Month: July 2012

Homegrown fascists. Ok, petty tyrants.

I got an email invitation from my local freecycle group about a nearby event. I decided to enquire as to whether they were a different group from the one who gave me a hard time here a few years back. I don’t know, something about the tone just set me off.

Surprisingly, they doubled down on it. The mod who replied gave me some malarkey, supplied some unsupportable “facts” that I was told four years ago had been deleted. So are they lying now? Or were they lying then?

The fact of the matter is that by accusing me of sending a message that no one besides “Morris” ever saw, they are admitting to moderating all messages. So they can’t prove I did anything wrong but their case hangs on their own misbehavior. And they would rather defend that than own up, even now, almost four years on.

I guess I should be glad moderating a freecycle group for unlawful conversation keeps them busy. We have enough sociopaths in power at much higher levels.

encumbered time

One of the many things parenthood doesn’t prepare you for is the notion of encumbered time. The word “encumber” is usually associated with a burden but that’s not the sense in which I am using it.

The concept of an encumbrance I have in mind is how it’s used in government financials, where an amount of money is said to be “encumbered” or assigned and allocated to a defined purpose. It’s not spent – in fact it may never be spent – but it exists on paper for a specific purpose. It can’t be reallocated or reassigned to some other purpose without being unencumbered, usually a hassle and considered a sign of poor planning.

So encumbered time is time that is allocated to a purpose that can’t be used in any other way. For example, time spent taking someone to an appointment is time in which you are not engaged but that you can’t put to it’s best use. Sure, you could knit or read a book or harass politicians on Twitter. But you can’t paint that room or weed that garden bed because you’re not there. A job is not encumbered time, nor is any household task in which you are actively engaged: my definition means time when you are not part of what’s going on. It’s not for you.

There is a lot of that when you have kids or a family of any size. And it’s not new. Generations before us have experienced it. The concept of a name for it just came to me recently. And it’s not a case of resenting it or regretting the choices that brought you here so much as knowing what it is, of understanding it through naming it.

Not worth Google’s time or mine, I think

So much for the promise of website advertising. I didn’t expect to get rich. The ads presented have no contextual relationship to the content, it’s no surprise the click through rate is abysmal.

Screen Shot 2012-07-07 at 9.51.31 AM.png

This is over several years, since March 2008, not a monthly payout. Since you don’t a check til your total reaches $100, I should see a payment in June 2014.

hey, I wrote moar code

I wanted to see what posts were being shared through Google+. 

#!/usr/local/bin/bash
echo "
    "
for i in `grep google-plus /var/log/httpd/httpd-access.log | cut -d" " -f7 | sed 's|?share=google-plus-1||g'`; 
do export URL=http://paulbeard.org$i ; echo -n "
  1. " ; GET $URL | grep \a crank's progress › //g' | sed 's|||g' | cut -d"< " -f1 ; echo "
    2. " 
done 
echo "
"

Ugly, I know. Don’t ask how much time I wasted trying to get a regex that would pull the title text from between the title tags. I could use sed to remove text but not match and retain. As the quote runs,

Some people, when confronted with a problem, think
“I know, I’ll use regular expressions.” Now they have two problems.

*sigh*