Long long time, no post. Much happened in the last 2 years since my last post. :) One of these days, I'll write more in my journal about it. Lessons learned, sometimes hard. Love found, marriage next year. Life is good.

Mostly just want to check in, since I haven't advogatoed in a long time.

Been a while since I posted, though I read advogato regularly. Still working on why that is. My life is a mess in some ways, not bad in others... and maybe I'm just not the journaling type.

9-11 events:

Simply put, while the event is shocking, my opinion of the media and the masses are confirmed sadly. I am more saddened by the rampant patriotic bullshit and lack of awareness than anything else, even the deaths themselves.

I have relatives in NY, and yes, thankfully none of them were hurt. Yes, I was scared, and if one of them had been hurt, I'd be a mess right now. No argument there.

And yes, the pain and grief and terror and rage are driving people right now. Feeling all of that is good. Acting from that is not. There is a difference.

I had no hope for this country, even before this mess happened, and I see nothing to change my mind: The US is screwed up in so many many ways and it's unlikely to change.

ESR voices a valid if unpopular opinion, and he's personally attacked for it. Fuck all of you who did so.

Bush and others are willing and wanting to go to war, regardless of the realities or even the logic of such. Fuck that.

Flag waving patriots who think that "America" really means something good and true these days: Wake up, or you continue to earn the stupid American image. Fuck the flag and learn the truth about what the rest of the world thinks about ugly American involvements. We are not innocents.

CNN, and the rest of the media (with the exception of BBC for some odd reason): plastic propaganda machines, all of you.

Heroes? Yes, there are heroes. Flight 93's brave passengers who probably saved many lives, even while losing their own in the process. Firefighters and policemen who rushed into burning buildings to rescue people, buildings whose exits should have be fixed the first time a tragedy happened there and weren't. All of the people who are giving time and energy to pick up the pieces and breathe smoke and sweat for hours. Those are the heroes, and nobody will argue that, will they?

Anyone who picks up a gun or a bomb and goes to kill someone 'responsible'? Not a hero. Not in my book, and shouldn't be in anyone else's either. Feel free to disagree. Many do. But if you so value the 'freedoms' we have, you cannot argue that my voice isn't as valid as yours. Freedom to voice the unpopular view is one of the most important of freedoms.

Now, watch the powersthatbe shut down encryption, privacy, and myriad other freedoms, all in the name of 'peace' and 'justice'. I won't join conspriracy theorists who wonder if the US had a part in the attacks, but it wouldn't surprise me to one day learn that someone knew something was going to happen, decided there was no point in warning people because they couldn't stop it happening eventually, and decided that a huge horrible event was just what they needed to let them take charge the way they wanted to all along.

To end this, I'll quote Niven's law:

F x S = k. The product of Freedom and Security is a constant. To gain more freedom of thought and/or action, you must give up some security, and vice versa. These remarks apply to individuals, nations, and civilizations. Notice that the constant k is different for every civilization and different for every individual.

We have people in charge who don't care about F at all. F them.

EUGLUG
Well, it is all the rage here to create projects for LUGs, so I've created a EUGLUG project for those of us who are in the Eugene/Springfield Oregon area. (At least ten here I know of)

Wiki
I'm hooked on playing with PHPWiki. Wiki is addicting.

meta
Well, got some good responses so far to my article, and hopefully something good will come of it. The more I play with this stuff, the more I like it.

xvl
Still can't get xvl to work for me. Solved one problem by hardcoding the directory and now it's got a memory allocation problem or something.

wiki
Decided to try installing a wiki. Nothing was packaged for Debian (huh?) with the exception of zope-wiki which is far overkill, so I grabbed the PHPWiki snapshot tarball and after some mysql wrangling (wrong table names), it installed like a charm. rybolov's usually the mysql/php guy but I can handle it enough to at least figure stuff out and make it work. PHPwiki is very nice, much prettier by default than other wikis...

life
With more of my friends (naturedarren, Kyrgan) joining, I might just find the discipline to diary more often... we'll see.
Life has been so busy lately, it's nice to be taking it easier. Leaving a job and entering the marketplace isn't fun, but so far so good. Ask me again in a few months.

community
Our local Linux user group, EUGLUG has been wrestling with finding new places to meet having both outgrown the old and business changes where we meeting. After weighing all the options, I decided a hiatus for the summer makes the most sense. Meeting every week on Thursdays and once a month on Saturdays has taken its toll, and a break is a good thing, so we can coordinate something with the other Oregon LUGs as well as find new digs. It was pretty funny how many regulars reacted to the news with "Well, now what will I do with my Thursday nights?" Still haven't posted the news to the mailing list, I'll go do that.

tivo
Tivoed: too many to count - with my new 60 gig HD addition, the number of movies waiting to be watched is just perfect, I can pick and choose from about 7 or 8 at once...plus all of the good shows I season pass, both new shows and good stuff i missed the first time round.
At the moment: Pups - spoiled kids rob a bank. Thumbs down.

looking forward to
Jay and Silent Bob - Kevin Smith is a god.
Annual fireworks party at my place

I've followed the certification 'problems' with interest, seeing as I'm rated as Master based solely on 1 Cert for it from kbob, and I'm working on lkcl's xmlvl the next generation of advogato. (Ever notice how Luke ends up being the TNG guy?)

gary wrote:

have a ``show incoming capacities'' link on everyone's personal page. I had a play with mod_virgule to see how easy this would be

Please let me know when you get this working, I'd like to see that... if you get it for virgule, it should work for xvl also

dmerrill mentioned increasing the number of seeds from four to ten or so. If you look at the seeds, however, you will find this: raph has certified loads of people (at least N, where N is a number larger than I can be bothered to count) and seems fairly active. alan has also certified at least N people, although I don't think he is active here.

http://daniel. haxx.se/advogato/stats.cgi says it's raph at 70, alan at 76

There are plenty of people here who are:

Respected in the open-source community, aka the Masters amongst us

Very active here

Known to be scrupulous certifiers

Perhaps two or three of them should be ``seeded''.

Per the above link, (all thanks to bagder) I nominate, based on community certs:

lilo DV mathieu

All are active and all are well certified enough that making them a seed is justified by the given trust metric currently.