of your
story. Likewise, I don’t intend to put something
on the internet, and then pretend that I can
somehow remove it. Once it’s there, it’s there!

I’ll quickly mention where the notion of “won’t
rewrite history” comes from. Although I am
new to Downtown Bloggerville, I am a Usenet News
veteran since the mid-1980’s, and have been emailing
since 1981. Sure, there’s some stuff I’ve posted
or emailed here and there that can make me look
silly… but, you know what? That’s because
I’m human, not some perfect AI program. I’m
well aware that Google, Deja, and archive.org
are out there!

Balance

I want to try to balance my topics a bit. I have
a huge backlog of tech stuff that I can spit out,
but that could get tedious. I’m going to deliberately
spend some time up front getting different categories
established. It would be all too convenient to
fall into a “blogging about blogging” rut.

On the other hand, I’ve been fairly into tech stuff
for a long time. I wouldn’t be surprised if 50-75%
of my posts touch on it in some way.

Me Be Me

I pledge/vow/swear to be myself. I’m a lot better at it
than trying to be someone else!

Paris Nightclub. September 1989 - Honeymoon. Hot, sweat,
humid. Wild Jazz, crowd underground. Dance all night. 3 in the morning… the
long stroll back from the Latin Quarter to the Arc de Triomphe. Cafes hoppin.
Happy people abound. Walk to the beat of the traffic. More coffee please. A
simpler time.

Wind farther back. 1961. Paul Newman and Sidney Poitier made Paris Blues at the CdlH,
giving us their take on transplant Americans pursuing their Jazz
Dreams. Dig it. It’s a wonderful, possibly overlooked travelogue of
a movie with great jamming scenes of a gleeful Louis Armstrong. Watch it,
and escape for 100 minutes. A simpler time.

A couple of weeks ago, I started looking into how I would blog. In
the midst of discovering Moveable Type, pondering my own FlexiPhoto
project (more about that in a future posting), and wondering about web
addressing schemes in general, I had an idea…

What if it were easy to search the web, on a per-domain
basis, by Location and Time?

A couple of sites that deal with location are
geourl.com,
and mapper.acme.com.
To the best of my knowledge, there isn’t anything out
there right now (March 29, 2003) that lets you search
by location AND time.

My basic idea revolves around having a second URL that
resolves to a web page/resource. It takes the
form of:

http://domain/latitude,longitude,altitude/time/whatever.html

An example is:

http://example.com/37.87,-122.29,15M/1994-11-05T13:15:30Z/event.html

The second URL can be resolved by mod_rewrite to the original web document.
I wrote the idea up, and started a web site at
ThereAndThen.org. A lot
more is explained there, so have a look and let me know
of any feedback.

With my first entry, I should explain why everything here looks so… so…

…so default!

I’ll tell ya… it’s because I believe in iteration. Thus begins my foray into, oh, do I have to say it? blogging.

A JavaJoint, to me, is an active coffeehouse. A goal is to have others post here from time to time. Guest bloggers… have them here on Open Mic Night. btw, there is a JavaJoint.net, in St. Cloud, MN (a nightclub and more). Tere is no relation between me and them. I have owned the JavaJoint.com domain since early 1995.

If you look at my resume, you’ll see that I’ve been on all sorts of fun software development projects. I’ve come to conclusion that sometimes it’s best to just launch, get content (or, for an app, the debugged basic functionality) out there, and steadily improve on it.

There is no “gold master” for this web site! I just don’t buy the CDROM mentality. Web sites evolve.

I’ve been coming up to speed with Moveable Type on a Debian linux box at home (I will write what I think of the installation process later…) I realized that I didn’t want to launch on April 1st, because, by golly, it would be Foolish. There was the thought of “oh, but I should make it look different from the default, and wait and wait till I get that perfect”. A competing thought of “no, there’s a lot to write about, right now!” won out. I cast my vote for iteration, and so this site will change in a myriad of ways
as I learn MT hacking :-)