Archive for July, 2003

Ping woes

Thursday, July 31st, 2003 | Blog Stuff | Comments Off on Ping woes

I FINALLY figured out why MT was having trouble pinging when I saved an entry.. Turns out weblogs.com is WAY overloaded and was almost always failing (and thus failing any pings behind it)… Since I’m pinging folks largely to get folks blogrolls I just switched to pinging blogrolling directly… So the solution was just to quit pinging weblogs.com and just ping ping.blo.gs and http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/ – now it seems to work..

knock on wood…

just in case anyone cares! 😉

All this attention

Thursday, July 31st, 2003 | Gay Stuff | 3 Comments

So I don’t know what to do with all this attention that we (the ‘gays’) are getting these days… I find it all really fascinating and overall I think its a fantastic positive step – even the negative stuff… For example:

– ‘Queer eye for the Straight Guy’ and ‘Boy meets Boy’: These shows are basically the same dreck that is on every other station. Personally, I find queer eye kind of fun to watch largely because I love the interaction between the victim and the guys – the straight guy always seem very open to whats going on and grateful… Boy meets Boy – less interesting.. for the same reason I didn’t like Joe Millionaire and the rest – just a mean manipulation of people’s emotions for money.. But both are just gay stints on formulas.. kinda interesting..

– Supreme Court Decision on Sodomy: FAN-FLIPPIN-TASTIC to hear the supreme court determine that the government has no business passing laws that set gay and lesbian couples apart from straight folks and invade people’s bedrooms. AND – on top of that to hear Scallia himself say that this opens the door to Gay Marriage.

– Dubbya’s and the Pope’s slams on Gay Marriage: This has created quite the furor on both sides of the debate for good reason but I’m not sure why this is surprising to anyone. Georgie was put in office by the christian right and he’s crystal clear on who will pay to keep him there. And the Catholic church is a well known opponent of homosexuality. This is just people drawing lines in the sand.

Why do I put 2 silly TV shows together with these two political milestones? Because the collection of this and all the other stuff going on lately has two important effects – first, it points out some realities about gays and lesbians that people may not have seen before (particularly folks that don’t THINK they know anyone gay). And, second, to force people to think about what their views are and why…. Its to easy for people to go along with what they learn at home and from folks at school without thinking about them. But with this much media and political attention one can hope that people will actually spend some time discussing and thinking about what they believe in rather than just taking things for granted…

Another thing that Elizabeth Birch pointed out in a talk at Apple some time ago is that, while Gay Marriage may be an ideal but perhaps unattainable goal, fighting for such a huge goal adds to the momentum of less difficult advances. Sure, while we may want gay marriage and completely equality for gays and lesbians, this may be something that will meet strong and possible insurmountable opposition. However, by fighting for something that people take this personally and seriously, that same opposition may be somewhat more supportive of things such as workplace non-discrimination laws. After all, their church teaches them that marriage is a sacred institution, it also teaches the golden rule and discrimination in other forms might seem less acceptable..

So we should DEFINITELY go for the gold (Marriage) but don’t forget that even if we don’t get that we’ll be a lot further along than we’ve ever been.

Just a set of observations… I just like the fact that people are thinking and talking these days – even if we don’t always like what they’re saying..

( Not to mention I think the guy that does skin and hair on ‘Queer Eye’ is REALLY DAMN HOT! 😉 )

BuyMusic.COM

Thursday, July 31st, 2003 | Geek Stuff | 1 Comment

I gotta say – I can’t help but chuckle when I see this:

Technical Glitches Plague BuyMusic.com

I mean – I don’t have a problem with competition – thats what spurs great products… But blatant rip offs are something completely different. Have you seen their ads? They’re nearly IDENTICAL to Apple’s ads for the music store..

I would DEFINITELY like to see a solution to this for windows so the recording industry has a legal alternative that is available and can stop their random law suit tactics. But c’mon people – please.. a little creativity PLEASE! 🙂

Guess Apple just needs to get on the windows version of the music store… 😉

Charlie’s Angels

Wednesday, July 30th, 2003 | Random Morsels | 2 Comments

Ok.. So Kevin and I saw the second Charlie’s Angels tonight… Matt warned me not to.. Said it was AWFUL.. I mean – REALLY bad… But I actually enjoyed it… Not an award winner by ANY stretch of the imagination and at certain points it is colossally stupid. But overall it was exactly what I was looking for. Silly stupid messed up fun. And the fact that Bosley changes race on you between the first and second movie does make sense when you see it.

Granted now I’m going to have to see some heart wrenching independent film to make me feel better about killing brain cells on this one.. but still! 🙂

I think it works

Wednesday, July 30th, 2003 | Blog Stuff | Comments Off on I think it works

By george – I think I got it working…. The new home seems to be up and happy as far as I can tell and i’ve hidden most of the stuff on the old one (though it still exists so people’s links won’t break)…

Now the real trick is finding all the places where I’ve laid links to the old URL and get those update (not to mention getting others to update their links)… Would be SO NICE if there was an easy way to do that automatically – kinda like DNS does… Just change the pointer in one place and everyone else gets the updates magically… Would be cool if blogrolling did that at least – you add a link to someone’s blogrolling entry if they have one so if they move the domain you’ll follow the move..

Ah well… Any hints would be appreciated…

Update your Links

Wednesday, July 30th, 2003 | Blog Stuff | 4 Comments

Moving vans are rolling up for my Blog… I’m moving it over from Matt’s domain over to mine… So if you have links to http://www.fullerbrantner.com/swimfinssf/ please change them to point to http://www.swimfinssf.com/ – I’m going to be trying to get everything pushed over to there…

Not sure if this will go without a hitch but I’ve got my fingers crossed! 🙂