Mile Zero
if challenge had a taste, you'd be quite delicious
Mile Zero is the personal website of Thomas Wilburn. All statements and opinions here are my own, and do not represent the views or policies of my employers at Congressional Quarterly, Ars Technica, or other publications.
Fun with Stats, May 2008 Edition
Oddly enough, all of my old "Fun with Webalizer" posts seem to have vanished during the site transition. I'm guessing that they got caught in a filter when I tried to exclude the site logs. So once again, here's the best single search phrases that brought people to the site this month.
12:05 x Thomas x /meta/stats x link x 0 comments
The eApps server offers a number of spam filters. It should be said that I get a pretty phenomenal amount of spam every day, despite my best efforts. So I may have gone a little crazy adding filters to the server. If you've e-mailed me, and didn't receive a reply, you might try contacting me through another means.
10:52 x Thomas x /meta/announce/changes x link x 1 comment
When the mail goes, so do I.
I am seriously getting tired of learning how to create a tarball every three months.
UPDATE: Up and running on eApps, after much wrangling of permissions and Apache settings. Now to get a refund from the old host.
21:22 x Thomas x /meta/announce/delays x link x 2 comments
Enough with the Lists, Already
I realized, last night, that lately I've had a tendency to gather up lots of little posts for a link list, instead of just posting them individually. There's nothing wrong with that, but it does seem a little pointless, since I've got this elaborately homegrown categorization system built here. So let's try going back to the old style. At the very least, maybe it'll get me to update more often.
10:57 x Thomas x /meta/style x link x 0 comments
Yes, the site seems to be a little unstable. Not sure why. Neureal hasn't been impressing me much lately.
Anyone got recommendations for new hosting? Must be able to run Perl, provide shell access, include nano or pico text editors, and provide webmail access to my POP account.
UPDATE: Well, let's see if Dreamhost does any better then. Thanks to Wheat for the recommendation.
09:22 x Thomas x /meta/announce/delays x link x 5 comments
Things may be weird here, I'm not sure. It looks like my server has been moved, so that my SSH session goes to one place but my actual files exist in another. I don't really know how that works, but lets hope its not a precursor to more disaster. I'm going to make a .tar of my files just in case.
UPDATE: Well, everything seems to point to the same IP address again. Maybe this means that they've figured out how to move my stuff without blowing it up. That'll be handy.
22:59 x Thomas x /meta x link x 0 comments
Today and tomorrow, I'm going to be attending UX Week 2007 for a local trade publication. Feel free to take a look at the schedule and see if there's something you'd like me to check out while I'm here--I'm trying to record the sessions when possible so I can put together a report for one of the area radio stations. Suggestions for other places to file stories on UX Week would be appreciated.
12:03 x Thomas x /meta/announce x link x 0 comments
Found a solution to the server move that nuked Mile Zero a few months back. Turns out that the tar command preserves filestamps, which makes sense, seeing as how it dates back to the days of tape backup. An archiver that actually archives file information! Who knew?
Of course, I wouldn't need to know this if the server admin had used a .tar to transfer the files to the new server in the first place. I really hope there was a good reason that they used the regular copy command, since almost every page I've read includes a note along the following lines:
Tar is a great way to copy directories recursively.
Because that might as well just continue:
Especially on Thomas's server, so he doesn't spend three weeks fixing the dates on something like 400 files.
22:54 x Thomas x /meta/blosxom x link x 0 comments
Won't lie, it was nice to have a week away. Almost considered not coming back. When work is busy (I've been putting together the second set of Africa Good Governance on the Radio Waves programs, and that's never a smooth project), I don't find myself with much time to think about extracurricular writing, and at home it's too tempting to just relax and do something less challenging. Belle and I watched the first season of Heroes this week, for example. Good show.
Still, I'm kind of compulsive about writing. It's habit-forming, and it's therapeutic. But writing on a blog is also a dialog, as I said. It's like talking to yourself, except other people can read it. I think that puts it one step above crazy street person in terms of psychological profile, just because of the literacy requirement, although I've met some pretty literate crazy street people.
Anyway, the point is that blogging is like talking to yourself, but not entirely. There's comments, for one thing. For another, it's not completely isolated. That bothers me a little, as I go through the archives. There are topics I write about here, and I wonder if they would really be so important to me if events hadn't wandered their way.
For example: I turned MileZero.org into a blog in late April 2005, a little over two years ago. In early June, barely a month later, I managed to get myself into an argument with the editor of a gaming print magazine, and got linked by a number of the blogs on the right side of the page there. It felt like a big deal, and there are a lot of game-related posts after that. I don't know if it's because I was really so interested, or if it was the rush of joining a new community.
That's happened several times. For a while, I wrote a lot more music posts, especially after I got linked for coding the Excel drum machine. Some of this is just my changing moods--I have my obsessions, but I don't really consider myself single issue. I think I'm lucky, actually. Although I've had a number of people comment here or link to my posts, Mile Zero has never been a strict gaming or music or politics or culture blog.
On the other hand, I'd be lying if I don't sometimes wonder how long I can go without writing about a topic, because I know that's what some people probably come to read. I know I've written posts sometimes when my heart wasn't in it, just because I thought people might be getting bored. I have a love-hate relationship with my readership statistics.
Like a couple of weeks back, when Lance Mannion wrote a post saying that he'd added me and a few other people to his blogroll. That's an honor, and I was really proud. But at the same time, I also started thinking: "great, now what in the world should I write to keep people like him around?"
I kid, of course. No-one will ever de-link me. I have blackmail material on all of them.
We're social animals. We all react to the opinions and statements of people around us. That doesn't change just because our peers are online, instead of being neighbors and coworkers. Some people are wired to respond to that more than others--I think most writers online fit that profile. It makes me a little nervous to know that about myself, but it's probably best that I channel it into some kind of productive path.
Because if the blog thing doesn't work out, I've got these sandwich boards in the closet, and a spot all picked out in front of the White House. I think it could be a hit.
21:22 x Thomas x /meta/why_or_why_not x link x 1 comment
One Perl script later, the archives have been partially sorted. I'll do the rest a bit at a time.
I don't actually care if the dates are absolutely correct, as long as everything's in some kind of order. A blog, as I see it, builds on earlier work in a kind of dialog with itself. When the order is lost, the big advantage of this format is lost.
Once it's ordered, I'll have to start looking into ways to either back up Blosxom accurately, or incorporate dates as metadata into the file somewhere, so this won't happen again.
Updates will resume on a regular basis once they get Pico reinstalled. I can't work with this Vi program.
23:10 x Thomas x /meta x link x 1 comment
