A few minutes ago Tasha and I said our tearful goodbyes to our friend and companion for the last twelve years, our beagle Tela. Tela wasn't just a wonderful, cheerful, cuddly dog whom we doted on; her life intersected with our relationship so completely that it is difficult to picture us without her. We always told her that we were a couple, but that she made us a family.
Tela came into our lives because I needed a present for Tasha when she graduated from college. She was actually promised to Tasha before she was even born, and ended up being born on Tasha's graduation day. Tasha would be going back home to start building her pottery business, and I still had another year or so of school. So my mom got me in touch with a breeder in my hometown, and they arranged for us to come visit the litter once it arrived.
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So we're deep in summer here in Richmond, and things are as busy as ever. My consulting business is going well, and I'm about to start work on a few cool projects while continuing work on past ones. Tasha's business is also taking off, and so we are partners in stress -- for once! I'm even considering advertising for an intern as Tasha did, since it would not only be a chance to get some help but to give a computer science student the kind of real-world, practical tools for building a consultancy that I never got.
Last week, Tasha and I saw Wilco in Charlottesville and that was great. Having been a fan of jam bands for so long, I'm used to artists taking big risks on stage and it either paying off wonderfully or crashing. To see such accomplished musicians deliver stunning performances so consistently impresses me -- and the songs are pretty much top notch. After that we went to Baltimore for Artscape, where Tasha sold pottery while I got drunk and walked around the exhibits with our Baltimore friends. It was a fun weekend but not so relaxing.
As far as writing, I have a new piece over at C4SS on my experience with the anarchist pedigree of Occupy Richmond. I'll be expanding on this in a future post. I also am working on my "freedom of religion / defense of the pre-rational" argument. I also just wrote an attack on a developer encroaching on our neighborhood. It's pretty sick how rich developers can subvert city regulations at will, yet I have to go through an ordeal just to put up a picket fence.
Well, that's about all I can think of. Stay tuned for more hopefully -- I'm really trying to post more often!
As many of you know, Tasha and I bought a house last year in Richmond. We found ourselves in the Springhill neighborhood, a little known historic area that started out a hundred years ago as a place for the families of Manchester industrial workers. The neighborhood is small and often overlooked, which is curious considering that, aside from being across the river, it's in the middle of the city. I can walk to the bottom or VCU, and the James River Park System and Belle Isle are blocks away.
Richmond is well known for being a hub for neighborhood blogs, so I've been sitting on the springhillrva.org domain for a while intending to launch a blog. Now that I'm getting my personal IT in order, I thought it was time to tidy the site up and make the announcement. Hopefully I can get my neighbors to help out maintaining it, and hopefully they'll find it useful to do so.
Hope everybody had a great New Years Eve! Tasha and I celebrated at an awesome performance by Brothers Past. The second set consisted of all the songs from their forthcoming album, most of which are brand spanking new. So that was exciting. We also had a great experience at the gorgeous Morris House Hotel, and we hope to stay longer the next time we're there.
Just wanted to throw some news items out there. As you may have noticed, commenting is now available via Disqus. I plan on importing the old posts and comments over the next month. Let me know if you experience any problems.
As for leftlibertarian.org, that project has proceeded splendidly. I'm now pretty sure that I've caught up with all the old, non-defunct feeds it was aggregating from before. Let me know if I've missed you. I will not be importing legacy content from the old site, since, well, it exists elsewhere. I will be continuing to tweak the site, with particular emphasis on truncating posts more cleanly and consistently. I also need to generate a list of all the blogs I aggregate; shouldn't be too difficult.
Hope everybody has a wonderful new year! Tasha and I will be heading to the Brothers Past NYE show in Philadelphia. This will be my first BP show in a while, so I'm looking forward to it! Just hope the weather cooperates.
Happy New Year!
It's been a long, long time. I went to Amsterdam. I reconnected with my host family, with whom I'd had no contact for 13 years. I revolutionized my productivity strategy. I delved into new areas of ruby. And more, I'm sure, which is hard to remember because I didn't freaking write it down.
Why have I been gone so long? The biggest reason is spiritual; much of the infighting among the Alliance left me feeling like I had been working with self-critical neo-maoists who were more interested in purifying the party than critically thinking about freeing the actually existing people. Disengaging from the ideology was essential to rediscovering those ideas for which I'm willing to fight.
A huge, giant part of it was technical problems related to WordPress which I've still not figured out. It took $38/month in virtual hardware to run my sites. Much of this was related to leftlibertarian.org (still down). In an attempt to pare down the resources I required to run what I thought were, in the end, rather simple operations, I moved to nginx to escape Apache's well known memory issues. This ended up being more complicated than I expected, the result being I'm still down.
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