Thinking Unenslaved

and i won’t be back again. well, at least not at the current ip address.

i don’t know what i was thinking. wait, yes i do. i was thinking that keeping the money in our community was a better thing. and it typically is. and i am a big proponent of keeping the money in the local community. so doing this bugs me on several levels. however, when it comes down to the fact that for the hosting of six domains, i am being charged $150/month, when i could just be paying $6.95/month (for better service, greater configurability, and higher bandwidth, no less)…well, it’s time to move.

so, that’s what’s going to happen. i have already semi-successfully moved dawnne.com. i say “semi-successfully” only because i have to re-upload a couple of galleries and a few images (stuff that didn’t make it via the WordPress export/import utility), and because someone in the WordPress development group thinks we like to have to hand-enter our blogrolls if we ever pick up and move. that aside, moving over to BlueHost was not only a complete no-brainer in financial terms, but was also done in less than 12 hours, although DNS propagation outside North America may take longer. and goodness knows i have a bazillion readers from overseas on my personal blog. har-de-har-har.

did i mention it was BlueHost? it’s BlueHost. shameless plug from a woefully shameless man.

so, like, over the next few days, i will be moving everything. the hardest part of this is going to be moving the blogroll. because i like to serve the click-through method (the supposed reason why blogrolls exist), i will have to add some of the more recent additions into my google reader so i can do the export thingy from that to the wordpress blogroll. i’m going to take my time on that, however, as i am more focused on getting some client stuff done before Christmas. just be advised, you’ll see temporary burps not only in the website, but in the feeds, and when the website comes back up, it won’t be perfect from the get-go.

i just said “get-go”. yes, i was raised in Texas. carry on.

i do want to say that i deeply appreciate the services of my local provider (see the current footer). this is primarily a money issue. sure, as with any other small-business host, service sometimes isn’t what i would ideally want it to be. but i have learned quite a bit from them, just as i have hopefully helped them learn about WordPress hosting as well. they are good people, and i do somewhat regret bailing on them. but, like i said, at $6.95 a month, i can simply choose not to eat out ONCE each month and i draw even, or better. pfft. what was i thinking….

ironically, this comes immediately after making the comments plugin gravatar-compliant. if you haven’t setup a gravatar on your email address, why not? well, the reason why commander[dot]other[at]otherwhirled[dot]com doesn’t have one is because apparently they can’t handle email addy’s with [dots]. that aside, it’s a fine way to make your comments across your favorite blogs—all of whom should be supporting the gravatar project—more consistent, so peeps can recognize you and see how cool you are.

there may be burps and glitches this morning as i install a few plugins. it shouldn’t affect the feeds.

if you look at the footers here, here and here, you can probably guess what i’m installing, but also to give them credit where credit is due, and probably because i’ll screw up and forget to put them in the footer of this blog….

1. Alex Rabe’s Next Gen Gallery ~ i have some plans for the otherwhirled that may include a gallery format on certain photos, especially as we near the next major elections and there will be plenty of photos of Republican candidates ducking past the White House, etc. and gallery-izing my LOLcons and otherwhirled originals (whenever i put more than two up, lol) is just an option i’d like to have.
2. Andrew Ozz’s Shutter Reloaded ~ i use this on my other blogs to preview images. the code is phenomenally clean and it works much faster than Thickbox or Lightbox (the two more popular versions of this type of thing). but if good photoshoppers such as Tengrain are going to post here occasionally, i want to give them the opportunity of providing higher-resolution versions of their talents, and Shutter Reloaded is a grand way of doing it.
3. Oliver Seidel’s ContactForms II ~ used on my other blogs to replace the wordpress comment mechanism, and i simply would like to have it here for consistency’s sake. to implement this one, i have to edit core wordpress files, hence my reasoning for this post as warning that things might go “boom”. i haven’t screwed up implementing it yet, but there’s always a first time. after it’s installed, commentators will have the option to contribute their comments as an email to the author instead of a regular comment, and will have to prove their humanity. sorry about the latter requirement, but in the past week, i have seen the spam beginning to shift off the original otherwhirled over to here. neat-o!

as a reminder, i still would like others involved here in the otherwhirled. if you’d like another place to share your insight, witticism, and/or anything else talk to me at commander[dot]other[at]otherwhirled[dot]com.

for those of you on wordpress (hosted at wordpress.com or not), i offer two items of advice, if you are interested in knowing who’s really linking to you, and how many people are visiting your contributions to the general irresponsibility of the world at large:

1. WordPress statistics is very generalistic. they depend entirely upon whether or not the proper tag {wp_footer()} is contained somewhere within your main index page and any other pages that might serve content (author templates, archive templates, category templates, tag templates, single post templates, and wordpress ‘page’ templates). if your theme has all those separate templates, but lacks the proper code, those templates won’t trigger information into your stats. and if you’re on the hosted wordpress.com, you can’t edit the themes. see why i left? well, that was reason # 57, i think.
2. When blogs that link to you directly, as in through a particular post, update their content and that post scrolls to the next page, that link will disappear from your wordpress dashboard. i just saw that happen with links from Jess and Tengrain. so basically, you can ignore that kind of shit too in your dashboard. Also, if someone simply hasn’t clicked a link to you, say in someone’s blogroll, for a while, wordpress drops reporting it as well. this is one of the reasons why i try to take time out every week to click through people’s blogrolls.

in short, the wordpress stats and dashboard information never come close to matching the real stats i get from my server software itself. so, at the risk of pimping something my wife may or may not be working for in the near future, i humbly suggest google analytics. it’s free, for one thing, the stats are far more verbose, and they match succinctly with the actual statistics i get from my server software. it does a lot of other useful things as well.

i also have a sitemeter thingy running from my sidebar. it’s not very verbose, either, for what it’s worth. at least not the free one. my stats from feedburner are absolute crap (they report less than 30% of the hits my server stats say touch my feed. kinda sad, that, and i’m glad i don’t pay for it).

okay, that was your handy tip for the day from Commander Other. carry on!

…and ‘cuz i don’t feel like doin’ nuttin’ else t’day.

except client work, of course. durn clients never go away. maybe smack the kids around a bit and yell at ‘em for bein’ mine.

okay, okay, put up the damn christmas tree. lowercase ‘c’, because “he” was just a propaganda tool, mind you.

so, i added some new additions to the blogroll over there on the right, because i was tired of following links from other people’s blogs to theirs. i’ve been reading/watching/listening to these folks for a while, and i like ‘em. you should, too. hell, most of you probably already do, but according to google analytics, SOME of you are ‘new’ visitors each day, so what the hell… ~
more below the fold

i have become infected with a virus that started with Splotchy, wherever it is Splotchy lives, and has made its way to me here in South Dakota, where people willingly share viruses, but frequently attempt to deny that sex exists. at least, the religious ones do, anyway. but i digress, which is a particularly exceptional talent of mine. a pity, that, no?

at any rate, here i sit with a virus at my fingertips, courtesy of Jess Wundrun, who got it in turn from Enriched Geranium who contracted it from Dr. Monkey von Monkerstein (no doubt during one of his $1,000-per-plate campaign dinners), who got it from FranIAm, who apparently picked it up from Splotchy during that all-night binge-fest with the “foreign exchange” students, if you know what i mean, wink-wink, nudge-nudge.

seriously, i have no idea where all that just came from. my doctor would probably say that i drink too much caffeine, though. last time he told me that, i jumped up and beat him with his stethoscope.

but i digress….(told you so!)

Continue to the intriguing and mystifying story of I-dunno-what

Tengrain didn’t really tag me with this although he did say that if we wanted to do it, we should consider ourselves tagged, and I’ve been dying to do it because I have a relatively eclectic collection of music in my iTunes library: somewhere over 80Gb of high-resolution compact disc rips going back as far as the early 1970′s and including several hundred songs pulled for free from the original mp3.com site. So, I’m doing it, and then I’m going to tag some homies. Pfft.

The rules:

1. Put your music player on Shuffle
2. For each question, press the next button to get your answer.
3. YOU MUST WRITE THAT SONG NAME DOWN NO MATTER WHAT (this is in capital letters, so it is very serious).

1. IF SOMEONE SAYS “IS THIS OKAY” YOU SAY: “No Self Control”, Peter Gabriel (untitled album, 1980)

2. WHAT WOULD BEST DESCRIBE YOUR PERSONALITY: “World Full of Nothing”, Depeche Mode (Black Celebration, 1986)

3. WHAT DO YOU LIKE IN A GUY/GIRL: “I Feel You (Helmet at the Helm Mix)”, Depeche Mode (I Feel You, Maxi Single, 1993)

4. HOW DO YOU FEEL TODAY: “Cold Alien”, Planet Bliss (via mp3.com circa 2003)

5. WHAT IS YOUR LIFE’S PURPOSE: “One Tree Hill”, U2 (Joshua Tree, 1987)

6. WHAT IS YOUR MOTTO: “Moon In Ice”, Yello (One Second, 1987)

7. WHAT DO YOUR FRIENDS THINK OF YOU: “Poison in the Well”, 10,000 Maniacs (Blind Man’s Zoo, 1989)

8. WHAT DO YOU THINK OF YOUR PARENTS: “End of the Line…” designerthumbs (via mp3.com circa 2004)

9. WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT VERY OFTEN: “A Matter of Conscience”, The Sun and the Moon (The Sun and the Moon, 1988)

10. WHAT IS 2+2: “The Song of the Sybil”, Dead Can Dance (A Passage In Time, 1991)

11. WHAT DO YOU THINK OF YOUR BEST FRIEND: “Six Different Ways”, The Cure (The Head on the Door, 1985)

12. WHAT DO YOU THINK OF THE PERSON YOU LIKE: “Superunknown”, Soundgarden (Superunknown, 1994)

13. WHAT IS YOUR LIFE STORY: “i remember everything”, Sub City (via mp3.com circa 2002)

14. WHAT DO YOU WANT TO BE WHEN YOU GROW UP: “Craving”, Xymox (Twist of Shadows, 1989)

15. WHAT DO YOU THINK WHEN YOU SEE THE PERSON YOU LIKE: “Into the Fourth Dimension”, The Orb (The Orb’s Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld, disc 2, 1991)

16. WHAT DO YOUR PARENTS THINK OF YOU: “Help Me Lift You Up”, This Mortal Coil (Blood, 1991)

17. WHAT WILL YOU DANCE TO AT YOUR WEDDING: “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out”, The Smiths (The World Won’t Listen, 1986) (okay, i’ll admit it: i rigged this one answer, because we DID dance to this at our wedding!)

18. WHAT WILL THEY PLAY AT YOUR FUNERAL: “The Colour Hurts”, Curve (Pubic Fruit, 1991)

19. WHAT IS YOUR HOBBY/INTEREST: “Suboceana”, Tom Tom Club (Boom Boom Chi Boom Boom, 1989)

20. WHAT IS YOUR BIGGEST SECRET: “To Wish Impossible Things”, The Cure (Wish, 1992)

21. WHAT DO YOU THINK OF YOUR FRIENDS: “Solar Choir”, The Creatures (Boomerang, 1989)

22. WHAT SHOULD YOU POST THIS AS: “Life’s What You Make It”, Talk Talk (The Colour of Spring, 1986)

It entirely figures that with over 30 years of music to pick from and the entire library active, the “next” button on my keyboard nearly-consistently brought up music from the mid-to-late 1980′s and early 1990′s. Bah!

Tag, You’re It! Tramplingrose, Tim and Todd

i finally blogrolled the people i said i would blogroll back on thanksgiving. damn, i’m quick, huh?

aw, hell. since i took so damn long, why not show ‘em all again?

• Life & Times of NotSoccer mom. yes, even though i’m a soccer dad.
• Say What?! signs of the times. funny stuff. i have things from here in Sioux Falls i should obviously be submitting.
• Little Bang Theory. just because you should. good writing and good content.
• The Great Endarkenment. frequently channels our inner sixth grade fuck.
• The Future Was Yesterday. oh, yes it was. weren’t you paying attention?
• Namaste. the tagline is over my head, but the content is superb!

oh, and also this individual, whom some of you might know from this place.

okay, i get it now. wordpress.com statistics being necessarily generalistic, i failed to understand, back when i had the otherwhirled on wordpress.com, just how many of my visitors were really just spam-whores looking for ways to sell their wares. in fact, as i noted over on Jonestown in the comments the other day, spam-whores still visit the now-defunct otherwhirled at a rate of several hundred per day. now that the otherwhirled has been on its own domain for several months, i begin to perceive:

1. that i generally enjoy somewhere between 20-30 actual visitors per day.
2. that in part this is because i haven’t spent a lot of time getting the domain registered with all the search engines.
3. but also that i alone am not really all that funny. i draw this conclusion both from the visitation numbers and the number of comments.
4. especially when my work-load of late has forced me to not be very consistent with the quantity and frequency of my posts.

i think this is also largely because i’m being a one-hit wonder in that all i do is snark on photos. i’m not that eloquent of a writer, and i frankly spend so much of my life in PhotoShop and Adobe Camera Raw that to a large degree, the last thing I want to do in my free time is manipulate someone else’s photographs.

there are some elements of this that i cannot really change. clients and family have to come first, and so do certain other activities (i’m one of our state’s handful of soccer referee instructors, and am just a few months shy of being expected to start teaching TaeKwonDo classes on my own). the thing is, i don’t want to stop doing what i do here, especially with at least another 9 months on the contract for domain services, and i don’t want to mix it with my personal blog. as for the latter matter, i don’t really have a good reason as to “why” i don’t want to mix the two, i just feel it would be better if i didn’t. and because hardly anyone spells my name right and my personal blog is one of the ‘original’ vanity domains (i got the domain back in 1995).

so, i’m wondering something. i had this idea, for what it’s worth, a long time ago, back during the summer when Tengrain and Dr. Monkey von Monkerstein were kind enough to guest-blog for me, in fact. so at the risk of appearing to rip off an idea from Fairlane, if the 20-30 of you are aware of anyone who’d like to help the otherwhirled provide something other than snarkery on photos, please invite them to contact me at commander[dot]other[at]otherwhirled[dot]com. the types of things i’d like to do here, but lack the time to do consistently myself:

1. Onion-esque rewrites of news articles.
2. Unique snarkographic imagery.
3. Editorials of social, political, religious, and/or other pertinent topics—with the understanding that political and religious matters are generally considered snarky cannon fodder.
4. Snarkery on the entertainment industry and the public’s tendency towards materialism.
5. Pretty much anything else that fits into those modes of thinking.

ultimately, i would really like to have several good bloggers participate here—i don’t currently have an intention on limiting the number of them, provided we can all get along and support each other even when we might share idealogical differences. i am also willing to extend the offer to moderate and conservative bloggers, again, given the caveat that we treat each other respectfully.

thank you for your time and your assistance. and thank you to those few of you who have kept visiting here over the months.

i will be gone over the extended weekend, leaving sometime this afternoon and coming back Sunday morning.

in my absence, i offer up some link love to blogs which i’ve noted have recently linked me, and blogs which i’ve simply been remiss not to link to of late. plus some “oldies but goodies” that should be part of your standard blog-reading anyway. at least in MY humble opinion, for whatever that’s worth….

and i’m linking to these folks in thanks for their daily contributions to my good humor, by the way. this has been a very important thing this year. i wouldn’t be sane without ‘em all!

• Life & Times of NotSoccer mom. yes, even though i’m a soccer dad.
• Say What?! signs of the times. funny stuff. i have things from here in Sioux Falls i should obviously be submitting.
• Little Bang Theory. just because you should. good writing and good content.
• The Great Endarkenment. frequently channels our inner sixth grade fuck.
• The Future Was Yesterday. oh, yes it was. weren’t you paying attention?
• Namaste. the tagline is over my head, but the content is superb!

if this other thing i’m working on right now continues to take forever to upload, i’ll get those folks above blogrolled post-haste.

as well, you should be visiting these blogs on a regular basis.

• Mock, Paper, Scissors. if for no other reason than the fact that Tengrain has a cool moniker.
• Monkey Muck. because he can.
• Jonestown. it’s not just Fairlane anymore.
• Sorghum Crow’s General Store. it’s not just for breakfast anymore!
• Darkblack. which, incidentally, is how i like my coffee, even though i’m prone to putting other things in it.
• Blue Gal. because she’s the coolest ever.
• Capn’ Dyke, Lesbian Pirate Queen. commander other lykes pyrates. he likes ‘em a lot, he does.

now, what’re ya doin’ lazing about this ol’ place? get ye off ta readin! i’ll be back in a few.

‘Grain, and Monkey are welcome to cross-post here in my absence. of course i do a terrible job of fore-warning them on such matters, but there you have it. if they don’t post anything while i’m gone, it’s because they obviously hate me. and you, their loyal readers, of course! (i kid, i kid!)

wondering why I haven’t been posting as much recently? wonder no more. i finally have the new fine-art site launched. yippee!

…fwiw, largely because i have not been lacking in the business. my apologies to the five or six of you who check in here regularly to see what i’m not doing and how funny i am not being.

parts of what is eating my time and/or my mental energy is minimally alluded to here and certainly consumed here (because “here” is not just “there”, but it’s also my presence on two other websites), while also trying to get my fall wedding shoot finished up and out for proof. wheee!

i’ll try to get back to teh funny as soon as i can. i also turn 41 this week. commander other is not getting any younger. dammit.

dunno why or how. stuff happens, i guess. we’ll have ‘em back on as soon as we can!

sorry, kids. i’m ‘way up north’ in Aberdeen, SD for the state high school tournament. i meant to be posting each night while i’m here, but last night turned into a long evening of discussions on all the politics and other things that infest any such organization, so not only did i not get to post last night, but i didn’t even get to catch up on my favorite blogs! my life feels so incomplete

the tournament, if you care, is going well thus far. it actually starts today, but yesterday there were several “play-in” games: last chances for teams tied on points to get into the tournament. sadly, some boys and girls will be back in school on friday despite their best efforts.

anyway, i’ll post some things tonight and get back on the ball here, so to speak. sorry to leave you hanging. i’m sure your lives are nearly as incomplete without me as mine is without you. or, not.

seeing as i so rarely actually write on the otherwhirled, i figured i should broadcast that i actually wrote something.

weird, i know, but there you have it.

Trolls are one of my favorite things. I don’t collect troll dolls or anything, nor do I amass a collection of troll-doll paraphernalia. In fact, the little troll dolls kinda creep me out, to be perfectly honest. That’s why I’m not actually talking about them. The trolls I like are the ones you find on blogs—the kind of person whom, by the way his (and trolls are normally male and don’t seem to mind letting us know this) fingers punch about on the keyboard, one can readily recognize as “someone who doesn’t get out much”. And if he does happen to “get out much”, one can readily discern that his interaction with the universe is relatively—possibly even exclusively—so hideously self-absorbingly anthropomorphic, that his ability to interact on what most of the rest of us would consider to be a common level of awareness, is severely lacking.

Okay, so those several sentences above have probably already driven Bing and every other well-educated reader of this blog mad with their poor constructions. This is one of the reasons why I don’t write much. Since, when I try to plan a written thing out, I never seem to get it done, stream of consciousness is pretty much my only viable method of operation. Which, by the way, is something I will admit to having in common with what many people complain about trolls doing: the stream of consciousness thing. However, if one thinks about that a bit more clearly, one would be reminded that stream of consciousness is the basis of most oral conversation, and the expectation that written conversation be any different is at least slightly misplaced. At least, I don’t tend to treat conversation in the same vein as discourse, anyway.

At any rate, I always enjoy it when a troll comes along on a blog I read frequently. Naturally, this happened recently during a period when I’ve not only not been able to post here as much as I would like, but also have had to curtail my reading a bit as well, despite the realization that I am slowly becoming a better person for continually reading each and every one of the blogs that I have so conveniently linked on the right. Hey, did I digress again? Hush.

To repeat myself (it’s a talent), at any rate, I enjoy the trolls, but not so much that I want to have them around me all the time. That was actually one of the considerations for the format of the otherwhirled, truth be told. I know my captions and titles may piss some people off from time to time, but I’m an avid believer in the principle, “If you can’t take a joke, then get the hell out of the kitchen.” Or something like that. Anyway, I’ve had a couple of people not understand that what I do here is satire, but I don’t get much trolling because I rarely expound upon a particular subject. However, I used to deal quite frequently with trolls on a now-defunct blog I used to participate in daily. We have some particularly charming trolls out here in the hinterlands…er, I mean, the northern Midwest…and I’ve been missing their company—not really enough to remain involved in some of the other blogs these particular trolls frequent, but I’ve missed them nonetheless.

So imagine my initial joy to discover a troll over at Jess‘s and Fran‘s places! Followed closely on, of course, by a modicum of depression due to the fact that I discovered this troll rather late in the game, and he seems to already be gone. Sigh. If there is any Justice in the Universe, She is a high-handed bitch. Damn, there I did it again, going and digressing in just two sentences. See? I suck at this.

You may enjoy skating on over to the following threads where our most recent troll outbreak has been spotted. I think he’s pretty much done now, but perhaps he can be coerced to pipe up with additional examples of his personal inadequacy in the near future. Perhaps I’ll even get lucky and he’ll come over here and piss in my back yard for a while.

• FranIAm’s War…What is it good for? Absolutely nothing! Say it again!
• FranIAm’s Sophie Scholl – Or why we must expand and not contract in the face of fear
• Jess Wundrun’s Could it have been me?

Relatedly, I’ve read this article before, but I’m still not convinced it’s entirely helpful in the way I want it to be. Of course, that’s probably just because I enjoy poking trolls (and poking them and poking them and poking them) and watching them spew ever more incoherently and passionately until they have to stop because their heart rate is giving them fits. Of course, I realize that’s at least partially due to the fact that I keep in touch with my semi-sadistic inner child and give him food and water every day, but it’s also because it violates one of the principles behind the practice of trolling, which succinctly is, “No backsies!”

Anyway, if you want a bit of fun, go read the troll, and Jess and Fran’s fine rebuttals to his missives. I will say this for him: He types pretty well for having one hand down the front of his pants.

My friend Todd was allowed to reprint a Media Matters report that exemplifies the right-wing butt-fuckery of the press, which incidentally gives me an excuse to use a quote that’s from a not-very-popular guy, but which is still one of my favorite quotations on the media.

Read Todd’s post on rebutting the idea of a “Liberal” South Dakota newspapers.

….instead of pasting images of His Majesty the Thumbsucker into blog posts and writing quippy comments.

recent changes to the Blogroll:

• Southern Beale ~ she’s a Scorpio AND a photographer, so i almost wouldn’t give a crap about her political affiliation, but that seems properly aligned as well. added today via a link from Sadly NO!
• Cap’n Dyke ~ she’s just cool, and being a RenFaire freak, i can get into the piratey improprieties just fine. added last week, methinks.
• ClapSo ~ also added when i moved the blog to this domain, i believe. i very much enjoy his perspective.

You may have noticed some slight changes to this here bloggy-place I call “the otherwhirled”.

Maybe. Even though the thingy on the right says only ten of you subscribe to my RSS feed, the server metrics software claims I get over 150 pulls on the standard feed URI daily (even though feedburner is supposed to divert those requests to itself), so it’s quite possible that many of you have no idea what the site looks like at all!

At any rate, I added a Google Gadget to the bottom of the left side-bar on the right (and the left side-bar is on the right almost exclusively so that I could refer to it as the “left side-bar on the right”) because Mrs. Other was somewhat responsible for its creation. Or actually very responsible. And because I think it’s just nice to see a government initiative that is genuinely focused on finding ways to make beneficial use of old satellite data instead finding ways to use it against the citizenry.

I also finally found a decent social bookmarking plugin. I use these things a lot, when they exist on the blogs I read, and I’d like to ask you to do the same in return. More people should be aware of my ineffectual ramblings, after all. The plugin supports something like over fifty social bookmarking networks, so if you don’t see one that you prefer to use, drop me a comment and I’ll add it in.

Yeah, I still can’t bring myself to put GW’s vacant stare on my blog today, sorry. We’ll return to the regular programming later this afternoon.