Dowbrigade

The big day has arrived! Today is a memorable day inthe Dowbrigade household, and in the evolution of the Dowbrigade itself. At 12:30 pm, in Faneuil Hall, the Revolutionary marketplace in downtown Boston, the lovely Norma Yvonne will be sworn in as an American citizen. And then, afterwards, we will come home and begin the distasteful and traumatic process of migrating the Dowbrigade News from the Manila universe to the WordPress world.

After surviving nearly 10 years of marriage to the Dowbrigade, no mean feat in and of itself, and 5 years as a green-card holder (the five years before that she was in the well-known pre and post-9/11 INS limbo, as the agency shuffled towards transforming itself into the more muscular but still torpid ICE, and petitions were frozen, paperwork was lost, documents were), Norma decided she wants a US passport and she wants to vote in the next presidential elections, both of which she will now be able to do.

Even after 10 deliriously happy years of marriage and being more in love with the multi-talented soon-to-be-citizen today than the day we were married, one tiny, insecure iota of our soul fears that all this time she has been stringing us along until the day she gets her citizenship, at which point she will throw off the disguise, laugh wickedly into our stunned face, and hand us our walking papers. But that’s probably just something we should work out in therapy, if we ever get around to any therapy beyond blogging, which we won’t.

Norma is going to make a hell of a U.S. citizen, and the country is lucky to have her. She is one more reason that we need to keep the immigration pipeline open, and not just for college-educated economists like her. It’s not the immigrants and their values that are endangering the country.  Hell, their values are working their asses off, saving their money, and turning their kids into regular American citizens. They are thankful every day for the opportunities that this country offers.

The people WE are worried about have been here for so many generations that they take America’s freedoms for granted. The ones who expect (and in millions of cases receive) handouts from the government, are not working although they could, or instead working one of a hundred million scams, cons, or frauds through which they leech of of honest citizens.

But we can’t get caught up in that evil screed right now, we have to start getting ready for the Citizenship ceremony. And yet we can’t go without a word of warning.

This may be the last posting of all time for the Dowbrigade News as we know and love it. Reports from the far side of the migration from Manila to WordPress are mixed and sketchy. Bob Stepno reports a fairly problem-free transition. j’s Scratchpad reports managing the transition via a number of ingenious scripts that some clever friend sent her which sound way beyond our computer skills to facilitate. An unknown but disquieting number of other Harvard blogs have disappeared into the digital wilderness, and no one knows if or when they will reappear. We are particularly worried about the images, on which the Dowbrigade News relies.

But onward and upward, undaunted. The plain fact is that sometime tomorrow, or next week (details are still somewhat vague and contradictory) the Manila server will shut down forever.  Those who have not migrated will lose their blogs. Unfortunately, in WordPress we are not allowed to fiddle with the template code, as we were in Manila. We must choose one of the standard, pre-loaded templates.

As a result the Dowbrigade News will look considerably different.  No longer will it feature that attractive plaid stripe, the title strip photo of the trees along Memorial Drive, or the portrait of our cat, Chiqui. Some readers will applaud.

We remind ourself that using the same design for 3 years is slothful and unimaginative.  We remember that it is always good to learn to use new tools.  We are trying to look at this migration as an opportunity to try new and different things with our blog.

But we are going to miss Manila, our first blogging ax, as clunky and media-unfriendly as it became in its old age. It was its fatal talent as a Spam magnet that finally did it in. Let it Rest in Peace, and in its place  in blogging history.  And stay tuned, in this space (the URL and name will stay the same) for the New, Improved Dowbrigade News.

In typical blind-pig fashion, the Dowbrigade did not manage to find this soiree, even after being informed by the ultimate insider, the inestimable adamg of Universal Hub fame, that the secret location was "327 Summer Street – Second Floor – South Boston".

Is anybody who was there awake yet? We would love to post some links to blog postings or photos about the event.

When they found her last week, her father said, she was "bare-bones skinny" and shaking, scuttling like a monkey along the ground to snatch up grains of rice, her eyes "red like tigers’ eyes". So when the first pictures of Rochom P’ngieng, the woman supposedly lost in the jungle for 18 years, emerged yesterday showing a calm and apparently healthy young woman rather than an emaciated, feral beast, the mystery surrounding her remarkable story deepened.

Yesterday, however, as further intriguing reports emerged of a mysterious naked man who had been spotted with the woman but ran off when challenged, the family began to close ranks. They have withdrawn permission to take DNA samples to confirm the woman’s identity, and police have thrown a cordon around their isolated home, in an effort to keep at bay curious neighbours and the world’s media.

from the Guardian UK

Hey, I recognize that guy! That’s my college buddy Ming, last seen paddling naked up the Mekong River in a dugout full of ibogane extract and action flix DVDs…

Comment Spam update: Thus far today we have been the victim of comment spam from the following sources, in chronological order: shuttle xpc sk21g, cardiomax 700e, crystal ball pendant, cheap car audio systems, radiant heater, 14k gold charm bracelet, camaro guage, and facelift cream. 24 robot-generated comments in all. And every single one is commenting on "post 940", which we DELETED MORE THAN 24 HOURS AGO!

So obviously, comments don’t even need a valid posting to attach themselves to. Diabolical damn spam……

A Scotsman is planning to become the first person to windsurf across the Atlantic – and then turn back and do it again.

Leven Brown, aka El Loco, would have to balance on the 20ft surfboard for around five months as he gets blown from the Canary Islands to Antigua, without any support vessel.

He would get only a few hours sleep a night, in a small hollowed-out depression in the board, and would eat dehydrated food, reports Metro.

The specially-made board will be fitted with an electronic anti-shark mechanism.

Once he’s crossed the Atlantic, Mr Brown plans to turn round and surf back the other way – taking a more dangerous route through rougher seas.

from Ananova

A candidate for this year’s Darwin Award, for sure. Hope he takes plenty of single malt, and a sheep for company….

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is a reposting of an older story which has been innundated with comment spam. For more on this, see below…

F.K. in Conway NH has an interesting question for Dr. Knowledge in today’s Boston Globe.  He writes, “Humans can’t fall from much more than one body height without risk of serious injury. How come insects, on the other hand – ants, for example, or spiders or earwigs – can drop from the equivalent of skyscraper heights with impunity?”

First of all, what the hell is an earwig? I’ve been pulling hairs out of my ears for years now and have no desire for additional hair in this area. Perhaps it is a wig which ATTACHES to the ears, so it won’t fall off.

Anyway, Dr. Knowlege goes on to explain that the seeming impunity of insects has more to do with the physics of falling objects than exo vs. interno skeletons.  Something along the lines of if one creature is twice as big as another in all dimentions its weight (mass) would be 2 X 2 X 2 times as much, and since the force of impact is mass times velocity, basically the bigger you are the harder you fall.

The part of his answer that I can’t get out of my mind, however, had nothing to do with insects. Dr. Knowledge writes:

“In a long fall, as from a building, air resistence becomes a factor. The air resistence effect really helps cats a lot, and the chance that they survive a fall from a building increases to 95% between seven and nine stories, and then stays constant.”

Now, I would like to be introduced to the brilliant scientific brain that carried out THAT study! “Okay Isaac, now take them up to the 12th floor and drop the next ten. Nurse Betty, check that Calico over there for vital signs….”

Obviously they couldn’t rely on anecdotal evidence since it would come for such a wide variety of buiding types and landing surfaces, it would be statistically worthess to a major scientist like Dr. Knowlege. An eight-story fall in Oslo is certainly not certifiably the same as in Tegucigalpa. So obviously, in the name of science, some twisted grad students in Dr. Knowlege’s employ have been carrying out these dastardly experiments.

Cite your sources, Dr. Knowlege! I suspect that the ASPCA and PETA would be quite interested!

What is it with the comment spam? For the uninitiated, comment spam, and its cousin trackback spam, are fake comments or trackbacks generated by automated programs, which exist just to attract traffic to or boost rankings of the originating sites, which generally shill penny stocks, off-shore pharmacies and a variety of products to improve penis functioning.

It is very bothersome for a small-time blogger like the Dowbrigade. For one thing, it fills up the page we use to see how many hits each of our postings get with useless information about these fake messages. Normally, we can see the read totals for the past 30 postings or so, which for the Dowbrigade means a couple of weeks, at least. But since each comment occupies a line, just like a real posting, when we get dozens of these fake comments they drive our real postings off the page.

The only way to get rid of them that we know is to individually go through and delete each one, which involves at least 4 clicks and several page reloads, and there are thousands of these bastards. Life is too short.

Lately, the problem has gotten much worse. During the past week the comment and backtrack spam has gone from a steady stream to a flood. One posting in particular, an ancient chestnut from the primeval dawn of the Dowbrigade News, originally posted September 4, 2003, has in the last few days attracted 22 trackbacks and 100 comments – all spams.

So this posting is something of an experiment. We have deleted, not the comments, but the original posting, identified as "post 940" and are re-posting it here as "post 9195" (how far we have come). Will the spam simply migrate to another older posting? Will it somehow find this same message about the cats in its new location? Is there any way to get rid of this damn spam? Inquiring minds need to know……

UPDATE: Even though posting 940 has not existed for the past seven hours, it is STILL ATTRACTING COMMENT SPAM. Since we vaporized the posting it has been commented on 5 times – three times by “tulsa hair transplant center” and twice by “lite brite illuminart easel refill”. HOW CAN WE KILL THIS SPAM STREAM?

Taking advantage of our recent hiatus from blogging, we have had occasion to review what we were putting into our blog, and what our readers were getting out of it. We came to the conclusion that it may be time for a major revision in the look and feel of the Dowbrigade News.

Way back in 2003, when we got this whole blogging thing off the ground, we attended a series of sessions with the Blogfather himself, Dave Winer, at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, in which we discussed the future of blogging, and what we would ask for in a blogging tool, if Santa Claus were a genius programmer with unlimited resources.

Unfortunately, almost none of the functionality envisioned in the ensuing discussion is available in the mainstream blogging products on the market now, almost four years later, belying the conventional wisdom that an unrestrained market inevitably delivers what customers want, with the spoils going to whoever delivers first. Unlimited layout plasticity, visitor defined visual organization, dynamic embedded fields, live chat, content sharing between platforms and blogging tools, elegant incorporation of RSS and OPML, drag and drop uploading, one-click content sharing and numerous other ideas remain beyond the pale, although most are available in not-ready-for-prime-time betas or geeky niche products.

But hey, that can’t stop us from dreaming. Since almost the beginning we have been enamored with the idea of a blog that resembles a squared-circle crystal ball. The links and controls would be cleverly incorporated into the base of the globe. The really cool feature would be that when a visitor clicks on a story, category or function of the blog, the desired information would form in a few seconds from whispy smoke in the bulb of the ball. Once formed it would be the same as any blog-text, with links, photos and scrollability, but every change of content or story would cause the crystal to quickly fill again with swirling smoke before resolving into the desired new configuration. A slick commentary on the impermanence and ethereal nature of the Blogosphere, no? And all done up with virtual smoke and mirrors.

Of course, as an old-fashioned analog guy who can’t program his Blackberry, the Dowbrigade is going to need plenty of help to make this happen. Any teenaged uber-geeks out there looking for a design challenge? We can promise fame, if not fortune, to any takers.

Meanwhile, we are working on a detailed follow-up posting about the new functionality we would like to incorporate into the New Edition Dowbrigade. We are thinking along the lines of a screen completely composed of size-adjustable color-coded fields (think, building blocks) which can be individually and easily programmed to display any imaginable content, including postings, slide shows, windows into other’s OPML taxonomies, commercial content like weather and TV, mail and messages, inline WIKI windows, dynamic and automatically updated search nets, easily accessed and cross-indexed archives, or anything else available on the net.

The layout, resizing and content assignment for each adjustable field must be so simple and easy a second grader could do it during a commercial break in Sponge Bob Squarepants. Look for a detailed description of this "building block" model of blog creation in an upcoming posting. Coming soon to a Crystal Ball near you……

Taking advantage of our recent hiatus from blogging, we had occasion to review what we were putting into our blog, and what our readers were getting out of it. We came to the conclusion that it may be time for a major revision in the look and feel of the Dowbrigade News.

Way back in 2003, when we got this whole blogging thing off the ground, we attended a series of sessions with the Blogfather himself, Dave Winer, at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, in which we discussed the future of blogging, and what we would ask for in a blogging tool, if Santa Claus were a genius programmer with unlimited resources.

Unfortunately, almost none of the functionality envisioned in the ensuing discussion are available in the mainstream blogging products on the market now, almost four years later, belying the conventional wisdom that an unrestrained market inevitably delivers what customers want, with the spoils going to whoever delivers first. Unlimited layout plasticity, user defined organization, dynamic embedded fields, live chat, content sharing between platforms and blogging tools, elegant incorporation of RSS and OPML, drag and drop uploading, one-click content sharing and numerous other ideas remain beyond the pale, although most are available in not-ready-for-prime-time betas or geeky niche products.

But hey, that can’t stop us from dreaming. Since almost the beginning we have been enamored with the idea of a blog that resembles a squared-circle crystal ball. The links and controls would be cleverly incorporated into the base of the globe. The really cool feature would be that when a visitor clicks on a story, category or function of the blog, the desired information would form in a few seconds from whispy smoke in the bulb of the ball. Once formed it would be the same as any blog-text, with links, photos and scrollability, but every change of content or story would cause the crystal to quickly fill again with swirling smoke before resolving into the desired new configuration. A slick commentary on the impermanence and ethereal nature of the Blogosphere, no? And all done up with smoke and mirrors.

Of course, as an old-fashioned analog guy who can’t program his Blackberry, the Dowbrigade is going to need plenty of help to make this happen. Any teenaged uber-geeks out there looking for a design challenge? We can promise fame, if not fortune, to any takers.

Meanwhile, we are working on a detailed follow-up posting about the new functionality we would like to incorporate into the New Edition Dowbrigade. We are thinking along the lines of a screen completely composed of size-adjustable color-coded fields (think, building blocks) which can be individually and easily programmed to display any imaginable content, including postings, slide shows, windows into other’s OPML taxonomies, commercial content like weather and TV, mail and messages, inline WIKI windows, dynamic and automatically updated search nets, easily accessed and cross-indexed archives, or anything else available on the net.

The layout, resizing and content assignment for each adjustable field must be so simple and easy a second grader could do it during a commercial break. Look for a detailed description of this "building block" model of blog creation in an upcoming posting. Coming soon to a Crystal Ball near you……

Taking advantage of our recent hiatus from blogging, we had occasion to review what we were putting into our blog, and what our readers were getting out of it. We came to the conclusion that it may be time for a major revision in the look and feel of the Dowbrigade News.

Way back in 2003, when we got this whole blogging thing off the ground, we attended a series of sessions with the Blogfather himself, Dave Winer, at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, in which we discussed the future of blogging, and what we would ask for in a blogging tool, if Santa Claus were a genius programmer with unlimited resources.

Unfortunately, almost none of the functionality envisioned in the ensuing discussion are available in the mainstream blogging products on the market now, almost four years later, belying the conventional wisdom that an unrestrained market inevitably delivers what customers want, with the spoils going to whoever delivers first. Unlimited layout plasticity, user defined organization, dynamic embedded fields, live chat, content sharing between platforms and blogging tools, elegant incorporation of RSS and OPML, drag and drop uploading, one-click content sharing and numerous other ideas remain beyond the pale, although most are available in not-ready-for-prime-time betas or geeky niche products.

But hey, that can’t stop us from dreaming. Since almost the beginning we have been enamored with the idea of a blog that resembles a squared-circle crystal ball. The links and controls would be cleverly incorporated into the base of the globe. The really cool feature would be that when a visitor clicks on a story, category or function of the blog, the desired information would form in a few seconds from whispy smoke in the bulb of the ball. Once formed it would be the same as any blog-text, with links, photos and scrollability, but every change of content or story would cause the crystal to quickly fill again with swirling smoke before resolving into the desired new configuration. A slick commentary on the impermanence and ethereal nature of the Blogosphere, no? And all done up with smoke and mirrors.

Of course, as an old-fashioned analog guy who can’t program his Blackberry, the Dowbrigade is going to need plenty of help to make this happen. Any teenaged uber-geeks out there looking for a design challenge? We can promise fame, if not fortune, to any takers.

Meanwhile, we are working on a detailed follow-up posting about the new functionality we would like to incorporate into the New Edition Dowbrigade. We are thinking along the lines of a screen completely composed of size-adjustable color-coded fields (think, building blocks) which can be individually and easily programmed to display any imaginable content, including postings, slide shows, windows into other’s OPML taxonomies, commercial content like weather and TV, mail and messages, inline WIKI windows, dynamic and automatically updated search nets, easily accessed and cross-indexed archives, or anything else available on the net.

The layout, resizing and content assignment for each adjustable field must be so simple and easy a second grader could do it during a commercial break. Look for a detailed description of this "building block" model of blog creation in an upcoming posting. Coming soon to a Crystal Ball near you……

It’s finally over, the semester that wouldn’t end. It started, if memory serves, on May 29, with a class of Business Professionals meeting in a weird wired classroom near the Business School, and ended this afternoon with a farewell lunch in a Thai joint a half-mile down Comm Ave.

Over the intervening 28 weeks, motivated by encroaching poverty, the Dowbrigade has been a veritable didactic machine. Calling in favors, leaning on management, volunteering for suicide missions, we loaded up our schedule with a hodgepodge of assignments, different departments, ad hoc electives and an eclectic collection of tutorees including personages of whom we dare not reminisce lest we run afoul of one of several foreign intelligence organizations.

Many times during the tough stretches, doing the dirty work in the academic trenches of American Higher Education, teaching three-a-days and getting home so tired we didn’t make it through the news, stacks of papers to correct so high we can’t see the TV behind them, the flat tire in the rain skipping lunch between classes to meet the man, mornings we could barely drag our sorry carcass out of bed, one thought kept us going. That thought – right now. The present moment. Looking back in stunned satisfaction, having run the gauntlet of placement, syllabus, midterm, term papers, finals, evaluations again and again till our head hurt. And now – We Are There.

So what do we have planned for the next six weeks, until the “Spring” semester starts up in the dog days of January? For the next few days, as little as possible, allowing the engine to cool down and the steam to dissipate. Then, the things we always like to do when our time is our own; read, eat, blog, learn new stuff, laugh, enjoy family, get lost and try to find our way home, get into trouble and try to find a way out. No travel on the schedule so far; last year we spent Christmas in the Andes and New Year on the Beach, and the year before Norma Yvonne was with her Mom in Ecuador, so this year we plan to spend the holidays together, at home, with a tree decorated, stockings hung, and family mustered. Hoping for a silent night and Peace on Earth. Fat chance.

At any rate, a chance to rest up and recharge our batteries after an exhausting though exhilarating run of close encounters of a classroom kind.

Actually, we should probably be ashamed of ourselves. Here we are whining about how hard we have to work, when compared to three-fourths of the people on the planet we live a life of unimaginable luxury and sloth. Why, compared to a Burmese peasant toiling endlessly in some rice paddy, or a Guatemalan Indian spending 70 hours a week in some firetrap factory carving cat scratchers for sale in Targets across America, or any one of millions of incarcerated souls forgotten by the outside world, working hard every day just to stay alive, and sane, the Dowbrigade is a pampered prince in a pleasure palace.

Besides, we’ve lived long enough to know by now that whenever things seems most placid, restful and blessedly boring, cacophonous chaos is right around the corner. Stay tuned….