Michael Hanscom

Enthusiastic ambivert. Geeky, liberal, friendly, curious, hopepunk; trying to be a good person. (he/him)

Happy Valentine’s Day

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HPPY VDAY Happy Valentine’s Day everyone!

The weekend actually didn’t end up being too bad, given that I was feeling fairly miserable when it got started. Prairie came in to town, and we spent most of the weekend laying around the apartment resting and watching movies, with a bit of driving around on Saturday to visit some friends of hers in Anacortes and Bellingham.

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p align=”center”>Sunset over Puget Sound, Bellingham, WA

On Sunday we wandered up along Broadway and stopped by Twice Sold Tales. On their counter is a notice that due to construction on the Seattle Monorail, they will be moving sometime in 2007/2008, as the building they’re currently in will be being demolished. There was a request for volunteers to sign up to assist in moving the store, so I asked if there was a signup sheet available yet.

Apparently this made the store owner’s day, as I was the first person who’d actually asked about volunteering. So, while there wasn’t an actual sign up sheet yet, she gave me her card and wrote “FIRST VOLUNTEER” on it, with promises of goodies and laurel wreaths when the big moving day finally arrives.

Our movie selections for the weekend started with a definite 80’s theme, with Risky Business, Ruthless People, and Big Business. Later we hit Blockbuster and picked up King Arthur (very disappointing) and the new Battlestar Galactica miniseries (very impressive).

After Prairie headed back out to Ellensburg, I camped out in front of the computer and put a few hours into a project I’d been meaning to work on for a long time. I’d always intended for the Hanscom Family Weblog to involve more participants than just my dad and I, but one of the stumbling blocks had been a lack of any sort of ‘instruction manual’ for the site. After Dad forwarded me an e-mail from his brother, my Uncle Doug, letting me know that Doug was interested in contributing to the site, I finally buckled down and got a start on writing out a Users Guide so that more of the extended family can participate.

So, all in all, not a bad weekend. Of course, I haven’t mentioned the number of hours I spent whining and grumbling about being sick, but we’ll just let that slide this time, shall we? :)

Ugh. Ick. Bleah.

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I’m getting sick. No, I’ve gotten sick. This bites. Body aches all over, my eyeballs want to explode anytime I’m not looking directly ahead, and my brain has shut down. For some reason, it’s always one of the first things to go when I get ill — thank goodness for built-in spellchecking, the number of typos and fat-finger errors I’m making is just depressing.

On the bright side, one thing I love about working five blocks from home is that I’ve got time on my one-hour lunch break to leave work, hit Subway, grab a sandwich, come home, eat, hop into the shower and soak under hot water for about 20 minutes, then get back dressed and head back into work. That’s probably about the only thing that made the latter half of the day bearable.

Early bed for me, tonight.

Meh.

iTunes “Most Wonderful Girl, The” by Lords of Acid from the album Lust (1991, 4:47).

Washington Post article on Blogging and Jobs

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About two weeks ago, I spent some time being interviewed by Amy Joyce of the Washington Post about my expulsion from the Microsoft campus for an article she was working on about the potential pitfalls of blogging about one’s job. The article went live today: Free Expression Can Be Costly When Bloggers Bad-Mouth Jobs. Here’s the section where I’m quoted:

Michael Hanscom started his blog, Eclecticism, before 2000, as a way to keep in touch with family and collect things he found on the Internet. A fan of Apple computers, he found himself working at a temporary job with Xerox on the Microsoft campus in Redmond, Wash.

Hanscom said his family teased him that he would burst into flames when he walked onto the Microsoft campus. So one day, when he noticed a pallet of Macs — the same version he just bought for himself — ready to be delivered to Microsoft, he took a picture and posted it. “It struck my sense of humor,” he said.

A few days after Hanscom posted the picture, he said, his Xerox manager called him into an office. The manager had Hanscom’s blog up, and asked if the picture was his. Hanscom said it was, but said it was posted on his own time, on his own computer. According to Hanscom, the manager then said because it was posted on his own space and time, the company couldn’t ask him to take it down, but he could never come to the Microsoft campus again.

“It makes sense, really,” Hanscom said. “I’ve tried since then to look at it from their point of view. I never gave away any secrets, but I was in a position where I saw a lot.”

Quite a few other webloggers were quoted, too. Looks like my fifteen minutes isn’t quite over with yet! :)

(If anyone happens to be finding my site on a Google search after reading the WaPo article, my 15 Minutes category has all the gory details.)

That’s a lot of text

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Fun fact for today regarding this weblog: a full export from MovableType of every post and every comment results in a 12.7 Mb text file containing 3,117 posts and 8,178 comments and trackback pings.

Wow.

I now have a WordPress site up and running that has all of my old entries (up to, but not including, this one) that I’m starting to poke around with to see what I think. So far, it’s been an interesting experience. The installation was dead simple. Importing my MovableType archives took some work — the PHP script kept timing out on the 12.7 Mb file, so I ended up having to break it into chunks and import six months at a time. That was likely more of a reflection on my server and the huge amount of data I was feeding it than WordPress itself, though.

I have the Staticize plugin installed, and it does seem to be making a difference: the initial load of any particular page takes a few seconds, but then any subsequent loads are pretty zippy as it can pull from the cached file (as a test, I even have all comments and trackback pings displaying on my posts about losing my position at Microsoft, and the load times are still bearable).

The WordPress interface takes some getting used to after years of familiarity with the MovableType interface. It’s certainly useable, and I like a lot of the options that are available to me, I’m just not quite as fond of the overall user interface (however, part of that might just be my fondness for sans-serif fonts, as the WP UI uses all serif fonts — to my eye, it feels more cluttered). Still, it’s the functionality that’s the key point, and it doesn’t look like I’ll have any worries there.

I’m not putting the WordPress blog live just yet (though, to be honest, if you’re really curious, it shouldn’t take too much guessing to figure out the URL), as I haven’t done anything in the way of customization just yet. At minimum, I want to make sure that my blogroll is set up and most (if not all) of the goodies in my sidebar are active. Diving into the design may end up taking a little longer — right now it’s using the default Kubrick theme, and while I’d prefer to move the current ‘distressed’ look and feel of this site over, I’m going to have a lot of relearning to do as years of familiarity with MovableType tags and design techniques battles with figuring out the WordPress tags and design techniques.

It’s a promising start, though I’ll freely admit that the real test won’t come until I bring the site live and find out just how my server reacts. I don’t know exactly when I’ll do that — part of me wants to just throw it in (sink or swim!), another part of me wants to make sure it’s perfect before I switch over, another part of me is still waffling over moving away from Movable Type, and yet another part of me thinks that I should concentrate on what I need to do to split the existing Movable Type database apart for Dad and Kirsten’s sites.

First steps are being taken, though. We’ll find out what path they lead me on.

iTunes “Wise Up! Sucker” by Pop Will Eat Itself from the album This is the Day…This is the Hour…This is This! (1989, 3:15).

Grandma’s Memorial

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Mom and dad just got back from their trip to Florida for Grandma’s funeral, and dad posted this photo (with more to come, he says).

Grandma's memorial, Ft. Myers, FL

Harold, my father-in-law, died the 29th of December. We went down for about two weeks, and got Arline, my mother-in-law, who was legally blind, all set for life without Harold. We came back to Alaska. On the 28th of January, Arline died. We got back late last night. […] Our downstairs room contains a lot of stuff we need to organize. Arline had lived 93 years and Harold 88.

iTunes “Shuckin’ the Jive” by Black Happy from the album Peghead (1993, 4:42).

Another day, another Doocing

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Another one bites the dust, as they say — this time Mark Jen, formerly of Google.

TDavid has a good wrapup of information on this latest “blogger gets fired” story.

Update: A sure sign that I’m on the tail end of my fifteen minutes of fame: in this CNET article about Mark’s firing, I’m the only blogger mentioned who didn’t get a link. ;) This amused me.

(CNET link via Terrance)

Laurie Anderson: Mach 20

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SpermLadies and gentlemen, what you are observing here are magnified examples, or facsimiles, of human sperm. Generation after generation of these tiny creatures have sacrificed themselves in the persistent, often futile attempt to transport the basic male genetic code. But where’s this information coming from?

They have no eyes. No ears. Yet some of them already know that they will be bald. Some of them know that they will have small, crooked teeth. Over half of them will end up as women. Four hundred million living creatures, all knowing precisely the same thing. Carbon copies of each other, in a kamikaze race against the clock.

Now some of you may be surprised to learn that if a sperm were the size of a salmon, it would be swimming its seven inch journey at five hundred miles per hour.

If a sperm were the size of a whale, however, it would be traveling at fifteen thousand miles per hour, or mach 20.

Now imagine, if you will, four hundred million blind and desperate sperm whales departing from the Pacific coast of North America, swimming at fifteen thousand miles per hour, and arriving in Japanese coastal waters in just under forty-five minutes.

How would they be received?

Would they realize that they were carrying information? A message?

Would there be room for so many millions?

Would they know that they had been sent for a purpose?

— Laurie Andersen, ‘Mach 20’, off of United States Live

iTunes “Mach 20” by Anderson, Laurie from the album United States Live (1984, 2:47).

What about [some other blogging tool]?

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After reading my rant about comment spammers, Joel asked me if I’d thought about switching over to another weblogging system. Here’s a (somewhat expanded) copy of what I sent back.

I’ve enjoyed reading your site (and its comments) ever since TypePad… and I bring this up as an honest suggestion. Why not try out WordPress? It’s simple and while it’s not immune to comment spam there are a wealth of plug-ins and options that filter or destroy them quite nicely.

Switching systems is definitely one of the things on the “possible solutions” list (WordPress and ExpressionEngine being the two top contenders). One of the things that’s been keeping me from exploring that is a distinct lack of redirect-fu when it comes to making sure I don’t break my old permalinks. I’ve received one offer of possible assistance with that, though, so it may be less of a hassle than it’s looked in the past. In the best of all possible worlds I’d be able to keep my current permalink scheme, but I’m not sure if that’s possible with the other systems, so if I have to, I’d settle for working redirects.

Part of what keeps me on Movable Type, though, is simple customer loyalty and experience. I’ve been on MT/TypePad for years now, and it’s what I’m most familiar with. Plus, they’ve been very good to me — they even just refunded me the $120 I’d accidentally paid for a year of TypePad that I wouldn’t be using, purely out of the goodness of their heart (I didn’t even ask — they saw my post grumbling about my own absentmindedness and made the offer).

I’m also unsure about how much moving to a PHP-based system (as both WP and EE are) would impact my server. MT’s Perl codebase has high overhead when it’s working on something, but then very low overhead when it’s simply serving static pages. Thanks to that, until the spam attacks started getting this bad, it played very nicely on my system. Since PHP has to process every page as it goes out, that’s more overall processing, and the question becomes whether PHP is resource-friendly enough on my box to be worth the switch. I’d used MT’s new PHP integration to dynamically generate pages for a while (before I decided that I wanted to integrate plugins that didn’t play nicely with the PHP code), and there was a noticeable lag when first requesting a page. More info on this aspect from any current WP or EE users (or even developers) would certainly be appreciated.

No matter what, though, I’m not going to be up and disappearing. I’m frustrated and annoyed by the whole situation (though not as much as I was yesterday), sure…but I’m not that easy to shut up, either. ;)

Oh, one other thing: if I do move to another system, I want to be able to use tags instead of categories. I know that there’s a plugin for this for Expression Engine (John‘s using it), and it appears that there is a hack for WordPress also (though that’s from a few months ago). Something else for me to investigate while I’m deciding which direction to head.

Update: I’ve had one vote against going to a dynamic system such as WP or EE. Phil (who I host) has both a WP and an MT weblog set up on my server. To compare the two, click these links and compare how long they take to load: MT (serving static pages) and WP (serving dynamic pages). It’s a noticeable difference, the MT site pops right up, while you can watch the WP site build the page. Off of that example, at least, I’m thinking sticking with MT and static pages is a good idea.

Update: Whee — I’m still getting comments, they’re just “old-school” e-mail comments. :) This is good. Both indieb0i and Ryan (and Gregor) have let me know about the Staticize plugin for WordPress, which “is a highly advanced caching engine that dynamically and automatically caches pages on your site that need to be cached, when they need to be cached.” Essentially, only the parts of the page that really need to be dynamically generated are, and the rest of the page is static (at least, that’s how I’m reading it). Nice, and puts WP back in the possibilities list. Thanks!