This posting is being created entirely from my desktop. Using the brand new software goodie from Ranchero, MarsEdit I can develop postings from my computer using a Mail.app like interface and upload them to zanshin via an XML remote procedure call interface. How utterly cool is this?
A while back I read an article that described 14 characteristics of fascism using the likes of Hitler, Mussolini, and others as examples. What was chilling about the piece were the parallels to present day America. You can read my Fascism Scorecard, and see for yourself.
Yesterday I stumbled across this sermon by Davidson Loehr, a Unitarian Universalist minister in Austin Texas. It is the clearest, and consequently most chilling, explanation of America’s descent into fascism.
I urge your to read it and pass it on to your friends.
Last June I installed ShortStat so I could see who was visiting zanshin and from where. At the time we were on the verge of a cross-country move and when the initial setup failed to work I put it on the back burner.
In September after most of the dust from the move had settled I had time to debug my ShortStat installation and discovered I had a PHP functions files called “functions.php” and ShortStat also had a “functions.php” file. Once I renamed my instance everything worked like a charm. So even though I installed ShortStat on June 21st, I didn’t start collecting statistics until September 11.
In the three months since ShortStat has been active on zanshin there have been 10,113 site hits from 2171 unique visitors. That’s on pace to be over 40,000 page views in a single year. Wow. Now I realize that some portion of these page views are automated robots; in fact 37 percent are “crawlers” of one form or another. Still that leaves better than 6370 non-crawler page views in three months time. Or roughly 25,000 pages served to humans in a years time.
It just boggles my mind that my thoughts will be viewed twenty-five thousand times this year.
With the help of this Spywareinfo article about referer spam, and Joe Maller’s blacklist I have hopefully put an end to the increasing number of referer spam my site and my wife’s site experience everyday.
The Spywareinfo article explains it all much better than I could. I would only add the suggestion to backup any .htaccess file you find before altering it, just in case. An earlier, less informed, attempt on my part to lock out the spammers actually resulted in my site being unavailable to anyone in any format. Oops.
This now brings to 3 (or 4, depending upon how you count) measures I’m taking to rid my sites of electronic graffiti. I’m using “deny” rules in my .htaccess file to ban IP addresses from accessing my site, I’ve added “rewrite” rules to block specific referers and specific types of referers, and I’m using BotWhack from Eric Goldberg to filter unwanted entries from my Referer list.
Even with all of these tools in place I know that I’ll continue to get referer spam. My hope is to move my site out of the “low hanging fruit” category so that fewer opportunistic referer spam tools find me.
In the book Illusions by Richard Bach, he talks about meeting an advanced soul, and about learning the truth of this lifetime. One of the techniques for discovering truth that he talks about is posing a question in your mind and then opening at random a book or newspaper and reading the first thing that you see aloud. If you are properly focused the text will contain an answer to your question.
At present our life is in an uproar as Michele and I are hoping and praying for a change in our circumstance. We have put into motion several events and are waiting to see if one of the results is the outcome we truly want. We have tried very hard not to plan on any one outcome; (a) so that we can be flexible enough to accept what ever happens, and (2) so that we don’t emotionally invest so much that the loss of the outcome doesn’t destroy us.
With all of this in mind, when I recently stumbled across this Hebrew proverb, Man plans, God laughs, I realized that it was an answer to a question I had been holding in my mind for some time now. The question hasn’t been put into words as much has it has been a context for all that I have been thinking and feeling in the past few weeks. If I were to put it into words I would pose it this way: What actions or inactions should I be taken to get the outcome I truly desire? The answer is: Man plans, God laughs. To me this means that you have to give up the illusion of control and accept what your inner essence leads you toward.
I have to trust that part of me that is the Tao or God. I have to believe that inside of me is a compass that unerringly points in the direction I need to go, and that all I need do is relax enough to see this internal compass and I’ll be okay. I’m not suggesting that I be fatalistic or passive, on the contrary, I am saying I need to be active and participate in my life, but in a way that listens to my inner voice. In a way that honors that part of me that is in touch with the Divine.
In spite of my best efforts to do otherwise, I find myself investing in a potential future. By this I mean I am emotionally and spiritually investing myself in a future that is currently dependent upon the actions of others. Most of us have some control over our immediate future, we can plan out the day or a week. And major events likes weddings or vacations are sometimes planned for months or years before coming to pass. These are all situations where most of the control lies in the individual and very little is delegated to others.
Employment by and large is not an area where individuals have much control any more. In the twenty-one plus years I’ve been a professional the employment landscape has undergone several major changes, the end result of which has been to create an unsettled and chaotic environment where people are no longer really in control of their destiny. The illusion of control still exists, people can still make what appear to be choices about what work they wish to perform and where. The change has been more subtle and more insidious. Gone is the promise that hard work and dedication can help you build an investment in your current engagement. Gone is the idea that your support of the company will net you support from the company in return.
Don’t believe me? Just look at the change in language used to describe people in the work place. Personnel departments are a thing of the past, now we have Human Resources. Positions require a “full time equivalent” or FTE. The bottom line is protected at all costs through resource actions rather than firings. We’ve de-humanized the language used to describe human contributions and costs in the workplace, which in turn allows us to treat live people as objects. It is far easier to throw away an unwanted object than it is to impact the live of an employee and their family.
This past week on “NOW” there was a piece on New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer who is making a career out of investigating and prosecuting large deregulated industries. His raison-d’etre seems to be that deregulation doesn’t place the corporation above or outside of the law. This is the first sign I’ve seen that the pendulum may finally be reaching the end of the swing started in the 1980s by the Drucker lead “downsizing” movement. Maybe the final twenty or so years of my career will see a return to a time when corporations and employers view their employees as valued members of a community, as human beings with life’s of importance, and not just as pawns in some meaningless profit driven chess game.
In the computer hardware world there is a term, “Mean Time to Failure” that measures the average time a device is expected to last under normal wear and tear before failing. Of course you don’t always get the mean time, sometimes you get more and sometimes you get less.
Take our toilets for example. The apartment we are renting as two bathrooms, one that gets used all the time, and a second that gets used primarily as a backup when the first is occupied. This past week the flap inside the tank on both toilets stopped working properly. Both are now sticking in the up or open position causing the toilet to run on and on and on. Now I suspect that both flaps were installed at the same time, and while our usage has been lopsided in favor of one, you could probably make a case for each flap having roughly the same wear thus far in its lifetime. But what are the odds that both flaps would stop working in the same manner within days of each other?
That’s a pretty tight mean time to failure.
All of this gets me to thinking the people have a mean time to failure too, physically, emotionally, and mentally. The general reduction of difficulty getting food and shelter has lengthened our lifetimes considerably in the past century or so. More people are living longer, more people are active and working longer than ever before. The ultimate mean time to failure is our lifespan. Men generally get to the mid-seventies and women a few years more. Of course the lifetime you lead will cause your mileage to vary. The past year with all of its stress must have shortened my time. We’ve been way beyond normal wear and tear for some time now.
My only question then is this: will I be aware of my own flap getting stuck or will that failure be it?
The weight of daily existence is starting to wear me down. I’ve never done well in those times of my life where my focus was on the future or the past. I’m a present tense kind of person, and lately I just can’t seem to find a connection to the present.
There are periods of time where the immediate task at hand helps to blot out my stress about the future, and my anguish over the recent past. Work has become a drug in a sense. I can numb myself to the harsh reality of my situation by immersing myself in the details and crap that makes up my current employment engagement. And the stress of the past few months has taken a toll on my energy level so that I collapse into bed at the end of the day and immediately fall asleep. The sleep isn’t restorative or restful however, I’m not getting enough relaxation while I’m awake to get some beneficial sleep.
I felt very forced into my current situation, and I allowed certain aspects of it to happen without even attempting to participate. I’ve always believed that you have to let go and move with the flow of events around you, but that’s different than giving up. In a sense I gave up when we moved to Kansas. I had worked so long and so hard to find work again, and then worked even harder to get us here that I created a false sense of momentum and direction. At first being in Kansas felt like it had a future, that we were going to be okay here. In truth I gave up when the last day in Springfield came and we had to leave all in a rush, all in a hurry. My engines flamed out then, it was only the forward speed I had built up that kept me going until now.
There have been brief moments of connection with my true self recently, connection that was the result of actively participating in my life again. I think that the impact of losing my job in March disassociated me from myself in a deeper and more profound way than I realized. It has taken me until now to start to feel connected to myself again. Only now am I able to really connect with my truth again, and only now am I feeling like I can direct my life again. I’ve started to focus on today and on the present more in the last few weeks. Gone are the long periods of hurt and bitterness over the events of last spring. And gone too, are the fears over the future. Or rather, gone is the intense focus on the future.
I need to care for myself here, now, in this moment. I have to discover my needs and fears and hopes and desires in this time and space. Once I do that, I can start to connect once again with that part of me that is capable and strong, wise and learned. Ignoring my immediate emotional or spiritual state blocks me from accessing my true power and ultimately only contributes to my feeling of helplessness. Recently I started to take a more directive role in my situation (the results of which I hope to expose here very soon now) and as a result I started to feel better.
I’ve got a lot of work to do to fully come back to myself, but I know how to accomplish this and I’ve successfully done it before. We are approaching a new year, and in a nice bit of synchronicity, the start of the tenth year I’ve had Michele in my life. It is time for a new beginning, it is time to reaffirm who I am. I stopped my world and got off for a while, now I’m ready and able to get back on.
Michele and I had a wonderful Thanksgiving holiday. Starting on Wednesday with a matinee showing of National Treasure and culminating with 4 glorious days of doing nothing.
The food was plentiful and fantastic tasting. We made perhaps the best roast turkey we’ve ever had, complete with dressing, cranberry sauce, mandarin oranges, and greens. The weekend also included portions of hamburgers, Dublin Coddle, homemade beef vegetable soup, fresh strawberries over vanilla ice cream, and chocolate lava cake.
We watched movies too. Everything from “The Matrix” to “The Majestic”, and from “Fried Green Tomatoes” to “Finding Nemo” by way of “The In-Laws”. There were naps, and reading, and general relaxing.
The best part of the weekend however, wasn’t the food or the movies. It was the time spent with my wife. We needed some serious downtime, some time to re-connect with each other, some time to re-connect with ourselves. The past months have taken their toll on our spirits, our energy, and our general well-being. This weekend went a long way towards restoring us to at least a shadow of our former selves.
Dear Spammer(s),
Okay. You win this round. I’ve been forced to remove comments from my sites because I am sick and tired of spending an increasing amount of time everyday removing your vile spew from my site. So now no one can comment here at all.
Fuck you very much.
However, all is not lost. I’m in the process of switching the back end of this site, and my wife’s site to Expression Engine. Which has a membership feature that will require proof of humanness before comments can be left.
Sometimes technology is a a good thing.