Letter to Senator Jon Tester

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I got a campaign pitch from Montana Senator Jon Tester today. No surprise, as I’d contributed money to his 2006 election, and had expected to support him in the future. But a few days ago, he voted against the DREAM Act. If you’re not familiar with that, here’s a paraphrased description from Wikipedia:

The Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors Act (the DREAM Act) is a piece of proposed federal legislation in the United States…This bill would provide certain illegal and deportable alien students who graduate from US high schools, who are of good moral character, arrived in the U.S. illegally as minors, and have been in the country continuously and illegally for at least five years prior to the bill’s enactment, the opportunity to earn conditional permanent residency if they complete two years in the military or two years at a four year institution of higher learning.

All the Republicans in the Senate voted against the DREAM Act. No surprise there; the GOP is the party that not only shelters racists, but institutionalizes their beliefs. Five Dems, including Tester, voted against the Act, effectively killing it. Here was my letter to him.

Dear Senator Tester,

You voted against the DREAM Act. You were one of only five Democrats to do so. By doing so, you ensured that tens of thousands of innocent young people’s lives will be ruined, and the US will be deprived of that human capital. That’s stupid and wasteful. I didn’t think you were either.

Excuses don’t cut it. And false excuses like “it’s amnesty!” are even worse. Of course it was amnesty, of a sort. But it was one in which the recipients, illegal immigrants here by no fault of their own, were earning a path to citizenship. You know, that’s exactly what we want in America. And you chose to kill these kids’ American Dream. That’s shameful.

On this one you were either a Democrat or you aligned yourself with the racists that are in charge of the Republican Party.

We know which side you’re on now. You chose to stand with the racists.

I am ashamed that I ever supported you financially and publicly. I will not do so again.

Sometimes, deciding to no longer support a politician you believed in is difficult. For example, it was painful to leave John Edwards behind, as I genuinely thought he had the best policy prescriptions in 2008, especially on my most important issue, healthcare reform.

But this breakup? This was an easy call.

When critics don’t think

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Before seeing Tron: Legacy today, I checked out the reviews on Rotten Tomatoes, as usual. I saw that most critics hated it, but that audience reviews were strong. I kind of expected that; Tron isn’t going to be a movie that makes your average film critic sing its praises. I took special note of the set of critics that I think are tools: O’Hehir of Salon, Phillips of the Chicago Tribune, Stevens of Slate. They’re valuable to me as negative indicators. I find that if it’s a movie that I’m interested in seeing, and they hate it, I’ll often have a good time. As expected, they all trashed the film.

I usually ignore Claudia Puig of USA Today, because, well, she’s not often of any interest. But this one should be in the annals of critics foolishly Not Getting It: “For a far more thought-provoking tale about the virtual realm, try The Social Network.”

One, the movies are in completely different genres; it’s fundamentally wrong to compare them in that fashion. Two, The Social Network isn’t about the virtual realm at all. None of it is set in “Facebook world,” the way the virtual world exists in Tron. Three, this is the sort of incisive comment made by someone who thinks, “Well, they’re both sort of about computers.” And then stops thinking.

I understand being under deadlines. But that’s embarrassingly shallow writing.

WordPress baffles me, part 2 (now with less whining!)

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After reading the responses to my last post, it became clear to me that what I thought was a cry for help just sounded to others as whingeing. And re-reading the post, it was clear to me that y’all were right.

So, let me try again with our biggest pain: incoming links.

The issue:

Our existing incoming links are in the format

/yyyy_mm_dd_archive.html

WordPress, apparently, needs that URL to be*

/yyyy/?w=nn

That is, we have the year, month, and day—but what we need is the year and week number. That nn is the nth week of the year. So we have a URL that comes in looking like (for example)

/2004_04_18_archive.html

and we then want WP to serve up

/2004/?w=16

The problem:

As I see it, there’s two ways that WP could handle this*: either redirection, or permalinks for weekly archives.

Redirection: I can’t figure out how to do this given that nn in the code above. A redirect would have to take in a date and turn it into a week number, and I don’t believe that’s possible*.

Permalinks: I was hoping that there was a plugin that creates pretty permalinks for weekly archives, but I haven’t found one as yet*.

That means that I have to write a custom query*, and here’s what I’ve got so far:

$day = substr( $datestr, 8, 2 );
$month = substr( $datestr, 5, 2 );
$year = substr( $datestr, 0, 4 );
$timestamp = mktime( 0, 0, 0, $month, $day, $year );
$week = date( "W", $timestamp );
query_posts( 'nopaging=true&orderby=date&order=ASC&posts_per_page=-1&year=' . $year . '&w=' . $week );

The problem is that I have no idea where to put it, and no idea how to make it happen only when the URL is in the above format.

I’m still hoping that there’s an easy way to do this, and if I’ve got to use my own code in a child theme, I think I can now handle that—it’s just I’m not clear on the details of where/when it gets called.

Thanks in advance for any help you can give!

* This is to the best of my understanding, which means I could well be wrong—if I am, please let me know.

WordPress baffles me

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So far, we’ve been on WordPress almost 80 hours—and I keep finding things that drive me insane, or that don’t work, or that I can’t figure out, or, or…

Okay, what is it that y’all like about this CMS?

But really, we were on MT for 6 or 8 years, and I never had to write a single line of Perl. So far, I’ve been writing gobs of PHP, though, because there don’t seem to be plugins that do what I want. And it’s not like what I want is that complex.

And then randomly, things just break. Currently, it’s the categories—don’t know why, don’t know how, but they’re broken. As are all incoming links to this site. Sorry, folks; I’ve been working on this since Friday evening, and it’s all way over my head.

Wish me luck, ’cause I need it.

Edit by Tom: The above is Dori’s way of asking for help from people who are experienced WordPress users. I think that she didn’t make that at all clear.

We’re in the new digs

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We’ve moved Backup Brain from Pair to Dreamhost, to take advantage of some of the latter’s extra features, and because we got hosting there for a ridiculously low price. We’re also taking the opportunity to migrate the blog from Movable Type to WordPress. We’ll be fiddling with making the old permalinks work, messing with the theme, and other stuff for a while longer. Please be patient while we clean up the new installation.

Update, 10/31: Still working on getting the redirects right from the old post structure to the new.

Want One More Woman at Tech Conferences?

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Over at TechCrunch, Michael Arrington wrote Too Few Women In Tech? Stop Blaming The Men, in which he said:

[Women] are literally hounded to speak at every single tech event in the world because they are all trying so hard to find qualified women to speak at their conference.

Here’s a relevant datapoint—all the conferences that, in the last year, have approached me about speaking and asked me to present:

  •  

 

 

So, let me take Arrington at his word must control mouth and just say publicly:

If you’re a woman, and you’re being “hounded” to speak at conferences, and you just can’t handle attending another conference—could you please pass an invite or two on to me?

Actually, that’s true regardless of your gender, and whether or not conferences are as a matter of fact setting dogs on you (“literally hounded“?). It also applies if you’re a conference organizer, btw.

Contact me. Please.

Vote for us to talk at SxSW

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We know, you’re saying to yourself all the time: why haven’t Tom and Dori blogged more? Or posted on Facebook more? Or even tweeted more? (And you are all saying that, right? Right?)

So here’s the deal: if you want to hear more from us, say so by voting for our sessions in the SxSW 2011 Panel Picker.

We’ve pitched two sessions: When Your Partner Is Your Partner and So You Wanna Write A Tech Book?. On paper, the former is listed as Tom’s session and the latter as mine, but the reality is that they’re both us (along with anyone else we can dragoon into participating).

I believe you’ll need to register before you can vote, but you don’t have to necessarily be planning to attend to register (although you should go—it really is Geek Spring Break and a helluva lot of fun).

panel picker widgetWhen Your Partner Is Your Partner
panel picker widgetSo You Wanna Write A Tech Book?

You have a proposed panel too? Great! If you want us to vote for your panel, just ask—but just so you know, here are my personal showstoppers; if your session description includes any of them, don’t bother:

  • References to post-pubescent females as “girls”
  • References to “your mom” or “your grandmother” as shorthand for non-technical people
  • Social media marketing gibberish (i.e., new media douchebags need not apply)
  • Any “hey, there’s this brand-new hot topic you should know about!” panels, when the topic itself is over 5 years old
  • Panels where the participants obviously know less about the topic than we do and it’s not even in an area where we claim expertise
  • And so on…

But I know that none of you would propose anything this weak, so let us know what you’ve got planned. And of course, if you think that one (or both) of us would be a good addition to your panel, we’re all ears.

See you in Austin!