Tag: Meta

What’s Cooking: Fried Turkey

This is obviously for the more daring and adventurous cooks. Republished from November 23, 2010 for obvious timely reasons. By now you should have defrosted that frozen turkey and it should be resting comfortably in the back of you refrigerator. If you haven’t, getteth your butt to the grocery store and buy a fresh one …

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What’s Cooking: Turkey Technology

I can’t believe it’s that time already. Revised from November 20, 2010 for obvious timely reasons. I never went to cooking school or took home economics in high school, I was too busy blowing up the attic with my chemistry set. I did like to eat and eat stuff that tasted good and looked pretty, …

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Rant of the Week: Stephen Colbert – The Biggest Loser Of The CNBC Debate

The Biggest Loser Of The CNBC Debate Was Everyone  

We’re Back

It took longer than expected. Steeper learning curve and we are still learning. We are still working out the technical kinks and the tech folks at GoDaddy have been great. All the old stuff is still here, as are your user names. You will have to request for a new password when you log in. …

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Transitions, Transitions

The Big News

As of October 15th our host and the provider of our site software, warecorp, will stop support for our platform, the developed variant of the Perl based Daily Kos 3.0 in Java originally called jscoop by it’s author, pacified, and now known as Soapblox.

Yup.  I am really, really old- 49281, well over 10 years now.  DocuDharma just passed the 8 year mark and was one of the early adopters of Soapblox and there are over 39349 essays, as well as 371167 comments.  Our other site, The Stars Hollow Gazette, started July 4th, 2010 and is 5+ years old and has 13318 diaries and 60718 comments.  TMC and I founded The Stars Hollow Gazette and we have been in sole control of DocuDharma since January 2011 (oh, and I was also a founder of that).

What Does This Mean?

I’m not here to brag, I do that on our anniversaries, I am preparing you for the crisis which we will hopefully make as little fraught as possible.

Warecorp has transitioned the sites to Wordpress, a totally different piece of software, and they have done the best job they could to make it look and feel like our good old Soapblox.  They have also put us in touch with a firm that specializes in customizing Wordpress sites.  I have been studying (online with a Tech Dirt discount) Wordpress, but it has been hard to relate without knowing what warecorp has already done for us.

The bottom line is that we’ll continue on as if nothing is going to change until it does and then we will present what we have at that time.

What Will Change?

It’s difficult to say at the moment.  Our transition sites just went live and we haven’t had time to evaluate them.  One thing we’ve talked about is using Disqus to drive our commenting system.  It’s not peeder Ajax but maybe it’s good enough.

There are things I’d like to do to freshen the sites but they may not be possible.  In any event they’ll be rolled out gradually when things are stable because, as a computer professional, I know you have to limit your variables.  We will always seek to achieve Daily Kos 3.x functionality because to my mind that was the easiest and best blogging system in the world.

Your Stuff

The thing to understand about blogs is that they’re basically an SQL (Structured Query Language) database and the front end, the user interface, is fundamentally a report or a data entry form.

If you have been a contributor of content or comments I totally understand your justifiable concern they might disappear.  Warecorp is providing us with archives of the underlying SQL databases which contain everything you’ve written.

These are the links to download that-

Independent of migration to WordPress Platform we’re sending you full archive of blog database as well as all uploaded files.

Here are downloadable links:

Files are updated daily at midnight CST and will be available at least month after we stop Soapblox hosting.

The Big Wind Up

We are all about continuity and persistence, we’ll work on this until we get it right.  We ask for your indulgence until that happens and will update you as events warrant.

Autumnal Equinox 2015

At 4:21 AM EDT, the Northern Hemisphere passed from Summer into Autumn as the sun passes over the equator heading south to give the Earth’s Southern Hemisphere its turn at Summer. The Autumnal Equinox is also known as: Alban Elfed, Autumn Equinox, Fall Equinox, Cornucopia, Feast of Avilon, Festival of Dionysus, Harvest Home, Harvest Tide, Mabon, Night of the Hunter, Second Harvest Festival, Wine Harvest, Witch’s Thanksgiving, and the first day of autumn. It is the second harvest, a time for gathering the Summer’s last fruits, giving thanks for the harvest and marking a celebration in gratitude as the soil and plants die away.

This year’s Harvest Moon happens on September 27 – 28 depending on your location on the globe. In North America, the crest of the moon’s full phase comes on September 27, at 10:51 p.m. EDT, 9:51 p.m CDT, 8:51 p.m. MDT or 7:51 p.m. PDT. The “Harvest Moon” is another name for the full moon that occurs closest to the autumnal equinox, which marks the change of seasons. The moon gets its name from the amount of light it emits, allowing farmers to continue harvesting the summer’s crops through the evening. This years harvest Moon is unique since it is also a super moon, when the moon’s orbit is closest to the earth. There is also full lunar eclipse that will give the moon a reddish hue as the earth’s shadow passes over its surface, thus the term “Blood Moon.”

On the night of Sept. 27 and into the early hours of Sept. 28, the full Moon will glide through the shadow of Earth, turning the Harvest Moon a golden-red color akin to autumn leaves.

The action begins at 9:07 PM Eastern Time on the evening of Sept 27th when the edge of the Moon first enters the amber core of Earth’s shadow.  For the next three hours and 18 minutes, Earth’s shadow will move across the lunar disk.

Totality begins at 10:11 PM Eastern Time.  That’s when the Moon is completely enveloped by the shadow of our planet.  Totality lasts for an hour and 12 minutes so there is plenty of time to soak up the suddenly-red moonlight.

he reason the Moon turns red may be found on the surface of the Moon itself. Using your imagination, fly to the Moon and stand inside a dusty lunar crater.  Look up. Overhead hangs Earth, nightside facing you, completely hiding the sun behind it. The eclipse is underway.

You might suppose that the Earth overhead would be completely dark.  After all, you’re looking at the nightside of our planet. Instead, something amazing happens.  When the sun is located directly behind Earth, the rim of the planet seems to catch fire! The darkened terrestrial disk is ringed by every sunrise and every sunset in the world, all at once. This light filters into the heart of Earth’s shadow, suffusing it with a coppery glow.

Back on Earth, the shadowed Moon becomes a great red orb.

A scientific myth is that day and night are equal around the entire world, not really:

Most Northern Hemisphere locations, however, do not see an exact 12-hour day until a few days after the fall equinox (and a few days before the spring equinox).

The main reason is atmospheric refraction: This bending of the sun’s light allows us to see the entire sun before and after it crosses the horizon. (By definition, actual sunrise occurs as soon as the upper edge of the solar disk appears above the horizon, while sunset occurs the moment the sun’s trailing edge disappears below it – though that’s not how our eyes see it.)

This helps explain why the day is slightly more than 12 hours long on the equinox. It also explains why places on the equator always see just over 12 hours of daylight year-round: It’s because of the angle from which they observe the sun.

Another of the myths connected to this celebration/time of year is the myth of Demeter and Persephone.  The Autumn Equinox signals the descent of Persephone back to the underworld to be with her husband, Hades and the Harvest Mother, Demeter’s mourning for her daughter…thus, the explanation of the dying back of plant life.  This myth gave explanation to our ancient ancestors for the changing of the seasons.  The symbolism that is present for us today is the letting go of our youth, child-bearing years and moving closer to the crone/elder part of our lives.  But it is only a preparation, the opening to what needs to be prepared when the Winter inevitably comes.

I Am The Autumnal Sun ~ by Henry David Thoreau

Sometimes a mortal feels in himself Nature

— not his Father but his Mother stirs

within him, and he becomes immortal with her

immortality. From time to time she claims

kindredship with us, and some globule

from her veins steals up into our own.

I am the autumnal sun,

With autumn gales my race is run;

When will the hazel put forth its flowers,

Or the grape ripen under my bowers?

When will the harvest or the hunter’s moon

Turn my midnight into mid-noon?

I am all sere and yellow,

And to my core mellow.

The mast is dropping within my woods,

The winter is lurking within my moods,

And the rustling of the withered leaf

Is the constant music of my grief….

You know how it is?

You know how it is when you go off for a while and when you come back none of your stuff really works though it seems to for a while because you have an unsecurity-concious neighbor with an open wireless connection and you’ve set your laptop to just accept any old garbage because who knows what sleazebag flea trap you’ll end up connecting through including the magic road trash triad of Starbucks, McDonalds, and Dunkin’ Donuts (DD is actually not so bad if you know what to order but it is pricy).

Yeah.  I hate it when that happens.

One morning with the tech guy later (“Pull the Plug and Re-Boot.”  Actually, I’m mostly pissed at myself.  That’s my line).

Rusty Diamond

H/T Digby

Bad Blogging

Stupid relatives.  I find myself in a place with no cell service and less internet.

The people who told me it’s not so easy from a smart phone are exactly right (I’m now in a Dunkin’ Donuts getting coffee).

I’ll see what I can do, but don’t expect much until tomorrow evening when I return from the back end of beyond.

How to Survive the “Apocalypse Dow”

Most of us didn’t even notice the New York Stock Exchange went “dark” for over four hours after a computer, or something, hiccuped. This isn’t something new and it probably won’t have nay impact on trades or the market itself. MSNBC host Rachel Maddow and her guest Kelly Evans, host of CNBC’s Closing Bell explain the past history of outages and the causes, mostly squirrels.

The new host of CBS’ “The Late Show,” Stephen Colbert, aka Supply Lord of The Afterscape, gives his reaction to the black out and how to survive “Apocalypse Dow.”

Get your survival kits and bulk supplies from Costco.

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