Author: Wil

I am joining a growing list of Americans who oppose the confirmation, of Alberto Gonzales for Attorney General.

As the prime legal architect for the policy of torture adopted by the Bush Administration, Gonzales’s advice led directly to the abandonment of longstanding federal laws, the Geneva Conventions, and the United States Constitution itself. Our country, in following Gonzales’s legal opinions, has forsaken its commitment to human rights and the rule of law and shamed itself before the world with our conduct at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib. The United States, a nation founded on respect for law and human rights, should not have as its Attorney General the architect of the law’s undoing.
In January 2002, Gonzales advised the President that the United States Constitution does not apply to his actions as Commander in Chief, and thus the President could declare the Geneva Conventions inoperative. Gonzales’s endorsement of the August 2002 Bybee/Yoo Memorandum approved a definition of torture so vague and evasive as to declare it nonexistent. Most shockingly, he has embraced the unacceptable view that the President has the power to ignore the Constitution, laws duly enacted by Congress and International treaties duly ratified by the United States. He has called the Geneva Conventions “quaint.”
[. . .]
With this nomination, we have arrived at a crossroads as a nation. Now is the time for all citizens of conscience to stand up and take responsibility for what the world saw, and, truly, much that we have not seen, at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere. We oppose the confirmation of Alberto Gonzales as Attorney General of the United States, and we urge the Senate to reject him.

While it is vital that we defeat our enemies, we must not become them in the process. As a nation, we must stand united against Albert Gonzales and everything he represents. Torture is not an American value.

I’ve run into a database error with MT-Blacklist, and until I get it worked out, I have to manually approve or deny comments, and it’s taking up a lot of time. It turns out that spammers totally ::heart:: my blog. It also means that if I’m AFK for an extended time, non-typekey users won’t get their comments added to the site for a loooong time.
So until I get this issue worked out, I’m changing my blog configuration to only accept comments from TypeKey users.
Now, listen, privacy is a big deal with me. Here’s what they say about it:

What about my privacy?
We’re committed to providing a service that respects user privacy. Therefore, we will not publish information that you have not chosen to make public, nor will we share your information without your explicit permission. We’re not in the business of selling email addresses, and we give users the option to choose whether they’d like to send their email address to the sites which they are commenting on.

I’m pretty comfortable using Typekey, for what that’s worth. I don’t mind being held accountable for my comments, either, and I believe that the vast majority of WWdN readers feel the same way. Actually, we’ll see how it goes with Typekey enabled. Maybe it will bring back some of the cool interaction that we used to have here a few years ago.
There’s more information about the service in the Extended TypeKey FAQ, and readers are always encouraged to privately share their thoughts with me via e-mail.

They say that when you have an audition, you have to walk in there like you don’t give a shit. You walk in there like you don’t give a shit, and you walk out with the part, because if you don’t give a shit, that’s when they want you.
But you’ve read the script, and it is good. So good, in fact, you fall in love with it. You fall madly, passionately, crazy in love with the script, and you’ll do anything to be one of the people chosen to bring the script to life.
You think about it all the time. You wake up in the middle of the night, imagining what it would be like to spend ten weeks on location or four seasons on the set. You get lost on your way to the post office, because you’re wondering who your competition is. You can’t eat, you can’t sleep, you can’t focus on anything else . . . you are in love, after all.

In the days before your audition, you do everything you can to be ready. First, you get to know your character. If you’re lucky, he’s a guy you know. Maybe he’s even you. Not the current you, usually, but still You. A younger you, a more passionate you, a more idealistic you; the You who you were before you fell in love with too many scripts and had your heart broken too many times to count . . . the you who was incapable of walking in there like you didn’t give a shit, because it felt so good to be in love. Then you learn your lines. You spend hours in your house or your apartment reading them out loud, scaring your dogs, worrying your neighbors, annoying your roommates who are sick to death of hearing about The Script. They’ve heard it all before, and you’ve made an unspoken pact among you: you don’t tell them how crushed you are when you don’t get the job, and they pretend not to notice how you wear the same clothes and drink heavily for five days after you get The Call.
The day of the audition finally comes. Your first date. Your big date. Your only date. You spend too much time putting yourself together. You carefully choose your clothes and style your hair a minimum of three different times. Maybe you spray on some cologne, because it makes you feel attractive. Maybe.
You drive to the studio, and hope your voice doesn’t break when you tell the guard that you’re going to Bungalow 15. You park, walk across the lot, and your palms sweat when you sign in. You wait for what seems like an eternity, surrounded by actors who are younger, taller, better looking than you. Actors who clearly don’t give a shit because they don’t have to. You know that they don’t love The Script like you do, haven’t put in the time that you have . . . but it doesn’t matter. You’ve been here before and you’ll be here again, long after they’ve left for location.
Your heart throbs in your chest when they call your name. You smile, take a deep breath, and stand up.
And then you walk into the room, and you’re supposed to act like you don’t give a shit.
Yeah. Right.

Embiggened by the success I had installing Debian Sarge on my desktop machine, I upgraded to Movable Type 3.14 from 2.661 today.
So far, the upgrade has been mostly painless, but I have encountered a few headaches, which I may go into another time. I’m glad that I exported my entire blog before I started, that’s for sure.
It looks like the comments have vanished all the way back until December, and I don’t know if they’re even working right now, but I’ve been here for hours, and now it’s time for dinner. I kinda hate computers right now.
If anyone notices anything strange, post a comment (if you can) or drop me an e-mail, if you don’t mind.
Update: Comments don’t work. They time out for me, and I hear via e-mail from a lot of WWdN readers that they are encountering various errors that sound MT-Blacklist related.
I’d love to sit here for another few hours and figure it out, but I’m tired, my back is sore, and I have an audition tomorrow. I’ll try to fix it later this week if I get some time.
Other than this incredibly annoying problem (which is probably my fault, like I forgot to set some stupid file to 755 or something) and a massive slowdown (which is probably server-related) the upgrade looks great. I especially like how 3.14 handles plugins.
So if you’re having problems commenting, I know. No need to e-mail about it. However, if you’re an MT user, and you’ve had any problems like this upgrading, I’d love to hear how you got around it.
Oh, if you’re looking for actual weblog content, I recorded an audioblog on Friday called “Wanting . . . “.
Update the second: Comments are making it through, because MT-Blacklist (2.04b) is e-mailing them to me, which is weird because I didn’t configure it to force moderation of new comments . . . but even when I approve them, they’re still not showing up. Maybe it’s a template thing.
Tell you what, I’ve learned a whole lot about MT because of this little snag . . . sort of how I learned a whole lot about recompiling a kernel when my machine puked recently.
So to review — things breaking: bad. Learning stuff while you fix things: good.
Update the last: I converted my database from Berkeley db to MySQL, and everything seems to be magically working. Cool!
The conversion was 100% painless. I edited two lines of mt.cfg (with vim, of course) and ran a perl script to do the conversion. I have about sixteen billion entries and comments and stuff, though, so it took about three hours to convert . . . but I just sat here at my desk and watched the update scroll by while I worked on my audition.
By the way, this pilot I’m reading for today is the best pilot I’ve seen in ages. Maybe five years or so (I use five, six, and nine years as benchmarks, because that’s how long I’ve been married, lived in this house, and known Anne, respectively).
Update the last, for reals this time: Got back from the audition to find a blog positively overflowing with spam. Tried to login to MTBL, discovered that since I switched to the new database, MTBL thinks I have an invalid username. D’oh! Until I get that worked out, I’ve turned on a MT feature which will only allow comments from people who are registered Typekey users. It’s free, it’s not that big a hassle, and it could be a week or more before I finally work out all these issues . . . so if you’d like to post a comment, get yourself an account, just like my typekey profile whydontcha.

Can’t get enough of my sweet, sweet voice? You’re in luck!
(Hrm. That’s supposed to be mildly amusing . . . but it seems more creepy, doesn’t it? Oh well)
Anyway, I did an interview with The Dragon Page and it’s up on their website. You can podcast it, tune in online and listen to the stream, or just grab the damn mp3 file yourself and listen in xmms, or winamp, or whatever audio player you like.
Or not. I’m not the boss of you.
And while you’re there, you should take a second and read the review of Just A Geek by Evo Terra. The most important bit, I think, which I would appreciate everyone who reads my blog spreading around is:

Uber-geek Trek fans looking for the dirty nasties which happened behind-the-scenes of the show are going to be disappointed. There are no tales of late night coke-parties which ended with Dr. Crusher and Councilor Troy bumping uglies, no recitations of the time Picard stuck a flattened tribble on his head and ran around the set saying “I