I sit here @ McDonald’s in my ‘a little geeky’ shirt, writing a blog post from my Blackberry running Opera. I think my geek index could only go up if I composed it in Klingon.

Speaking of Opera, I think the browser is very innovative and a good alternative to the built-in browser, despite the three flavors RIM has offered it’s addicts.

However, there are some very frustrating things about Opera on a blackberry that deserve a little attention. And I’m not talking about the kind of attention you might give a stunningly beautiful and heartwarmingly generous woman as she donates her time and money to homeless cleft palate victims in urban areas admidst racial turmoil. I’m talking about the attention you might give an infected dark-green and black scab on the side of that woman’s cheek as she continues to pick at it incessently as she speaks to the children.

Opera is the woman; these annoyances are the scab.

The biggest annoyance is Opera’s inability to be blackberry-like. It ignores most of the time-saving shortcuts we were given in the first place! Things like pressing space for “dot” or “@” in a web or email address. When typing in http://www.whall,org/blog I actually gotta press the periods. Or howdy@domain.com - when blackberry knows it’s an email address, it uses the first space as the “@” sign and all subsequent spaces as dots. A big typing time saver.

The next biggest annoyance is how it accepts the enter key as a character in single-line text fields. For example, if I need to type in ‘whall’ into a username field, I have to select the field by pressing enter, then type in the info into a pop-up window, then click the trackwheel in and select “ok”. The builtin browser is superior to this because as I scroll down the page, the text cursor automatically displays and I can edit in-place, and just scroll down to the next field. The way Opera does it, I inevitably end up having to use both hands for any normal kind of entry.

Another bugaboo is the bugs. The thing crashes once a day. Usually its some java.lang blahblahblah. Please stop crashing!

Yet another is the loss of the ability to paste in a URL. Argh! This was a major downside of the builtin browser already, so I’d switch to Opera as a fix, but noooooo can’t do that any more.

I *do* like many things about opera, but hopefully they start taking advantage of the blackberry advantages in the next version.

We hold these truths to be self-evident

In the same vein, do I need to declare that I’m currently in an unscheduled blog-break?  Discuss amongst yourselves the merits of declaring such a state.

btw, I am staying active on twitter and utterz since it’s convenient for me to do while mobile.  Just look on the right sidebar for updates.

I will say that I feel I’ve been particularly thoughtful, witty and interesting while on my ‘whallks’ with Luna and Jupiter, which is when I do my uttering.

Something’s been on my mind lately about competition and how we evolve due to it.  I think about YouTube and 3 million TV channels and the massive increase of awareness of other people’s “best” and how it would make people better.

In my opinion, competition brings out the best.  You get five kids in the schoolyard doing some sport, and they’re each trying to be the best out of the five.  When the scope only includes that schoolyard, or a small city, or a tribe, people who would be considered “legends” by those around them might not even compare to the “legend” from a different city or tribe who had inherently better athletes.

But now the scope is huge.  And growing.  Let’s say I a kid was top trumpet in 9th grade, but the band only had 17 members.  Then I the kid moves to a band with 200+ members.  The top trumpet there was Louis Armstong compared to me the kid.  There’s no doubt that the top trumpet in a 200+ member band is amazing.  But what if was a 2000+ member band?  Or a hundred 200+ member bands?

How far can we go with excellence? 

As we incrementally increase how big “the band” is in all areas of life – music, sports, leadership, ideas, patents, crafts, honesty, integrity, programming skills — it seems only natural to me that the “best” will also incrementally improve.  I look forward to how good our best can be and it fills me with a sense of pride.

And yet we still have the Idiocracy problem.  The best breeders aren’t breeding as often as the worst.   The people having the most kids are low-skilled and entitlement-hungry.  Where you would have normally surmised that the weak branches break off the tree in the winter, making the tree stronger, we have a system that favors the weak branches and stops Mother Nature from doing her job.

It reminds me of Forrest Carter’s “Education of Little Tree” where it says

Don’t feel sad, Little Tree. It is The Way. Tal-con [the hawk] caught the slow [quail] and so the slow will raise no children who are also slow. Tal-con eats a thousand ground rats who eat the eggs of the quail — both the quick and the slow eggs — and so Tal-con lives by the Way. He helps the quail. … Take only what ye need. When ye take the deer, do not take the best. Take the smaller and the slower and then the deer will grow stronger and always give you meat. … Only Ti-bi, the bee, stores more than he can use… and so he is robbed by the bear, and the ‘coon… and the Cherokee. It is so with people who store and fat themselves with more than their share. They will say a flag stands for their right to do this… and men will die because of the words and the flag… but they will not change the rules of The Way.

So while he goes on about flags and men, it still makes me feel that we are trying to change the rules of The Way.

So I think my real question is - how do we balance compassion and competition?

This past weekend I went to southern Oklahoma (Temple, Walters and Lawton) for some business-related and family stuff.

One thing that hit me bigger than I thought it would was — wow, I went to Basic Training at Ft Sill, which is in Lawton — get this — *seventeen years* ago.. That’s almost 20 years by my calculations! I’ve been to Temple a few times for visiting family but not to Lawton since 1990 - and I felt pretty old. I keep imagining myself saying the phrase “twenty years ago” and it just seems so…. old.  I was in the “1st and 31st” but I went online and it doesn’t seem as though that platoon or division is still there.

The 77th Armored Division Band put up with me for a few months for my training after Basic (I was in the Army Band as my contribution to our military). I really loved doing music as a living. And a military band knows it’s stuff, lemme tell you. It’s not just marches or classics - you play everything in the Army band - contemporary, rock, jazz, Big Band, blues, pop, you name it. My fellow soldier band members just loved music and loved playing. Sprinkle in a deep love and devotion to your country, sautee in a thick broth of discipline and you have a tight music-playing unit who can deliver heart-tuggingly good pieces.

While we were driving back to Temple from Lawton, I noticed a huge casino. I didn’t know that Oklahoma had gambling, and I loves me some casino action now and again. I asked, and it turned out there were several in the area.  I went to one in Walters but was disappointed that it was just slot machines.  And all the slot machines were really bingo machines with slot machine front ends - I’m guessing it’s something to do with the law.

I went further down the street (ok, figuratively - I actually went half an hour down the freeway) to a place that actually had table games. I had me a blast, but there were two things “different” about this casino than normal casinos.

The first one was that it cost a dollar to gamble.  Yes, an extra dollar - EVERY TIME YOU BET.  So for example, if you sat down at blackjack to bet $5 or $10 or whatever, you also had to put $1 on the side as an entry fee for playing the game.  And this was for EVERY HAND, not just to sit down.

That gets old really fast.

So I went over to craps, because you only had to pay $1 every time the shooter set a point, which made the entry fee last a lot longer.  Had me a lot of fun there.

And that leads me to the second thing - I’m guessing there’s some law against dice.  Well, how do you have a craps game without dice?

WITH CARDS.

Yes, the craps table had no dice, but they had a deck of special cards, where each possible roll of the die was represented by a different card.  The “shooter” would cut the deck and the dealer would turn over the next card and that’s the roll.

Very weird if you haven’t seen it before.

I heard on the news recently about how Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the President of Iran, wanted to visit Ground Zero.  I’m trying to find out if he wanted to visit proactively, or if it was scheduled by someone else, but I’m not entirely sure.  Either way, the US denied the request and some quotes include things like “Our position is that President Ahmadinejad will not be permitted to go to ground zero”.

Then I heard about how Columbia University invited him to come speak at their college, supposedly under the guise of “free speech.”  This is the same university, if you recall, that basically rejected, quashed and stopped Minuteman Project founder Jim Gilchrist from speaking. I don’t understand the university’s outpouring of welcome, especially to someone who is on the record as saying he wants to wipe Isreal off the map.  Nor can I see their waffling of position on free speech.  After seeing their plans of what they wanted to present at the forum, I guess I can give a little latitude, but still, I don’t favor giving a platform for hate speech, especially to someone who is supposedly an honored guest.

Anyway, for some reason (maybe because I can be a paranoid freak), when I heard all this, I immediately envisioned some quatrain from Nostradamus, which I shall make up here for purposes of illustration only:

A surviving King in the east travels across an expansive lake,
This leader sets afoot upon the site of a disaster,
two and four years after he sparked such disaster,
The visit sets off actions of his followers,
A permanent fire to the land of the stars and stripes rages the lands.

Who knows, maybe Nostradamus *has* said something - I can’t find it. I don’t know how often the Iranian President comes to New York, either, or if this would be routine or historic.

But I get a gut feeling that his visit is intentional, and it’s a signal to terror cells. Perhaps a visit to NY itself is nothing, but a visit to Ground Zero is the catalyst.  What the catalyst does - I don’t know, but my wacky conspiracy theory worst-scenario mindset is that it’s to let people know - the countdown starts.  Sharpen your blades, purchase your fuel; we’re about to get started.

I’m glad other people worry about this stuff for a living and not me.  I’m free to live out the American Dream, funded by our soldiers’ blood and sacrifice, protected by the laws we see fit to pass and enforce.   I just wish we could go through our day in our own language.

My standard disclaimer for a post like this would have to include:

• I have not met Ahmadinejad and I have no idea what he’s really thinking.  All I know I get from news, ‘teh Internets’ and talk radio.  So I know I’m a puppet, k?
• I am no scholar or even very knowledgable at all in middle east terms, intentions, culture or anything.  I can’t even tell you the difference between Sunni from Shiite without looking it up, and still after doing so, it seems they’re arguing about something that happened a billion years ago.  In fact, I just now learned how to spell Sunni.  Yay me!
• I realize I may be putting myself at risk by posting.  If I disappear suddenly in a bizarre way, think to yourself “hmm, that’s strange” and then go back to whatever you were doing.
• I wasn’t at the Columbia thing and the people doing the confrontation with Gilchrist probably aren’t the same people who issued the invitation, but I can guess they have the same kinds of thoughts and motives.  I also realize I’m responsible for my own assumptions.
• Whataburger has stolen Wendy’s catch-phrase of “see you tomorrow” when finished with the drive-thru visit.  This is tantamount to treason and it kind. of. fits…. in… with….. ok it’s unrelated.

I don’t pay attention to Emmys or Oscars or Tonys or speed limit signs or calories like some of you out there, so you won’t be seeing any report about them from me.

But something I haven’t blogged about yet but is pretty important to me is the Celtic Woman series.

I love these DVD’s!

The gist is - five beautiful and talented women (6 in the second DVD) get together with a supporting choir and a full orchestra and perform some amazing songs.  One of them is a fiery fiddler and the rest are powerful vocalists.  Some of the songs just send chills through you with how good they are and the punch they deliver to your soul.

There are two shows that they’ve performed, and both have been featured on PBS.  You may have caught them once or twice during their pledge drives.

Celtic Woman actually has a touring show, and I was fortunate enough to catch them in San Antonio in the past year, and boy, what a show.  By that time, I had only known about and seen the first DVD, so the event pleasantly surprised me with some new songs, some of which showed up on the second DVD.

It looks like YouTube has several postings online (and I’m unsure of their legality, given that this would presumably be copyrighted material).  My favorite singer is Lisa, and she’s featured in this piece here called “The Voice”.

Lisa also has her own website (UPDATE: seems someone snagged her domain name and made it a parked site; oh well.  Try her profile at Celticwoman.com or her Wiki entry) and I have one of her solo CD’s.  So beautiful, so talented, with a voice to curl up in.

Other favorites of mine:

• Lisa singing Caledonia
• Lisa singing May It Be from Lord Of The Rings
• The whole group singing “Beyond the Sea” - wonderful rendition of this classic song!
• Máiréad playing The Butterfly - violin solo.  Starts off slow and then simply rocks the house.
• Hayley (new addition for second DVD) singing Scarborough Fair.  Hayley kinda looks like Jenna Fisher to me.  This version of this song is haunting and her voice is so incredible.
• Si Do Mhaimeo I (Wealthy Widow) by Meav.  I’ve never heard gibberish sound so good.

And what is probably my favoritest song at the moment: Dulaman from the second DVD.

I wish I could get the English translation of the words, tho.  The flute solos are awe-inspiring.

Around the house, we frequently pop the DVD in, turn off the TV and just turn up the sound.  Since our DVD player auto-plays the default track on the DVD (movie, whatever), it works out well.

Question for you:

I own these DVD’s and I love the music.  I also own the CD soundtrack from the first DVD.  However, the music on the soundtrack CD is slightly different than the DVD, and it’s in a different order.  So I rip the music OFF of the DVD onto my mp3 player and to make my own CD.  I’ve done the same with Xanadu - the soundtrack music is so different than the music *in the movie*, and I want to listen to the movie.

Is that wrong or illegal?

And if you “know” one way or the other, is it just something you feel should be right, or do you actually know the law?  Could I technically get busted for making my own copies of my own DVD’s, even though it’s in a different format?

This week I performed some maintenance on my blog.  As many of you know, I use the open source (read: free) Wordpress software to power the blog, as I find it easy, extensible, powerful and, well, FREE.  My hosting provider actually offers a wizard to just launch a new blog and it’ll do all the setup for you, but I chose to install from scratch and do my own customizations and what-not, seeing as how I’m a geek.

The first upgrade I started with was the upgrade to Wordpress 2.2.3 from 2.0.1.  Actually, now that I think about it, I’m not 100% positive I was on version 2.0.1, although my admin dashboard page said so.  I looked back in my source folders and I had a copy of 2.1.3 floating in there, so I probably upgraded to 2.1 at some point.  I may have even blogged about it but since my search page is broken, I may never know.  Even now that I’ve upgraded, it still says “powered by 2.0.1″.  Oh well, I’ll figure that out later.

I say “first upgrade I started with” because as I was reading the install/upgrade instructions it recommended a Maintenance Mode plugin.  I thought - how cool is that?  So I installed the new maintenance plugin, did my backups of my blog, database, etc, activated the plugin and whammo - I have a maintenance page!

Very cool.  I’m almost professional, even.

So then I started the WordPress upgrade, and it took no time at all.  I un-enabled (is that a word?, er, disabled) the maintenance mode and now I’m all upgraded and safe. 

The next piece, albeit very optional and mostly unrelated to the wordpress upgrade was to upgrade SpotMilk.  SpotMilk is a great enhancement to the WordPress administration console.  The original one that comes with WordPress is nice enough, but SpotMilk is way cooler.  I was at 2.0.1 and upgraded to 2.2.1 with much lack of pain.

Now I’m on the hunt for what else I can upgrade or pimp out my blog with.

Hey, that’s a good idea!  Pimp Out My Blog.  It can be a weekly series where good web designers descend for a week on some poor shlep’s blog and totally pimps it out.  Ok, I just googled it and it seems someone else has taken the domain name and the idea. 

Some things I’m thinking about for my blog:

• Profanity filter for the comments. 
  I want cuss words to be cartooned out, like s$!t or @#$@@!  I understand some people just use profanity in their normal course of work, and I also understand some people would highly prefer not to see it, and I would understand people who avoid blogs that contain it.  So seeing as how even cartoons such as Calvin and Hobbes has curse words veiled behind punctuation, why can’t I?  I’ve seen a couple out there but haven’t actually tried any of them yet.
• Tag cloud for categories, or a category browser
  I still have a hard time deciding what to do here.  I have used 343 categories!  Some subscribe to the theory of only using a short list of categories, so as maybe to structure their posts or make it easier to browse around.  I like using more specific categories because they get used as tags in pingomatic or digg or technorati.  If I blog about spotmilk, I want the category or tag to contain it, if for no other reason than it enhances the ability for someone else on the internet to find my entry.  Especially if they’re looking for someone who <b>upgrade</b>d <b>wordpress</b> with <b>spotmilk</b>.  This post has three of those keywords!
• Search that works
  I don’t know why mine is broken - but then again I haven’t really looked.  I’m thinking it’s because I have # (pound sign) in some of my posts, but still, I have no idea.  But maybe there’s a better search plugin I can load that will solve the problem for me
• Pages for better navigation
  Right now, I just have the blog and a sidebar.  I want to add a FAQ, About, Most popular posts, my favorite posts, etc.  Maybe even a rating system for entries so people can “vote”.  I don’t know

What do you like about people’s blogs that’s NOT content-specific?

I still like what I get, in general, from 1 & 1.  The prices are great, and the package is awesome (3TB/transfer per month, 300GB storage, 1000 email accounts, etc).  But sometimes they just plain suck.

They suck like a hoover.

First, back in December 2006 they caused me much grief.  Four days of grief.

Then, just this last month I actually got to guest post on an important person’s blog and I was down again - THE DAY OF THE GUEST POST.  This is the biggest day for a small-time blog like mine where people see the guest post, and if they like it, they visit the author’s blog.  Worst.  Timing.  Ever.

Yesterday, I was down (all my email, all my websites) from about midnight Monday morning until just a few hours ago today.

Here’s how it all went down:

• About a month ago, I get a notice that my credit card on file for billing is going to expire in October, so I should update it.
• I go online to do so, and Paypal is recommended.  I thought “whoa, they take paypal now?”  I’ve been a paypal user since, oh, 1999 or so, and I use it all the time.  I like how I can use multiple funding sources AFTER it uses up my paypal balance.
• I get a confirmation that the new payment method has gone through. 
• Midnight on Labor Day (yesterday as I write this), all my email and domains stop working.  I have 132 domains and 149 mailboxes.
• I call in and Tech Support says “your domain is locked due to a billing issue”.  I say “well then let me talk to billing - I had just made a change from my old credit card to Paypal, so something’s messed up”.  They say “Due to the holiday, the billing department is closed.”

WHAT?!?!?!?  They can take actions such as locking an account but they can’t fix their own mistakes?

After I complain and escalate for a while, the guy tells me that there is something they can do to “bounce” or “retry” the account and I should wait 3 hours.  I ask if I should put my billing back to a normal credit card instead of paypal because maybe their paypal processing system is down.  I just want my domains back on.

He keeps informing me that the Billing Dept is down and that there’s nothing Tech Support can do to unlock the account.  This is so incredibly frustrating.  It’s like 1 & 1’s tech support is taught to just delay, hold people off for a couple of hours, or stall.  Lie if you have to.

I trusted him for a while but I was still down last night so I just went online and changed my account to normal credit card and WHAMMO, 3 hours later everything starts working again.

I hate liars.

ooooh!  and today I get an email asking me to take a survey for my customer support experience!

We all mature and learn important things in life’s journey.  Some of it has to do with motor skills, others have to do with finances, some with relationships, some with family.  They each have milestones - for example with finances you might get to the point where you save enough to buy your own toy.  You get your first report card money.  Other milestones include getting your own checking account, writing your first check, getting your first credit card, buying your first house, bouncing your first check, getting your first late fee, declaring your first bankruptcy, embezzling your first million, etc.

Blogging also has its milestones.  Today I got to 3rd base with blogging.   

1st base

You get to 1st base by having your own blog.  Some people TOTALLY mess this up - they start a post or two and then forget about it.  Or they let months go by with no attention.  Maybe they’re boring; maybe they’re too personal.  Maybe they get upset because there’s not a lot of return interest in their blog (why is no-one paying attention to me! I’m witty and personable DAMMIT!)  But you gotta realize, when you don’t have any real instruction, diving into 1st base with no help is like drowning in the slickest quicksand you’ve ever seen.

2nd base

People who have a little experience (or who grope in the dark) know what it’s like to be at second base - getting people other than yourself to comment.  This is a wonderful time in your blogging youth, where you feel validated, exhilarated and PUMPED UP.  Your heart races because right there, RIGHT IN FRONT OF YOU, is a real-live comment.  Someone not only read what you wrote, but they participated!  You’re no longer going at this alone - you have a partner.  That one partner quickly increases to two, then three, then after a while you lose count.  And, doncha know it, once you’ve had one commenter, you search in earnest for your next.  And the next.  And after while, you expect the commenting on a regular basis, and when you go without some for a bit, you begin to feel neglected.

3rd base

Guest-posting for someone else’s blog is 3rd base.  This is hitting the big time, and a lot of people never make it here in their entire lives (poor things).  While you can sometimes “steal” 1st or 2nd base, you generally can’t get to 3rd base without a willing partner.  And having multiple partners really livens things up.  This is why I’m so excited - I’ve made it!  And those who know Hilly know that I didn’t do too shabby either - she’s quite the hook-up.  Some people also count others guest posting for you as 3rd base, and if the blog-ebrity is large enough, it can count.  For example, if I got Scott Adams (creator of Dilbert) to guest post for me, that’s like the best 3rd base ever.

I’ll leave it to the reader’s imagination to determine the appropriate analogy for Home Run, but to give you an idea, Dave2 is a gigolo.

Thanx Hilly!  I’ll always remember you as “my first”.

These came to me recently, either through email from friends or seen on blogs here and there.  I just had to share.

Why are these so addictive?