Looking forward to seeing Tantek Çelik, who has been a fixture at every IndieWebCamp I have attended, and Marty McGuire, who I met at the last IndieWebCamp in NYC. The rest of the attendees I’m not as familiar with. Should be a fun day, following Yom Kippur, which is substantially less fun.
Notes
Kind:After 3 weeks, finally starting my 21 hour journey home.
It is the most mainstream of the plugins I’ve developed, but has only 30 active installations, which suggests location may not be important to that many people who have WordPress sites, or I haven’t made the plugin good enough. I’m working on the latter now. Anyone have any suggestions?
I got to attend the Leadership Summit, for community leaders(apparently I am one), where we agreed we needed to meet more often to organize our efforts…and got some Indieweb stickers. Despite my misgivings, we now have an Indieweb WordPress chat room as part of the Indieweb suite of chat rooms. So far, it has kept the WordPress stuff in one place.
My attachment to WordPress and involvement in the community seems to have made me an ‘authority’ on the current state of how Indieweb concepts apply to WordPress(which, by the way, runs this site). And we have accomplished a lot this month…with many Indieweb plugins seeing updates.
I always feel inspired to work on my Indieweb projects after meeting inspiring people, like the great Ryan Barrett, who maintains Bridgy, the software that translates likes and comments on Facebook and Twitter into comments on my site. It’s fortunate that I have nothing to do but eat, sleep, and work in Manila, because it has given me a chance to continue that inspiration.
Here’s hoping for more Indiewebcamps. Anyone interested in one in New York?
And now, onward and outward.
After three days, I have given up on directory by genre and am going solely with artist. Meanwhile, I am still trying to fix the genre settings for music players that use them. Allan Sherman is not genre Christmas. The Beatles are not Data. Someone contributed this data to a service. I’m not sure if they were not messing with me.
I have organized much of the files, but it looks like I’ll have to do an audit of all music I backed up from CD, because the auto-organizing tools seem to have reclassified a lot of material. But, for now, I’m pausing with forty-nine gigabytes worth of MP3s and a lot more tagging. Organization is frustrating.
For reasons unknown as all she knew of him was from the newspapers, Sands believed in Arthur and wrote to him with advice and encouragement many times over the next few years. Some of the letters survive, including the first.
‘Your kindest opponents say ‘Arthur will try to do right’ – adding gloomily – ‘he won’t succeed though making a man President cannot change him.’…But making a man President can change him! Great emergencies awaken generous traits which have lain dormant half a life. If there is a spark of true nobility in you, now is the occasion to let it shine. Faith in your better nature forces me to write to you – but not to beg you to resign. Do what is more difficult & brave. Reform! It is not proof of highest goodness never to have done wrong, but it is proof of it, sometimes in ones career, to pause & ponder, to recognize the evil, to turn resolutely against it.“
She goes on later to write:
“How sad it must be for anyone to look back and feel that the best strength of their manhood has all been wasted on unworthy ends. For your own sake and for the sake of those who love you, do not fill your life with actions which afterwards bring you only regret. Go back to Washington – forget New York, political strife and personal animosity. Remember that you are President of the United States – work only for the good of the country. And bear in mind, that, in a free country, the only bulwark of power worth trusting, is the affection of the people.”
Arthur surprised people. Having been a direct beneficiary of the political spoils system, he nevertheless participated in dismantling it and pushing for civil service reform. Admittedly, there aren’t that many parallels between Donald J Trump and Chester A. Arthur, but the often forgotten legacy of Chester A. Arthur is that a man can be changed by the realities of the Presidency.
Went over to the Bethel Woods museum as part of a drive to see some of the Fall Foliage.
Through December 31st, they have a Special Exhibit on the photos of LIFE Magazine photographer Grey Villet that is worth seeing. Apparently there is also a book of his photos that might be published. Villet photographed Batista and Castro, Martin Luther King, and more.
Their general exhibit on the history of Woodstock was also worth seeing. Woodstock began as a financial enterprise…..a music festival that had so many attendees show up that the organizers quickly realized they couldn’t possibly take tickets and made the concert free. Tickets cost $18 in advance and 186,000 tickets were sold, but more than double that amount actually showed up. It must have been an amazing sight.