A return to normalcy? Not quite, but it’s a beginning. Grief is a natural reaction to extraordinary events, it’s a protection mechanism to help us cope. However when it’s prolonged it can have the negative effect of holding us from moving forward. It’s impossible not to grieve with the images being shown on every station and website, however, things must move forward. I think that a lot of people took a step back and thought about things yesterday, and I couldn’t think of a better way to honor the memory of September 11th.

9/11 is a flashbulb memory for most everyone; every trivial detail about where we were, who we were with is burned into our memories. For my generation, this is really the first event of that kind, thankfully. I tried to think of today as a day of quiet introspection–remembrances, resolutions, emotions, and most of all, examination of today’s events. Where has the US gone since 9/11? I think reaction-ism on the part of some lawmakers has hurt the very things we’re trying to protect: our liberty, freedom, and ultimately, safety for ourselves and our progeny.

Anyway, mostly because I don’t want these things to fade in my own mind, I have set it up so on the 11th of every month the memorial (greyscale) theme will load for that day.

I know at some point you’ve wondered just how big this site really is. Or not. But if you want to know how much space all those dang pictures take up check out the new feature on the Zeitgeist. All the stats on that page are live!

Just wanted to let everyone know that the Houston Wireless Users Group is meeting tomorow at Kaveh Kanes. Here’s the announcement from Barrett:

Tuesday September 10th is the second Tuesday of the month…which
means…it’s meeting time again! Steven/Erewhon will be speaking about
video via 802.11b and a neighborhood-wide “wireless security mesh”
starting at 7:30 PM @ Kaveh Kanes. This is our first presentation on
the application of 802.11b technology outside of simply extending
Internet access. It should be fun.

The Zeitgeist for this site is now officially online, though it still needs some work. My plan is to add a new statistic to it every night for two weeks, so check it often to see what’s new. It’s great practice for my SQL and PHP skills, and I highly recommend making your own if you would like to hone your programming chops. I also have a similar page over at Mullenweg.com that gives some interesting info gleaned from our genealogical database, though I must admit the life expentancy data isn’t heartening! If you have any ideas for possible statistics for this site leave a comment and I promise I’ll implement every feasible idea.

Earlier today I was browsing last month’s server logs and noticed something remarkable: 11,465 hits from Googlebot in August. I was flattered, but how could this be? I didn’t even get a PageRank till about a week ago, so what was the lovely Googlebot doing all that time? Anyway I started to think about it and in terms of sheer quantity of pages, this site is massive. It is entirely possible that those hits could have been just a standard site crawl. Just running the numbers in my head, there are about 9500 pages under the Photolog (~3050 images, 3 pages each, albums), a couple of hundred JazzQuotes, a couple of pages under Toys, and then all of the actual blog content, and you could easily have over ten thousand pages on this site. Of course I never think of it that way because it’s all dynamic. Wait till I start putting the site stats up, it’s very interesting. Whew!

We filmed the first episode of PalmTalk today! It was different in some ways from what I was expecting, espescially in terms of how things flowed, but I was very impressed with some of the things they were able to do technologically with the cameras and effects. The guest, Lorraine Young, was really charismatic and had a great product to demo. All in all, I would say it was, well, a first episode. Ever seen any of the early episodes of Friends? There are definitely some things that are going to change before next week, and things are only going to change for the better, so I’m excited. I’m also curious to see how the whole thing turns out after all of the post-editing stuff they do. Anyway, I’ll see on Tuesday. The main dowside is I think I left my laptop AC adapter there, or at least I hope I did, because I can’t find it. Right now my laptop is hibernating until I get it back.

After the taping I had a very nice dinner with Sarah at one of my favorite chinese restruants, Ming’s on Montrose. After that I headed down to Kaveh Kanes, a great coffee shop downtown on Prarie with free WiFi internet access. Tonight was the monthly meeting (first Friday of the month) for people who listen to the radio show Technology Bytes, which is on Wednesday nights. I’ve heard it several times before and it’s a fun show to listen to. The people who were there were very interesting and we talked for a very long time from topics ranging from Apache 2 to Amiga to Minix to BeOS. I must admit that I was there partly by accident–I thought it was a HWUG meeting. I really enjoyed it though and afterwards I ended up going to House of Pies around 1 to continue the discussion with two unix/freebsd sysadmins I met there. It’s strange how much you can find you have in common with someone in such a short period of time. Also it was nice to meet the people who actually do the show, and you can tell they’re really technically competent and nice to talk to. Oh, and got another ‘tech support’ consulting job today, fixing a paper jam! What will I do next?

“They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”
—Benjamin Franklin