inCommunicado - eric eggertson

The Burke Eggertsons are having a come-and-go thing after Christmas to share a little holiday jollity with friends.

Thursday, December 27, 2007
3 p.m. to 7 p.m.
2920 Regina Avenue
(between Retallack and Robinson)
347-0757
eggertson@gmail.com

Come for a little time, come for a long time…

There will be space for youngish and/or young people to hang out away from the more seasoned guests.

We hope to see you!

I’m getting ready to leave my web hosting service because I am having no luck as a WordPress person.

If you don’t understand servers or WordPress, skip this post.

Permissions on the server have been a sore point from day one.

I can FTP files to the server, but when I try to use WordPress’ admin panel, I can’t install plugins or themes.

My queries to the hosting service result in a combination of responses from “we don’t provide support for any applications you put on our server,” to “gee, you should have told us about that two months ago. It’s a database problem that only we can fix.”

The latest go-round was about trying to get WordPress working, or canceling my account.

Now the server has been configured to allow WordPress to create files, etc., but I can’t FTP anything to the server any more.  I have the option of one method or the other.  So how do I change the images in my WordPress theme?  The files are on my computer.  I want them on the server.  Ugh.  Now I’ll have to go through every fricking option on the server control panel and see if there’s a file upload function that doesn’t involve FTP, or that bypasses the permissions.

My ignorance of WordPress is showing. Why can I only post items to the blog through WordPress, or via FTP, but not both?  How can you even use WordPress if you have no control over any of the files on the server, except what WordPress lets you do?  Back to WordPress to go laboriously through every fricking menu option to see where File Upload is hiding.  Will it let me choose where on the server to post something?  What file path do I use?  This is going to be fun…

I’ll keep trying this weekend, but it’s becoming painfully obvious to me that I just don’t have the technology chops to get everything set up properly, troubleshoot everything, and tweak WordPress. I’ve never given up on a piece of software or a technology environment before because I just couldn’t get it to work properly.  Usually I keep slogging, get a geek friend to help me with the tricky parts, and persevere.

But this business of having tech support that plays cat and mouse with what they will and won’t support is just annoying. This site advertises that they have one-step WordPress installation.  Well, installation hasn’t been the problem. It’s doing anything with it that’s the problem.

Argh.

Every time someone brings up the argument for vegetarianism, my eyes sort of glaze over. It’s not that I disbelieve the world would be a better place if we ate more beans and less meat. I just start to go into shock at the thought of leaving meat behind.

Today I read an argument that your food choice make a big difference in the amount of water used. A pound of potatoes: 24 gallons. A pound of beef: 5,214 gallons. After all these years of having “environmental impact” and “environmental footprint” thrown at me, I see it in terms that make sense.

Water conservation has always meant to me fixing dripping taps, improving industrial production, and reducing lawn care in the suburbs…

I’ve known about the argument for eating beans and other things at the bottom of the food chain, but no one ever put it in context of water conservation for me before.

(No, that doesn’t mean you can take 20-minute showers guilt-free if you’re vegan.)

Finding more environmentally-friendly ways to raise cattle is a step in the right direction. I’d find it hard to give up beef altogether.

Now, on to milk. A dairy cow uses 115 litres of water a day? I’m not sure I can handle soy milk to go with my lentils. I’ll have to do more reading on this.

Baby steps, Eric. Baby steps…

Now that I’ve moved the blog from Mutually Inclusive PR on Typepad, it’s time to do some regular posts here.

Thanks for your patience!

Just had some technical difficulties, so to find my posts, go to Mutually Inclusive PR. Hopefully, I’ll have them moved over here soon.

My b5media public relations blog is at http://commonsensepr.com 

For my photos, visit Flickr.

Thanks for dropping by. Hope to see you again soon!

ERIC

My 30 year reunion is coming up this fall, and I’ve said I’d pull together a website. Any suggestions for a good combination of web tools to help people post information, sign up for events, share photos, and generally stay informed about plans?

I’m looking at various wikis as possible platforms for most of the information. And I was assuming I could possibly piggyback on a platform like Facebook, a photo sharing site, or something like that.

Any suggestions would be gratefully appreciated!

Leave me a note here, or e-mail me at eggertson (at) gmail. (dot) com.

Tags: reunions, wvss, high school, wikis, blogs, websites, west vancouver

My favourite geek is coming to a screen near you.

 Starting June 1, Tod Maffin is hosting a live video show on blogtv.ca.

According to the Todster, it’s about personal technology, and will feature 45 minutes of live call-in (via computer) every Friday night.

Tod says he has funding from Alliance Atlantis for the web TV show, which will include visits to various technology companies across Canada.

One thing’s for sure: there’s nothing on regular TV Friday nights to compete.

Good luck, Tod.

Tags: tod maffin, tv, video, canadian, tech, gadgets, todbits, webtv, live, blogtv.ca

We got back to the house at 1:30 this morning from our road trip to Meacham to see James O’Shea’s The Red Truck.

For a play about rural Saskatchewan, the setting is just right. Dancing Sky Theatre operates out of a converted community hall in the village of Meacham, east of Saskatoon. There is room for just over 100 seats, plus a restaurant where you can get a meal before the show.

The silences and pauses are the best part of the play. As funny as many of the lines are, the unspoken disagreement between the farmer and his son say more about their relationship.

O’Shea puts a new twist on the story of passing on the family farm to a new generation. In this case,  the father wants his son to escape the financial burden of keeping a farm running, but the son prefers farming to anything else he’s tried.

Of the staged readings, productions and broadcasts I’ve come across on this subject, most are way too earnest or melodramatic. Nice to see a professional cast breathe life into a good script.

O’Shea’s first play Dogbarked started at Dancing Sky and progressed to the Prairie Theatre Exchange and the Globe Theatre. That’s precisely what a theatre like Dancing Sky is supposed to do: allow Canadian plays to prove there are stories written here that can make good theatre.

The Red Truck, by James O’Shea, directed by Angus Ferguson. Patricia Drake, Tom O’Hara and Rob Roy.  Music by Ernie Kurz, lighting design by Denise Hansen.

See also:  For Love, not Money, Canadian Theatre Encyclopedia, Dogbarked, Dogbarked Study Guide (PDF).

Tags: james o’shea, dancing sky theatre, meacham saskatchewan, the red truck, drama, plays, prairie, playwright

Kelley Jo Burke’s Charming and Rose: True Love is playing Monday and Tuesday night (April 30, May 1) at the University of Regina’s ShuBox Theatre.

Since I’m married to the playwright, I’ll avoid bias and just say this is a superb play that tackles the myth of the perfect woman as defined by controlling men.

Rose is a fairy tale princess who falls for Prince Charming. The results are dramatic. I’ll be there Monday night.  Looking forward to seeing Kate Herriott as the fairy godmother, Greg Ochitwa as Prince Charming, and Talitha Cuthbert as Rose.

Language and sexuality warning, blah, blah.  Call the UofR box office at 585-5500, for tickets, or bug the Theatre department.

Here’s Kelley Jo’s website (just three pages so far, but more to come).

I’ve never recommended a 2-hour podcast segment to anyone before. Hell, I don’t think I’ve ever listened to a 2-hour show before.

But if you’re interested in digital photo formats, the future of photo file compression, industry standards and the quandary of proprietary RAW file formats for every camera brand, you should check out episode 51 of This Week in Media.

TWIM usually covers the film industry from the camera operators’ or special effects persons’ point of view. This week it’s all about digital photo formats, and the status of Microsoft’s HD Photo format.

I’m no math scholar, but I could keep up with the discussion as MS’s Bill Crow explained some of the limitations of JPEG, TIFF, RAW and other file formats. I was also able to keep up when he got into a description of the algorhythm used in the new format, and how it allows for more information to be maintained about what the camera’s sensors picked up.

The payoff at the end of the show (okay, it’s only 1 hour, 53 minutes, not the full two hours) is when they talk about Photosynth, a cool tool Microsoft is developing to analyse and piece together photos from different angles, based on the grouping of objects or surfaces in different photos that are identified to help the tool place the image spatially in a 3-D viewing light table.

What the hell is wrong with the ISP and mobile phone business in Canada?

Gone are the days when you could just buy a service. Now, everything you do is an attempt to reduce the service levels below useless, or ding you for "extras" (no one has the guts to charge extra yet for services like "phone rings when someone’s calling you," but that day will come). It’s all about getting maximum ARPU (average revenue per user).

This week, Tod Maffin got me to fiddle with a Bell cell phone, so he could record the experience for his technology column on CBC Radio. It was rather ironic that two geeks spent a good 10 minutes trying to figure out how to download a movie and watch it on the cell phone. Not only do they want to increase your spending, but they can’t be bothered to make it easy for you to do that.

Today Techdirt has a good piece about Rogers throttling back its Internet speed for customers using torrents and other peer-to-peer downloading services. Their latest step is to reduce the speed of traffic that’s encrypted.

What’s wrong with this picture? One of the most common uses for encryption is e-mail, which should be the fastest thing in the pipeline, not the slowest.

Need more evidence there’s something wrong with service in Canada? Here’s Mark Evans:  Wireless Deals in Canada?; Wow! Signs of Competition in Canada; Less Regulation in Canada, Less Competition.  See also Boris Mann on prices higher than Mexico.

My very small act of defiance was to buy a smart phone that can access wireless LANs instead of tying me to buying all my bandwidth from the phone company. I had to buy a phone from Europe in order to pull that off, because the same phone distributed in North America has the wireless capability removed. (See Boris on his Nokia E61.)

What’s wrong with this picture? I’m having trouble seeing what’s right with this picture. We spend more to get less service, and valuable functions are disabled before they get to market.

Tags: telecoms, rogers, telus, bell, cell phones, mobile, wireless, throttling