This blog has moved, the new location is running, but I am still working on the theme.
Please point your link or bookmark at: http://blog.scottnolan.org.

Amazing! WordPress imported my entire Blogger web log in around 25 seconds. I have not been able to get the same themes working in my WordPress blog yet, and I am concerned about backing up the MySQL database behind my new blog (one of the side benefits of publishing in a free service, but pushing back to my own domain is built-in redundancy). Once I figure those issues out, I'll probably commit to switching from Blogger to WordPress. I'll also have to figure out how easy or hard it is to publish to both LiveJournal and WordPress from MacJournal like I do now (with Blogger and LiveJournal).

Well, Erci went and beat me to it. We picked up her Barcelona Red 2006 Toyota Prius this evening. It is very, very nice. I want one too. I balked at the non-negotiable prices earlier this fall, and I am glad I waited because the 2006 models will play MP3 encoded CDs and alarm when a tire pressure is low, but I am now thinking I want to replace my Saab 9-5 Wagon. AT-PZEV rating and 50+ MPG are calling me.

Well, after weeks of shopping around and days of fiddling with RedHat 9 and Centos (linux distributions) I decided to host my personal website at DreamHost. They have an excellent deal allowing you to host several domains on one account for only $9.95/month ($7.95/month if you sign up for 2 years), and that includes a free domain name registration for as long as you are paying them.

So I moved my home pages and Blogger web log to scottnolan.org and scottnolan.org/blogger.html and copied all the files off Erci's vampyr.org servers at Interland. Erci will be moving her site and blog over to the DreamHost systems soon too. Interland had great support and connectivity, but their billing was per domain, and as we are adding more domains soon, it was getting expensive. We'll talk to the folks at La Belle about moving too, but they are paid for quite some time at Interland, so there is no hurry yet. We'll be standing up a few new domains too (Arthur Murray DC and SGI Fortune District).

One of the other nice things about the DreamHost accounts is that they let us do imap/webmail with SpamAssassin protection and Mailman mailing lists (it'd be really nice to finally get the La Belle and Fortune District mailing lists set up properly for a change). They also have one button installs of things like WordPress, Drupal, TextPattern, MySQL, and phBBS - which will make our lives a lot easier.

Wired magazine has a pretty interesting article about the Passion of the Flying Spaghetti Monster online right now, it mentions the upcoming Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster book (expected in March) and has a

short interview with Bobby Henderson wherein he mentions that proceeds from the book and Venganza website are funding the construction of a pirate ship!

I want to take a vacation on the Pastafarian Pirate Ship! Ahoy me lasses, would you like to storm the tropics with me?

Random web surfing last night led me to the Studio Ghibli website, and it looks to me like they may be working on an Anime version of Ursula K. LeGuin's wonderful Earthsea Trilogy, or parts of it (my Japanese is rusty). The author has nothing about Ghibli on her website as of this writing, but this could be really, really cool. The Sci-Fi channel's miniseries on Earthsea was horrible, but Miyazaki's crew at Ghibli might be able to do this story some justice.



The flash based background on their website certainly looks promising! At first I asked myself why they'd use Flash for a simple background, but resizing the browser window makes the reason obvious, very cool.

Does anyone know more about a potential Anime version of Earthsea? I can read that something is happening in July of 2006, but not a lot more.

Update: Twitchfilm.net has a discussion about the Ghibli project, it is apparently Hayao Miyazaki's son Goro who is pushing the project, and it is probably going to be interesting, but may get mangled too. Reading a bit deeper on Ursula LeGuin's website, it appears she may no longer have control over the film rights to Earthsea, which would be very sad.

There has been a lot of hoopla raised by the usual goof-ball rabble rousers (mostly that coward Bill O'Reilly over at Faux-News and the so-called American Family Association) about some supposed war on Christmas. At first I thought this was some sort of joke, and that the goof-balls were just ranting out of sheer spite, but I see Neely Tucker has an excellent article about this in the Washington Post. Be sure to read it to the end, it is very interesting.

Basically I think Neely has this pegged on the nose:

1. many Americans are concerned about the over commercialization of Christmas
   
2. most Americans are not concerned about wether a store has "Happy Holidays" or "Merry Christmas" on their posters
   
3. most healthy Christians are not offended by the phrase "Happy Holidays"
   
4. most non-Christians are not offended by the phrase "Merry Christmas"
   
5. the few people who are concerned, are really more concerned that they no longer control the public holiday, the family, the social compact, and the center stage than they are about the true meaning of Christmas
   
6. the last week of December is probably not the anniversary of the birth of Jesus, that is more likely to be sometime in September, though we probably will never know
   
7. the last week of December is the proper time to celebrate many holidays, but especially Yule and Saturnalia, so let the parties begin!

The date many Americans celebrate as Christmas was first set in 395 by an early Christian Church that desperately wanted more converts. They figured that by setting a major Christian holiday amid the widely popular pagan celebration of Saturnalia, conversion would be easier for them to attract converts. It also coincided with the traditional Northern European celebration of Yule, which has to do more with the darkest days following winter solstice. Puritans did not celebrate Christmas because they were horrified by the free use of clearly pagan symbols (holly, drinking heavily, gift exchange).

Saturday sutragirl and I went to three holiday parties. We started at Bruce and Beth Roemmelt's Holiday/post-Campaign party where we ran into a lot of the Prince William County Democrats and had a great time. One of the strange and interesting surprises was the number of politically active Democratic organizers who are, or used to be, in the Society for Creative Anachronism (SCA) or who were otherwise interested in living history.

We ran into most of La Belle Company and many more active and former SCA members at yorkshirelad and melaniesuzanne's party. Ran into kfitzwarin for the first time in years (I have always had a crush on her), and her new (to me) and very cool husband. The hosts for this party have a fabulous apartment, and it was decorated beautifully. Sadly, we did not stay long enough because we wanted to spend some time at sutragirl's work party.

We finished Saturday evening at the Marine Scene party over at Tom and Tina's beautiful place, where their neighbors had re-positioned their decorative deer. Fajitas were awesome and much tequila was enjoyed, and the folks at Marine Scene play a pretty cut-throat white elephant gift exchange where a bottle of Patron was stolen 4 times after it was opened!

Sunday we had the monthly La Belle Company meeting and maille tailoring workshop. Tom showed off his fabulous new Landgraf long sword from Albion. After the meeting, a few of us stopped by Steve and Nadyne's annual holiday gathering where we got to see how much Katherine, Helen, and Gordon have grown! Yet more current and former SCA friends (there is a bit of a theme here, but I have not figured it out yet). Insert usual medieval martial arts discussion and study of fight books (Fiore, Talhoffer, etc.) as you will.

A few months ago I volunteered 2 hours of my time as a computer geek to a charity auction, and lovely L.G. won the auction. So Saturday morning found me helping her with her IBM Thinkpad A20m (P3 @700MHz, 256MB, 40GB, XGA, Win2000 Pro). I found myself impressed with the hardware, that this laptop made in 2000 was still running strong and quite useable after 5 years of use and abuse. That is remarkable for a Wintel box. While I am still using my 9 year old SGI O2, and 7 year old Macs, typically a Wintel clone is useless after 3 years. So this old A20m is remarkable, for it's hardware.



Windows 2000 Professional is another story. As usual with Windows(tm), there is no security at all, so L.G.'s browser (MS Internet Explorer) had been completely hijacked by some weather toolbar that kept over-writing her registry. McAfee, Ad-Aware, and Spybot S&D were all finding this annoying application and deleting it, but it kept re-appearing through IE every time we rebooted. I suspect we'll have to back up her data, re-install Windows, then restore only certain files. It is incomprehensible that people are not taking legal action against the companies that make this software that effectively steals their computer.

We had to settle for installing Firefox and Opera, and showing L.G. how to use them instead of MSIE, then installing ZoneAlarm, Ad-Aware, Spybot S&D, and updating her commercial copy of McAfee VirusScan (thanks AOL - best thing you've ever done for your members); and showing her how to boot safe mode and use McAfee, Ad-Aware, and Spybot from safe-mode. We also installed VideoLan because WMP and RealPlayer are both spyware of a sort too. I'll be investigating how to cheaply upgrade to more memory and an external backup drive for her. I am so glad I no longer waste my time with Microsoft's miserable excuse for an operating system, how frustrating. Updated (12/20) research is that she can get up to 512MB (two sticks of 256MB PC100 SODIMM 144pin) for about $96 and an external backup drive (40GB EZ Backit Pro) for $89.

Really large flakes of snow just started to fall outside my home office window here near Gilbert's corners. It is very pretty, but I supposed I'll have to drive in through this and that will be less than fun.