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An old Washington streetcar and a manual rotary lawnmower in the America on the Move exhibit at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History. I was wondering what a lawnmower was doing in the transportation section, but then I realized it looked a bit like the archaic form of a more modern mode of transportation.
Photos taken with a Sony Ericsson Communicam attachment (on T300 phone).
So if I’m getting my American History straight, George Washington cut down a cherry tree and threw it across the Mississippi River to help Lewis and Clark find their way to Gettysburg, so they could rescue Pocahontas from the Alamo and help Lincoln defeat the British in the Civil War, right?
Mount St Helens gave a mild belch today, spewing a mile-high cloud of ash and steam, and working up all the news outlets into a tizzy of alarmed “BREAKING NEWS ON THIS CATASTROPHIC ERUPTION” coverage. Reporters and volcano alike seem to have calmed down by now.
On the weblog front, Forester is just 40 miles from the mountain, and is writing about the volcanic events as they happen.
Check out this excellent USGS slide set of Mount St Helens through the course of its volcanic history since 1980, including some nice before-after shots, close-up photos of the lava dome inside the crater, and some of the scientific work that goes on around the volcano.
I don’t have much else to say on the debate that everybody else isn’t already saying. Overall, Kerry performed well, except for that “global test” bit. More from Barlow, Instant Replay, Lileks, Staunch Moderate, Talking Points Memo, and some very keen links on debate regulations from Wyclif.
Probably the funniest quick presidential debate roundup I’ve seen is from Wonkette. The phrase “Bush succumbed to vapor lock” gives me the titters everytime I read it.
Full debate transcript. More feedback links from DCist.
I have a few questions about homosexuality in church.
When all the Purpose-Driven books and keychains have been sold, and everyone has had their forty days, what comes next? “EKG, The Heartbeat of God,” of course! Key quote: “We cannot be satisfied with incremental growth. The Kingdom of God is about exponential growth.”
Churches jump from one Big Evangelistic Revival Program to the next, turning the Great Commission into a numbers-driven assembly line.
“Other seed fell on rocky ground, where it did not have much soil.”
Spaceship One is in the air right now, riding on its carrier plane, White Knight, for its second suborbital flight, the first flight of its X-Prize attempt. Best of luck to them on this historic launch.
More links: SpaceflightNow SS1 Status Center here, for live text updates, and NASA TV has a live webcast. Discussion on Slashdot.
Update, 11:30am: Launched, lofted, and landed. There was a scary stability problem at the start: the craft entered a wicked roll for several seconds after its rocket fired. The rest of the flight seems to have gone smoothly, but that roll is an issue they’ll have to address before the next prize attempt on Monday.
Some tiny low-res screenshots from SS1’s own onboard videocam during the flight:
We have a new weblog project up at work: Tobacco on Trial, tracking the progress of the government lawsuit against the tobacco industry.
The blog runs on WordPress, with a variation of Binarybonsai’s Kubrick for layout. I had a bit of a struggle modifying Kubrick’s stylesheet: simplifying the design, removing the need for extra background images, trimming redundant CSS declarations — Michael Heilemann’s method of CSS organization is different from mine. (Not that my stylesheets are any paragon of virtue.) The final design needs only one graphic for the title (which I bring into <#header h1> with FIR), and uses a couple of colored boxes and white background for everything else. When I have time I’ll put the template up somewhere.
This was my first serious WordPress project. It’s an excellent CMS, easy to install and run, with lots of practical, useful features where they’re needed — easily hide-able where they’re not. The admin interface is a refreshing break from the crufty, kludgy wasteland of open-source CMS interfaces. (Much more on that some other time.) “Official” support is fairly patchy compared to MovableType, as this is open-source, after all, but the forum is friendly and responsive, and the wiki is a perfect tool to gradually accrete collaborative knowledge in the absence of a paid support staff.
Probably my only complaint about WordPress is templating: you need to know PHP (or have a keen eye for find-replace) to do any mucking about with template code. Having everything in a single file means lots of large, nested if-else structures, which gets confusing. Additionally, certain template “tags” (actually just various functions called inside <? PHP tags ?>) are not particularly customizable (the_excerpt(), I’m looking at you). Gladly, WP coders know what they’re doing, and have been quite intelligent about indentation and commenting, both in the index.php template and in the WP code itself.
(I was also going to complain about WordPress making the common open-source CMS mistake of cluttering the home directory with all its files and dependencies, rather than “sanctifying” the CMS into a separate location like MT does, but, happily, that issue has been covered in the wiki.)
Conclusion: I like WordPress a lot, and I’ll certainly be using it for future blog-based projects. But we’re just friends.
I’ve determined that in order to completely wipe all your Movable Type entries, comments, categorizations, trackbacks, and sent pings, while leaving configuration and templates intact, you need to truncate only the following tables in your Movable Type MySQL db:
When that’s done, you have a virtual tabula rasa, into which entries, comments, and pings can be re-imported — assuming you remembered to export them from MT before embarking on this foolish endeavor of renumbering archived entries chronologically, under one category.
(Also, when importing entries into Movable Type from a text file, don’t hit Stop. It keeps going even if you try to interrupt the process, and if you try to do an import again while that’s going on, you end up with duplicates of everything. A long, slow process when you have 2,420 entries and over 3,300 comments.)
Soon: thoughts on WordPress.
I walked down to the new National Museum of the American Indian this afternoon, hoping to catch a short line in its last open hour, but no luck: while the museum remains popular, entry requires a timed pass, and it will probably be so for a long time, as with the Holocaust Museum and the Washington Monument. I took some pictures instead, then walked around the First Americans Festival to get some native corn soup with pork (slightly gamy) and iced mint tea (minty!).
The NMAI is a lovely structure, yellow stone and sweeping curves evoking native dwellings and the natural world, while simultaneously complementing the the neighboring Capitol Dome and the gravelly paths of the Mall. A fitting tribute to America’s native heritage, I think.
(Photos taken with an Aiptek Mini Pencam 1.3MP SD.)