Asymptomatic

Having an uncommon name is a blessing and a curse. I like my name, which is interesting because there are many people who do not. I do not recall the exact numbers, but there as a large percentage of people in a recent Wii poll who did not like their own name.

What's nice about an uncommon name is that you don't get confused with other people. It's very easy to request "owen@somedomain.com" instead of the lousy "o.winkler@somedomain.com" because there aren't many Owens to request the address. You don't have to postfix the uncommon name with a last initial for disambiguation.

The downside is outweighed by the upside, but it's still there. Sometimes you need to spell your uncommon name for people that don't recognize it. "No, it's o-w-E-n." And the worst is when someone else nearby shares your uncommon name, and someone calls it, because you aren't used to hearing your name used to refer to anyone but you. It's confusing....

Have you noticed this going on?

You're driving down the road, doing your own thing, and you see a bird. It's just a little generic bird, sitting in the road. Maybe he's with a friend or two.

You're doing 40 on this back road, heading toward this bird. He sees you. Maybe his friends leave, maybe not. But he sits there. Staring at you. As if his little feathery body is even going to leave a mark on your plastic bumper. But he won't move....

I am working on finishing up Habari's WordPress importing facilities. This is the middle step in a long chain of personal development that is probably being done somewhat out of order, just because some things need to be complete sooner than the things they depend on.

For example, I need to have a working body of sample posts to test any work I do on a database independent library for Habari. Habari is database independent now, but we're intent on building an abstraction class so that you can plug in new databases as needed instead of having to code any database-specific stuff directly into the core. In all, it's a good idea. So I need test data.

Also, some folks have suggested that there will be more incentive to make things work better if I'm forced to use the software. Personally, I'd be happy to use Habari for Asymptomatic, but there is one problem... Getting my old blog data into the system....

Over this past weekend, Berta and I trekked through the snow to the March WordPress Meetup at the Ten Stone Bar and Restaurant on South Street in Philly. We entered into an interesting conversation with Johnathan, who works on the blog section of philly.com.

Johnathan was concerned with getting readership to the blogs. He asked many questions about what it would take to get any of us as a reader. The general answer among the group in the conversation was "a minor miracle". Our conversation has me questioning why news media is failing to do its job, on both the front of reporting actual news and evolving with the advent of blogs and user-generated content.

There are different kinds of news - newspaper, TV, radio. I find all of them lacking somehow. TV and radio news are the most sensationalist pieces of crap reporting out there. They've devolved from any merit they might have had into fluffy soundbites from celebrities. Just like MTV no longer plays music (if it really ever did), TV news no longer reports news (if it really ever did)....

In my teens, I was plagued by nightmares of nuclear annihilation. I'm not sure what brought it on, but I would frequently have nightmares usually ending in seeing missiles flying through the air, the sounds of them falling from the sky, and then wake up just at the point of impact. And the worst part of this is I would usually end up laying in bed awake, eyes wide staring at the window, through which he morning sun was doing a great impression of a nuclear explosion. There's nothing like waking up from a dream about atomic destruction to a pretty realistic visual approximation of atomic destruction.

The nightmares have subsided. Maybe with the end of the cold war? But I haven't had any nightmares like that in a while. So, last night...

I had commissioned some art sculpture for some reason. The artist produced my sculpture as these four poles of wax. Each pole was about four feet tall, and brown with rounded tops. The sides were not smooth - the sculptor had formed each pole by hand from block wax. They were mounted on some wooden base in a straight line about four inches apart....