Updates

• I’ve revamped how Labels work on Journal Entries; they were getting out of hand. Now there are just a few Categories; every post will have one (and, hopefully, only one) of these. Beneath the Categories in the sidebar of Journal Entries (not Current Thoughts, where this is posted; Categories have yet to get out of hand here) are various Labels; a post may have none, one, or more than one of these. Note that as I’m using Blogger’s Labels for both my Categories and Labels, they will be mixed up together at the bottom of individual posts, in alphabetical order. But the Categories links are useful for making sure you see all the posts in Journal Entries, anyway, without having to navigate through the somewhat cumbersome Archives links, as all posts with a given Category, regardless of date, will show up when you click on that Category’s link either in the sidebar or at the bottom of a post, and all posts have a Category.


• Book Notes with multiple entries for one book also are Labeled with the book title to make it easier to see all the posts on that book at once; these book-title Labels do not appear in the sidebar, so they are only found on the relevant posts. I will also include an author label when I post about multiple books from one author.


• I’ve also changed the links for all the little book graphics (and most other book links) to Google Books rather than Amazon.com. Google Books has lots of neat features, including internal previews of many books, and a link to reserve a copy at your local library. If you’re having trouble understanding a Book Note and want to see if you can find the context, Google Books might help. If not, there’s an Amazon link on every page; they often have previews too.


• On another note, because of the way I’ve structured this blog, it’s quite likely that entries in the compendium are outdated and have been updated and improved in their Department blog. Click on the link at the bottom of each post in the compendium to see the latest and greatest version of that post.


• Although I’m not entirely sure why I’m going to all this work; I seem to currently have a grand total of one verified email subscription (the widget in the sidebar in the compendium says two, but one of them is me) to this blog. Is no one reading this? Or are they just not using the email subscription feature? I do hope somebody’s reading this, or else I’m doing a whole lot of work for nothing; I looked yesterday and noticed that, even with all of the journal entries I’ve posted, I’ve only gotten through something like a fifth of my first journal so far, so there’s lots more coming…


• That reminds me: since entries in Journal Entries are posted by their original creation date (years ago in most cases), it is likely that newly posted entries will not appear at the top of the blog. This means that if you’re watching Journal Entries to see if there are new posts, you’re going to miss them. Either subscribe to Journal Entries via email or subscribe to or watch the compendium, or you’re going to miss the new journal entries. Yeah, it sucks, but I can’t think of a better way; I’ll be posting stuff from several journals written at different times, and I think it’s worthwhile to keep the entries in chronological order.

Third Thing

3. I remember! The third thing is that along with how the blog is now separated into two departments instead of five, I changed the method that the blog entries are reposted onto the compendium. Instead of having an email client always running that re-sends the posts to Blogger (as described in Me? Blogging?), I’ve had to change things around a bit. With the transition to New Blogger that allowed me to consolidate the blogs, something broke with how Blogger parses special characters. My department blogs have an em dash in their names—that thing. The problem is, you can’t find an em dash on a keyboard; it’s a special, high-ASCII character like • or æ or . Unlike the lower-128 characters (everything you actually see on a keyboard: letters, numbers, normal special characters like $%&@), there’s no standard ASCII code for the upper-128 characters, which, on the Mac, includes the em dash (option-shift-hyphen), but on other systems may not. So HTML threw its hands up and instituted what’s called HTML Entities instead, where special characters are represented by codes like — and • (which result in — and •, respectively). The problem in this case was that Blogger started escaping these codes, so the department links at the bottom of the posts on the main page started looking funky. Instead of sending "Genius/Idiot&mash;Current Thoughts" (embedded in a link, of course), it sent "Genius/Idiot&&mash;Current Thoughts" which resulted, instead of Genius/Idiot—Current Thoughts, in Genius/Idiot—Current Thoughts. Not what I wanted.


Of course, the easy thing to do here would just be to give up and change the department blog names, to something like Current Thoughts or Genius/Idiot--Current Thoughts. But I’m not well known for doing the easy thing; I wanted it pretty. Instead, I spent many long days over a period of several months—most of last year, really—learning enough UNIX to do this by hand on my own computer (the Mac is now based on a UNIX operating system, in case you didn’t know). In the end, I had to go to an incredible rigamarole in order to save my silly em dash. Here’s the new setup (this replaces step 6 in Me? Blogging?):

6. Blogger emails the post to an email account I have set up on my own computer (I have a static domain name provided by staticcling.org). It comes in, is handed off to Procmail for processing, which hands it off to formail to modify the header so that Blogger would take it back (took forever to figure that bit out), then hands it off again to sed for lots of reasonably complicated text processing, to make it look like it used to look before Blogger broke it (Blogger had changed some style stuff as well). Procmail then sends it to Postfix, a UNIX mail server, which shoots it back off to Blogger.



This was at least as hard as it sounds to figure out how to do. I could never have done it without the Procmail Quick Start and a nifty program called Postfix Enabler. I’m cheap; I fought with .conf files and a bunch of stuff I don’t even remember anymore (God help me when I need to change computers; I have no idea how I did all this) for days before I finally gave up and paid the $10 for Postfix Enabler (a Mac front-end for Postfix). I was a fool. What I failed to do in two or three days, Postfix Enabler did in two or three clicks. I love the Mac ☺.

Three things

1. I’ve redated all the posts on the main page to match when they were originally posted. Some were out of order because I had posted some new items before I reposted old items.


2. The email subscribe link on Journal Entries was broken; it wrongly subscribed to Current Thoughts instead. Fixed.


3. Er…I forget what the third thing was. Except…don’t forget to subscribe! Oh, and if you’re a close friend, don’t forget to log into and friend me at LiveJournal; stuff too personal to go here is likely to go there.

Blog is back

(updated below)

The refurbishing of Genius/Idiot is complete, and I hope to resume posting on a semi-regular basis. As mentioned previously, there are two Department pages, Current Thoughts and Journal Entries. All posts from these two pages are amalgamated onto the main Genius/Idiot page. Each of the three blog pages has a Subscription link on it that works for that blog only, so if you only wish to be updated about current writings, only subscribe to Current Thoughts, if you only wish to see updates on my old journal entries, subscribe to Journal Entries, and if you want both, just subscribe to the main Genius/Idiot page.

I’ve re-enabled Anonymous commenting, but please don’t comment without at least leaving a nickname and URL or email address, or something to indicate who you are; I hate guessing. Plus, if you log in, you can subscribe to further comments on that post, which is pretty cool.

The main Genius/Idiot page has some older entries that people who have followed in this blog in the past may have seen before on top; I’ll move them down to their proper place before long, but people who have only looked at my blog in the last few months and not before haven’t seen these posts before. Some posts that should be new to everybody are at the top of Current Thoughts.

If you’ve never visited my blog before, I’d appreciate if you took a look and see what you think. Please leave comments on any posts you find interesting.

Thanks!

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Update: June 18, 2013

I’ve disabled Anonymous commenting due to some spam comments, but OpenID commenting is still available.

Changing Blogs

(updated below)

If you have been paying attention to Genius/Idiot for the last few months, you know I’ve been rearranging my blogs. Instead of the old separate-blogs-as-categories scheme that I was using (Philosophy, Book Notes, Random Thoughts, Liberty, and Technology [dead links]), thanks to Blogger’s new Labeling feature, I have consolidated these five blogs into two, Journal Entries and Current Thoughts, with Labels (listed in the sidebar) serving as categories within each blog. Of course, all posts from these two new blogs are still aggregated at the main Genius/Idiot page.

I’m in the process of migrating posts from the old blogs to the new, and then the comments. I’ll probably leave the old blogs up indefinitely, in order to be a good netizen, but they’re dead and will stay dead (except that I suppose I’ll repost this on each of them, but at some point commenting will be disabled).

One other thing: The header says “Posts from all my blogs are aggregated in the compendium.” But that’s not quite true; only posts from Genius/Idiot blogs are actually aggregated, as well as my posts from Carbondale Bytelife [dead link]. There is a passel of other blogs listed under “Other blogs” in the sidebar to the left that are not aggregated here. My question is, should they be? Should the main Genius/Idiot page show posts from all my blogs, instead of just the two Genius/Idiot blogs? I’ve had one “no” vote; what does everyone else think? And don’t shy away from answering just because you find this some time after it’s posted; I’m still interested in your opinion.

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Update: June 18, 2013

Well, though I left the old blogs up as long as possible, time still killed them with the demise of MobileMe. Journal Entries [dead link] and Current Thoughts [dead link] still exist, though moved to the URLs linked to above. The old “category” blogs exist on The Internet Archive, but they’re kind of broken there, so I’ve just left the old (dead) links intact above. Since the entire blog has been moved to my own custom domain, it should in principle never break again, as long as I’m alive, anyway.

Blogging again!

Woo hoo! I'm posting again!

It's been quite a while since I've put anything up on this blog, and now three in one night! I'm not sure I can contain myself. First my PowerBook died ☹ then I was swamped with other things, and then minor technical issues (combined with more lack of time) conspired to ensure that Genius/Idiot was dormant. I know there are at least a few people eager to read the bits of wisdom I have collected, so I will try harder in the future to keep to something resembling my once-a-night schedule. Hm. I wonder if I can somehow set up a delayed-posting system to post while I'm away at summer camp, etc. Has anyone heard of such a thing?

Well, it's my bedtime now. Later.

Genius/Idiot

I find it interesting that no one has commented on the title of this blog. I haven’t quite figured out what it means myself; it just feels right.

Me? Blogging?

(updated below)

Well, damn, I’ve finally done it. I’ve entered the blogging world.

I didn’t think I would, really. I mean, I had nothing especially against it; I had read several blogs and found them interesting. I just considered it kind of faddish and silly, for the most part; people making a big deal about bringing even more garbage to the ’net.

And then I found MacJournal .

I had been looking for a good journaling program for the Mac for years, and never found one that I felt suited my needs. I’d even tried MacJournal a couple of versions back and, while good, it didn’t quite catch my imagination. This time, though, when I looked at it, it seemed to have the features I needed. I think it was the flexibility of nested journals that finally sold me.

What got me excited about this program was the prospect of typing up all my old journal entries. I have plenty of half-full journals laying around, filled with everything from useless whining (’though it’s good to look back at how you’ve felt sometimes) to some quite interesting (to me) philosophical dissertations and thoughts I didn’t want to lose. But they weren’t doing anybody, including me, any good sitting around gathering dust. Entered into a program, titled, indexed and searchable, I could finally make use of all those old thoughts and ideas. And then I noticed that MacJournal also supported auto-posting of journal entries to a blog.

And that was ruin.

You see, the main reason I had never really been interested in blogging was that I just didn’t think I had anything to say. I didn’t want the pressure of coming up with something pithy and important every day or so, and I refused to spew unmitigated stupid blather. (Occasional stupid blather, like this post, is okay☺) But my journals? Being able to post my journals where the world could see them, possibly learn from them, appreciate them, give interesting, constructive feedback on them, but more likely respond with rousing choruses of “you suck”?

That I couldn’t resist.

So I spent damn near all day fidgeting and fooling around with various blogging software and websites, and ended up with a ridiculous combination of programs, sites, hosts and computers to make this thing work. Those that know me will laugh when they hear the concatenation every post goes through.

Here it is:

1. First, I type up the entry in MacJournal on my PowerBook .
2. Next, I click the button that sends the post to one of my subordinate (category) blogs on Blogger.com .
3. Then, Blogger logs into the iMac in the other room (yes, back in the same house the post originated from) and posts it to my iDisk (yes, this was the only way to do that ).
4. This uploads the post to Apple’s servers, where it is hosted on the appropriate category page for nice people like you to look at it.
5. At the same time, Blogger emails me a copy of the post I just sent to the category blog.
6. An email client that I have open for this express purpose (my usual client can’t handle the task) auto-emails the post back to Blogger.com.
7. Blogger repeats the process above, logging into my iMac and posting to my iDisk, except this time to my main blog page, so the post will not only show up in its category, but also on the main page .

So let’s be clear here: I send my post across the country so it can be sent back to my house to be sent back out to another part of the country, simultaneously sent back to my house by another route then back out across the country, to get sent back to my house again, and again sent to the other part of the country, to be downloaded and read by people who are probably across town.

Wild, huh? But it works. Oh, I know I could get around all of this, and get more functionality besides, by using a dedicated client like Blogwave Studio , but then I’d have to copy and paste each entry manually. This way, all I do is click a button, and computers do the rest of the work. Just like I like it.

Maybe I’ll get fed up with doing it this way sometime; I really am missing out on a lot of cool features...but I’m just getting started.

We’ll see. Well, it’s 2:00 in the morning; I should probably wrap this up. A few parting notes:

• I’ve set this blog up in categories. The main page will always show the latest posts, regardless of which category they’re from (kind of like memepool , but not remotely as cool).
• The categories are listed in the Links section of each page. Tacky, but it will do for now.
• Because of the rigamarole each post has to go through, some of the text on the main page may not look quite as nice as it does in the same post on the category page. Live with it.
• Also, comments are disabled on the main page. To comment, you have to click on the category link at the bottom of each main-page post. If anyone has ideas on how to make this fact more clear, please let me know.
• This one’s important, so listen up: I don’t necessarily intend to post every day. If you want to be notified when I do post, click on the nice little Monitor Changes button near the top of the page. Give it a try if you’re interested in my (possibly insane) ramblings. Note that for now at least, that little button will only track the main page; there’s not much point in tracking the category pages unless that one category’s all you’re interested in. Every new post will appear on the main page at http://blog.syleria.net.
• I’ll try to restrict my posts to about one a day, but I may get carried away and do several journal entries at once.
• Leave comments! Please! Just so I know somebody’s reading this!☺

For those not so technically inclined (read: non-nerds): What is a blog? Blog is short for Weblog. Web log-->weblog-->’blog-->blog. Check out the Wikipedia article if you want to know (lots and lots) more.

Well, I guess that’s all for tonight. Toodles!

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Update: June 17, 2013

Historical Note

 I’ve updated several of the links above that had broken, particularly to the main page of this blog. At the time this post was written it was hosted at http://homepage.mac.com/calion/blog/ on my .Mac iDisk, with four (and later five) subsidiary “category” blogs.