Since development of DasBlog petered out in 2012, and since I have an entire (size A1) Azure VM dedicated solely to hosting The Daily Parker, I've been looking for a new blog engine for this blog.
The requirements are pretty broad:
- Written in .NET
- Open source or source code available for download
- Can use SQL Server as a data source (instead of the local file system, like DasBlog)
- Can deploy to an Azure Web App (to get it off the VM)
- Still in active development
- Modern appearance and user experience
See? Look-and-feel is in there somewhere. But mainly I want something I can play with.
I'm still evaluating them. This list was really helpful, and pointed me towards the successor to DasBlog, BlogEngine.NET. Mads Kristensen's newest blog engine, MiniBlog, has potential, but it doesn't seem ready for prime time yet.
The changes will come at some point in the next few months, assuming I have time to play with some options and modify the chosen engine to support a few features I want, like time zone support and location tagging. I also want to see about adding completely new features, like Google Timeline integration, or private journals and events, which require encryption and other security measures that blog engines don't usually have. Not to mention the possibility of using DocumentDB as a data source...
Stay tuned. The Daily Parker's 10th birthday is coming in November.
My friend Sara, who has a Ph.D. in psychology, wrote in her blog today about dreaming's influence on inspiration, and incidentally why psychoanalysis isn't science:
REM (dream) sleep specifically is associated with increased abstract reasoning as well as increasing the strength of normally weak associations in the brain (see here). What that means is, two different things that your waking brain might not even see a connection between could become associated rather easily in a dream. Our brain does this kind of linking (neural networking) naturally, and it's a great way to learn new things - by connecting new knowledge you need to memorize to something you already know. Just as you can connect any actor to Kevin Bacon, you can connect any concept in your brain to another. Some connections are more direct than others.
Of course, Freud and other psychoanalytic theorists would state that these strange juxtapositions are simply your subconscious trying to work out any conflicts you're having in your life. In fact, pretty much everything goes back to this idea of the subconscious, at least for psychoanalysts.
Why do we need ... theory and hypothesis if Freud's and other psychoanalysts' theories can sum much of this up, in a neat, Oedipus-complex-themed package? After all, parsimony is an important aspect of science - the simplest explanation tends to be the best one, in the absence of evidence to support one over the other.
But that's the thing - the various social psychological theories outlined above have just that: evidence. Specifically empirical evidence, which is pretty important for science, something I've also blogged about before. In fact, psychoanalytic theories lack the basic ingredients that make them at all scientific: the ability to test these concepts (we call this 'testability') and, if they are false, demonstrate that (we call this 'falsifiability'). If there really are subconscious forces operating in your brain, trying to give you glimpses of what's really bothering you (latent content) but hiding behind symbolism (manifest content), how would we even begin to test this? After all, they're subconscious. But for social psychological theories, such as priming, we may know what evidence we would observe if priming happened and what we would observe if it isn't happening.
You can read Sara's other thoughts on psychology and horror movies at Deeply Trivial.
I've had a lot going on over the past couple of weeks so posting has been a little slow. I spent yesterday at the Bristol Renaissance Faire, following Saturday night's Pentatonix (and, right, Kelly Clarkson) performance, following running around during the day Saturday trying to get everything done ahead of both those events.
I'm a little fried. I'm also apparently slowing my average posting rate, having failed two months in a row to post 40 times. Before June 2015, the last time I failed to post 40 times was in November 2010, during my last month of business school.
Things are moderating, however, and I should resume the usual schedule soon.
Not a lot of time to write today because I'm spending most of the day as CTO and the rest of the day as Lead Developer. The context switches are horrible.
Tomorrow should be a little easier.
And the Daily Parker suffers. This is my 38th post this month, making June 2015 the slowest month on the blog since November 2010, the last month of my MBA.
Let's see if I can do better in July.
...and also preparing for a fundraiser at which I'm performing tomorrow:
And did I mention Apollo After Hours?
Six and half hours at Rockefeller Chapel, a Euchre tournament (my first—middle of the pack), a dinner party, and yet more rehearsals for an April performance all left my weekend kind of full. Somehow I managed to walk Parker enough times and to do laundry.
So, good weekend, full weekend, not exactly the Daily Parker's finest hour.
Regular posting will resume presently.
NPR takes a look at how the Internet never forgets and what that means to people who find themselves going viral:
Some unwitting meme celebrities embrace their fame. Earlier this year the Washington Post profiled Kyle Craven, more popularly known as "Bad Luck Brian," a meme about a boy with hilariously and often very dark bad luck. Craven, who was always a class clown, capitalized on his fame. The Post reports that between licensing deals and T-shirts, he has made between $15,000 and $20,000 in the past three years.
Others have tried to use their Internet fame as a catapult for an entertainment career. Laina Morris' picture is easily recognizable — the bulging, crazy-looking eyes and loopy smile made her best known as the Overly Attached Girlfriend who makes ridiculous demands and accusations. Morris has tried to create a comedic career out of her online celebrity. She has a YouTube channel where she posts skits, and a Twitter account.
But for others, it's a nightmare. Perhaps one of the most notable cases is Ghyslain Raza, "Star Wars Kid," who in 2003 became one of the first viral memes. This was before YouTube launched, and Raza did not even post the video. He simply taped himself doing Star Wars-style fighting for a school video club. His classmates secretly posted the video online, and it spread like wildfire. By the end of 2006, it had been clicked on more than 900 million times. It has more than 27 million views on YouTube and was parodied on Family Guy, The Colbert Report and South Park.
Oh, poor "Star Wars Kid."
My question is, how long until people adapt and wonder what was this "privacy" thing the old people keep babbling about?
After 15 years and hundreds of thousands of posts, Sullivan posted the last Dish entry this afternoon:
I hope that this fifteen-year catalog of insights and errors, new truths and old lies, prejudices and loves, jokes and intimacy, prescience and forgetfulness, will not be taken for anything more than it was, or ever could be. I hope we can all simply look back at the journey, and the laughs we had, and the pain we lived through together and the love that sustained us as a team and as a community, as we struggled together to figure out the truth about the world.
And yes, this was a labor above all of love. Love for ideas and debate, love for America, love for my colleagues, and love, in the end, for you.
I sit here not knowing what to write next. And yet, in the end, it is quite simple.
Know hope.
Earlier today he promised to leave the content up permanently.
The Dish has been my favorite blog for probably 10 years. I'm going to miss Sullivan and his team, and their 50-or-so posts a day. I may have more free time, but the Internet won't be the same.
Good luck, Andrew.
There have been interesting developments in two stories I've mentioned recently:
Otherwise, it's just work work work. But fun work.