General

Sorry about that

Dave Farquhar General

I’ve been trying to figure out for these past few hours whether I’m making one of the biggest mistakes of my life. From my experience, usually those questions alone are a really bad indication.
I have to go to work now. But I think working through this in writing will be a good exercise. And if I post it, someone might find it useful.

Yes, I’m here and looking for something to write about.

Dave Farquhar General

I’ll post later once I’ve figured something out. ‘K?

Outages

Dave Farquhar General , , , ,

Yes, I’m still alive and so is my server. Unfortunately (note to self: cue up “I Hate My Frickin’ ISP” by Todd Rundgren in the background) Southwestern Bell seems intent on proving my theory that their technicians’ favorite thing to do when bored is to run around unplugging stuff to see what happens.
What usually ends up happening is my Speedstream DSL modem gets hopelessly confused and I fall off the ‘Net. Although this weekend the problem wasn’t that my modem couldn’t connect, it’s that I couldn’t authenticate. Hello? How could I have changed my password? I was offline!

Now, maybe my Speedstream is a piece of junk. Maybe Southwestern Bell is a piece of junk. Were I in the habit of looking around in toilets, I’m pretty sure I could find a better modem and ISP. Unfortunately, I signed a one-year contract. It expires in October. I look forward to telling them to find another sucker.

Meanwhile, yes, I’ve been on a bit of an unannounced sabbatical. What happened? Well, an editor on a power trip over at Wikipedia turned me off to all writing for a time (Zoe, if you’re reading this, just because you don’t know how to write or research doesn’t mean you need to take it out on the world, OK?) and then I found myself swimming in a video editing project that made me believe anew in curses, because I don’t think I’ve seen so many things go wrong since a weekend about four years ago when Steve DeLassus and I tried to install about 4 different flavors of Linux on his 486SX/20 and turn it into a router. When I finally put that project to rest, my leisure activities tended to drift towards anything that didn’t involve a computer.

So I’ve been tired and just haven’t had the energy or will to write much or deal with questions. It happens sometimes.

I guess the Wikipedia snipe deserves a little clarification. I love the project idea. I love writing history. Unfortunately, the project is tainted by several editors who delete anything they don’t like, often without much reason. An article I contributed to about osteopathy garnered a comment from an overzealous editor saying the article raised more questions than it answered and if those weren’t answered he was going to delete it. Well, duh! A lot of things raise questions. If osteopathy didn’t raise any questions, then allopathy (the medical techniques practiced by your friendly neighborhood M.D.) wouldn’t exist. The more you know, the more you realize you don’t know, and if you don’t understand that you really have no business associating with anything with the letters “pedia” in its name.

Working along with one or two others, we were able to answer enough questions to save that article. But I was mad. The osteopathy article had minor problems and was on the chopping block, yet the article on Joseph Smith was so biased and incomplete as to be unusable, but was being ignored?

At one point I got into the habit of checking the historical events of the given day and looking for holes in the linked articles. It was fun, I learned a lot, and I think some articles improved for the better. I fondly recall writing about Joseph Pulitzer (as in the Pulitzer Prize). He’s a very misunderstood figure in history. On one hand, he was one of the biggest innovators in journalism, ever. On the other hand, he and William Randolph Hearst pretty much created the Spanish-American War just to sell newspapers, which is despicable. (Hearst falls a bit lower on the slimeball scale though; at least Pulitzer didn’t ever openly advocate the assassination of a president.) I came out of that endeavor with more respect for Pulitzer than I’d had before though.

But one day I found a photograph of Booker T. Washington at the Library of Congress and uploaded it. It got deleted when I neglected to answer a query as to its copyright status after 24 hours. Was the picture copyrighted? Very highly unlikely. Washington died at the turn of the 20th century and any published work prior to 1922 is now in the public domain. The Library of Congress isn’t willing to guarantee that particular picture is in the public domain, but they provide a huge, archival-quality TIFF for download, suitable for commercial printing use. So they must be pretty certain. You think the Library of Congress wants DMCA-related legal problems? William Jefferson Clinton may be above the law, but the Library of Congress isn’t.

Yet it turned into a controversy. A huge controversy. That particular editor wasn’t interested in improving the quality of Wikipedia; she was on an ego trip. Somehow she got gratification from teaching me and the person who re-uploaded my image (and then replaced it with another one) a lesson.

Meanwhile, an unattributed image of Britney Spears remains.

Of course there’s another lesson to be learned: When you’re trying to be an open-content encyclopedia, you need to attract people. You attract people by having lots of articles. The more articles you have, the more people read you, and the more people you have reading you, the more readers you’ll be able to convert into contributors. The Wikipedia would be a much better place with that editor writing articles and not harassing people who are also doing their best to make it a better place.

I do expect to return someday, but when I do, I’ll be writing the biographies of people like Calvin Schiraldi. Few people besides Red Sox fans care about Calvin Schiraldi, but that’s the point. I’ll get left alone if I linger in the obscure and I don’t upload images. I’m less valuable there, but we’ve already seen what happens when I think about value.

But in the shorter term, I need to find a paying gig. I’ve got a couple of leads on that. I can really use the money, but besides that, it’ll be nice to do some writing for magazines again. For me, writing stopped being about money at about age 19.

An irreverent look at April 4 in history

Dave Farquhar General

On this day in 1581, Sir Francis Drake finished his journey around the world. For his efforts, Queen Elizabeth received a message from the Spanish government, saying Drake was nothing more than a pirate who ought to be hanged. She didn’t take them up on the suggestion.
On this day in 1814, Napoleon abdicated his emperorship of France for the first time, defeated at the hand of an alliance between Great Britain, Russia, Prussia and Austria. He was then made emperor of the island of Elba. Dissatisfied with the size of his new 120-square-mile empire, he was back in France by March 1, 1815. Napoleon’s enemies sent armies to stop him, but instead, those armies made him their leader, giving him 340,000 troops with which to return to Paris and set up rule again. His second reign was slightly less impressive than his first, lasting 100 days.

But the length of Napoleon’s second reign was impressive compared to that of William Henry “Tippecanoe” Harrison, the 9th president of the United States, who died on this day in 1841. His inauguration was a month earlier, and March 4, 1841 was a cold day. Harrison, against the advice of your mother and mine, refused to wear a coat and proceeded to give the longest inaugural address in American history, prattling on for two hours. His lack of brevity came at a high price, for he caught pneumonia and became the first American president to die in office. He also claimed the record for the shortest term ever served by an elected president.

If those aren’t the answers to enough trivia questions for you, Tippecanoe was also the grandfather of Benjamin Harrison, forming the only grandfather-grandson combination to be president.

And on a somber note, it was on this day in 1968 that The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis.

An irreverent look at this day in history, April 3

Dave Farquhar General , , , ,

In 1882, my fellow Missourian Jesse James was shot in the back of the head and killed by a man he’d recruited to help him rob a bank in Platte City. Rumors persist to this day that James faked his death, even though 1995 DNA analysis of the body buried in Kearney, Missouri under a headstone reading “Jesse James” proved 99.7% conclusive. A man named Frank Dalton died in Granbury, Texas at the age of 104 in 1951 and he claimed to his dying day that he was Jesse James. Dalton’s body was to be exhumed in 2000 for DNA analysis and the story was a media sensation that you might remember. You probably don’t remember the results, because a mismarked gravestone caused the body of a one-armed man who died in 1927 to be exhumed instead, and the body buried as “Jesse James, supposedly killed in 1882” has yet to be tested. Despite the 1995 tests, citizens of Gransbury and citizens of Kearney still argue over which of them has the real Jesse James.
In other news, Adolf Hitler, FDR, Abraham Lincoln and Elvis were last spotted playing cards together in Argentina.

In 1826, Boss Tweed was born. Tweed was the political boss of the Tammany Hall machine in New York City. Their motto: Vote early and often. Tweed’s downfall came when one of his own men felt he got shortchanged when the embezzled money was split up, so he ratted to the New York Times. Tweed was imprisoned twice, on criminal and then on civil charges. He escaped and fled to Spain in December 1875, only to be recognized (supposedly a series of famous political cartoons gave him away) and he was returned to New York, where he died in prison in 1878.

In 1783, Washington Irving was born. I’m sure you’ve read his Headless Horseman of Sleepy Hollow or seen at least one of the many movies or Scooby Doo episodes based on it.

In 1942 and 1944, singers Wayne Newton and Tony Orlando, respectively, were born. Branson, Missouri would never be the same.

Sorry I’ve been away

Dave Farquhar General , , ,

I meant to post last night, then I noticed nobody had written a Wikipedia entry for Daniel Pearl. I had to jump on that one. We’re talking about a guy who wrote a feature story about Iranian pop music and got it published on the front page of the Wall Street Journal, folks. Who gets those kinds of ideas? And then gets them published in a venue like that?
OK, OK, getting it published on the front page of the WSJ isn’t quite the accomplishment it first seems–the WSJ seeks out stories like that to put on its front page to break up its notorious monotony. Still, this is one of the holy grails of journalism.

He also wrote a story about a Stradivarius violin being found on a highway on-ramp. That’s not something you hear about very often. The best story I ever heard like that was about someone finding a working Micron laptop on a highway on-ramp. The reason those things ended up on the on-ramp was the same: both of them allegedly were placed on top of a car before the driver absentmindedly forgot and drove off.

In the case of the Stradivarius, it’s also highly possible the thing was just stolen. In the case of the Micron laptop, it’s the theory of my coworkers that the guy who did it just wanted a new one and wasn’t quite as thrilled as everyone else when the laptop was returned to him in perfect working order. But, as usual, I digress.

There was a lot of drama surrounding the Daniel Pearl story. He was a highly-regarded WSJ bureau chief, chasing the trail of shoe bomber Richard Reid. He was kidnapped because he was an American Jew in a Muslim country. (Never mind that there’s every indication that to Pearl, being Jewish was just a label and he had no particular hatred of Arabs or Mohammedanism, and that Pearl was known at the WSJ for being one of its most outspoken critics of the U.S. government.) His loving wife was pregnant with their first child. That child was born several months later without a father. His grisly death was highly publicized because it was videotaped and released.

It’s easy to forget in all of that that Daniel Pearl was a human being, with a sense of humor and the unusual quirks you find and enjoy in your best friends.

So I had to jump at writing his story.

This is priceless

Dave Farquhar General ,

I don’t normally do this–wait, I’m doing two things I don’t normally do, namely, post to my blog at work and link to someone else’s blog without writing anything containing a hint of originality–but you’ve got to read Charlie’s entry for today.
And in typical blogger fashion, I’m going to point out that he forgot something. Or maybe I just know a way to infuriate him that nobody else has discovered yet. Or maybe it just infuriates me.

  • Every time the latest spyware-laden, blinky, annoying, whiz-bang novelty app you downloaded from the Internet doesn’t work, walk up to the first IT person you find and say, “You changed the firewall, didn’t you?”

    • I’m back

    Dave Farquhar General

    My DSL connection was up and down like a yo-yo for the past day and a half or so. Sorry about that, but this is a budget operation, and that’s bound to show sometimes.

    I’m coming up for air

    Dave Farquhar General

    I’m sick again–similar to but less intense than the last thing I got–so I’m off to the doctor again.
    Meanwhile I keep plugging away at this Microsoft stuff. There’s a lot more to it than I thought. This one’s going to have to be a series, spread out over–I’m guessing–at least three days.

    I’ll start that up once I’m feeling better.

    Pretentious Pontifications: The word of the day

    Dave Farquhar General

    The word if the day is “gat.” I understand that David’s boss did not know what that means. I take that as a sign of aristocracy, for among gentlemen, only those with a love of linguistics tend to know the meaning of words utilized by rabble like my black-sheep brother David.
    I trust I need no introduction. I am R. Collins Farquhar IV, David’s consanguineous twin brother. I got the good genes. David, if you are wondering, is not here tonight, so I took it upon myself to fill in for him. My best guess is that he is out trying to buy a “gat.” I understand they are available relatively inexpensively in the neighborhood surrounding the building where he works.

    The word is commonly heard on the streets, where I am sure my impecunious brother would gladly spend much of his time if his boss did not keep a very tight leash on him. But I propound that the word actually has a quite fascinating history, which is very unusual for the topics David brings up. So I will take this time to share a descant with you.

    The patent for the first practical machine gun was granted on the 4th of November of the year 1862 CE to Dr. Richard J. Gatling. The Gatling Gun stayed in use until 1911 CE. Although little more than a gewgaw today, the Gatling Gun was revolutionary in its time.

    Some simpleton historians suggest Dr. Gatling’s goal was to obviate war by making it so devastating that men would no longer melee. Of course, that did not happen. Just ask the French, who succeeded in having themselves overrun and devastated twice in the 20th century CE and had to be bailed out by the Scots, many of whom had to come back across the Atlantic from America to do it.

    Dr. Gatling was a doctor, as in medical doctor. Watching the dead return from the Civil War, he noticed that a small percentage actually died of gunshots. It was apparent to his eye that the most parlous thing about war was disease, not bullets.

    In a letter dated 1877 CE, he wrote: “It occurred to me that if I could invent a machine–a gun–which could by its rapidity of fire, enable one man to do as much battle duty as a hundred, that it would, to a large extent supersede the necessity of large armies, and consequently, exposure to battle and disease [would] be greatly diminished.”

    He was irrefragably right about exposure to disease. His theory about battle was less considerably cogent. He would have learned, had be bothered to ask me, that exposure to battle was not as easy to cure.

    While the Gatling gun is no longer in use, the word “gat” came to be a slang phrase, generally meaning “handgun” or “pistol.” You still hear the word used in the streets today. Or so my sources tell me.