My new hosting provider,, textdrive was down for two days. Today dreamhost (which serves up download.openlaszlo.org and Scott Evans' blog went down for eight days straight. Jumpline hasn't ever had any downtime that I noticed, in three years of using it, but there webapp for controlling things was really out of hand bad; the equivalent of voicemail hell. Sarah Allen likes mediatemple, but she's got some sort of relationship with the CTO... and it looks like it's down right now. I'm not sure who hosts Adam Wolff's blog, (but he'll probably see this post because I mention his name). The heavy-hitters I know host their own servers at colos. But come on, I'm just a minor netizen. I want to post my blog and some photos and some swf's. I have this illusion that maybe someday I will want to post a Ruby on Rails app, but really, it hasn't happened yet. However, I think it's crucial that my site is served from my own top-level domain. Maybe Apple has the solution; $99 a year for .mac is not bad compared to $8-$200 a month for downtime-o-rama. Apple software just makes me happy; maybe Apple hosting will, too.
And look, for the record, I can set up my own linux box for development, but I know that I don't know enough to protect a server from all the malware in the world.
I don't think my demands are particularly outrageous, except perhaps that i want all this for less than $200 a year. I'll hang out with TextDrive for a while, maybe actually get a RoR app up.
Maybe this should start being a perk that medium and large businesses can start offering to employees. Companys pay for cel phones and laptops, right? My manager has a few times suggested that I blog on one topic or another -- and the essays that turn up i our blogs are a hell of a lot more readable, opinionated, useful, and timely than the http://wiki.openlaszlo.org which does get quite a bit of atention from the OpenLaszlo team. Email is not enough, people. Corporate IT now takes it as a matter of course that they must maintain email, networking, backups, and applications. I propose that corporate IT also begins supporting the digitial lifestyle of the technorati by solving the "where do I host my blog" problem fof me.

my new place

The sign says "Beach Bungalow" and while that might be technically correct, I'm going to have to think of something better. Any suggestions?

072706_20201.jpg Originally uploaded by sbshine.

after the move

"All your furniture doesn't fit in your new apartment!" the owner said with some dismay, seeing my IKEA POANG chair and LACK coffee table on the back patio. "No," I agreed. "Why is that?" "My last apartment was bigger than this one. It's okay though. I like it here." And I do. The owner runs a shop, and she offered to sell the coffee table for me; the POANG's cushion had been pretty well destroyed by the cats, so I think I'll just use it for outdoor furniture.
The new apartment is maybe half the size of my previous apartment, but I really think I can be happy here. Happier, even -- this might be more of the right place for me than where I was, at Money Village. I took a lot of pleasure from all the manicured landscaping at Money Village, and appreciated the latino men who were always replacing something just past its prime with something about to flower. The sprinkler system -- irrigation, really -- for the gardens bothered me a bit... Not exactly a waste of water, but a gratuitous use of it. The Columbia River died so I could look out on a rich green meadow? (I know my water really comes from the Hetch Hetchy reservoir, but it amounts to the same thing. The Hetch Hetchy valley died so I could look out on a rich green meadow.)
Where I live now is a quiet street in Pacifica, two blocks from the ocean, with rows of single-story houses. Each house has its own garden or lawn or trees, and it's all alive. There are palm trees, and succulents, and flowering vines, and weathered fences, and gravel driveways... and it's beautiful. I don't think these people have landscapers. I think they take care of their yards themselves, and plant a bush or a tree because they plan to enjoy that tree for ten or twenty years. The air is always damp with fog coming off the ocean. My apartment is half the size of my old apartment, but the owner is building a mosaic walkway to the back patio for me, and I think we might become friends. On the wall above my desk is a large-format photo she took of a desert scene; the wall is light mauve; the floor is bamboo. Everything here is here because the owners -- two people-- decided to put it here.
Money Village was a great place to live for a year, and it was a level of luxury that I needed after the scary South Side of Providence. Now I'm happy to be here, cozy and foggy and rich with the opposite of transience.

irony

"The irony is..." that George W. Bush does not know what irony is. Correct me if I'm wrong here, but I'm pretty sure that's ironic. It is also ironic, a different sort of irony closer to cynicism, perhaps tragic irony, that the leader of the most powerful nation in the world, he who holds the reigns to a military, economic, and symbolic power that could actually decrease the violence in the Middle East, is the stupidest, least-diplomatic man to hold that office since the creation of Israel as a modern nation-state.
...all of which is a simplistic analysis that, I'll grant, fails to account for many of the dozens of factors contributing to the tempest of the Middle East... But still! In my simple analysis I still feel secure in claiming this: If the US, in the person of Rice or Bush or Bolton or any of the hawks who communicate US policy to the world, would simply ask Israel to stop bombing Lebanon, then Israel would stop fucking bombing Lebanon.
This precipitating issue, the two kidnapped Israeli soldiers, brings to mind the assasination of Archduke Ferdinand... except that in this case perhaps a dozen US black-ops boots-on-the-ground and a single military helicopter venturing into Lebanon under cover of night could bring the soldiers back to Israel... But then we'd lose the pretense under which the US would, could, will invade and occupy the entire region.
Might, perhaps, the "two kidnapped Israeli soldiers" turn out to be a sham along the lines of babies pulled out of incubators in Kuwait, centrifuge rods and yellow-cake uranium in Africa, secret stashes of WMD to the "north south east and west of Baghdad," and George W. Bush's service in the National Guard? The hawks in this administration have repeatedly fabricated evidence, or expertly deployed fear/uncertainty/doubt, in order to justify their (our, damn it!) political and military actions.
I would have more respect for the neo-cons if they simply declared, to Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Kuwait, and (heck) Saudi Arabia: "We'd like to control the middle east. Please return the keys to your country to the UN, for distribution to the western judeo-christian capitalist democracy of our choice."
Maybe fewer people would die that way.