For many moons now, I've neglected the NoodleFood comments. However, I've seen the error of my ways! Over the past few weeks, I've been making an effort to remedy that, simply by replying more often. I plan to continue doing the same.
You can...
Due to the debate about the NYC Mosque, the comments have been unusually busy these past few days. I've been unusually busy too, such that I've not had time to do more than skim many comments. That's not going to change for the foreseeable future, so I wanted to clarify my position vis-à-vis the comments, not just the comments here, but also on my Facebook page. I don't want anyone to think that I'm satisfied with everything that's being said -- because I'm not.
Ordinarily, I screen the comments for personal attacks, albeit in a loose way. I'm not so concerned if people posting in the comments lob the occasional insult at each other, provided that the discussion stays reasonably civil overall. However, I don't want people launching personal grenades aimed at Objectivist intellectuals not involved in the discussion. That's unfair to them. In general, I want people to argue the issues, not to attack their opponents.
(For the record, I made some mistakes in that regard early in this debate, for which I've apologized in the relevant venues. I'm not immune from error, but I'm trying hard to stay above the fray.)
Right now, I don't have time to screen the comments, although I've seen much that I've found objectionable. Rather than shut down the comments entirely, I'm operating them on a "judge, and prepare to be judged" policy for the next few weeks. Basically, unless the sight of another comment from you makes me want to puke my guts and tear my hair out, I'm going to allow it. You're welcome to judge other people for their comments -- and be judged for your comments in turn. I would ask, however, that you keep those judgments out of the comments. If you don't ... well ... you can expect to be judged for that.
Personally, I'm disheartened to see some personal attacks on Leonard Peikoff in these comments. I respect Leonard Peikoff hugely, despite this disagreement. He's an honorable man in my book, whatever his anger toward people who hold my views. He cares about the future of this country deeply -- and he's fought for decades to save it. He deserves better than to be casually dismissed, as if he's not thought about his views, even if you think his position utterly wrong.
If I can keep that context -- even though I'm deeply, personally hurt by some of his remarks in his podcast and distressed by the unjust attacks on me by some people unleashed as a result -- then you can too. Please, make an effort.
Also, please remember that you're to wrap up any discussion of this topic by the end of today.
The Disqus comments are having some kind of problem, such that some people aren't able to post. Disqus says they're undergoing maintenance, so I hope the problem will be resolved soon. In the meantime, don't despair!
Update: Yay! The comments seem to be working again. Feel free to try posting test comments on this thread.
Later today, I hope to do the Great Blogger Migration for NoodleFood. It has to get done pronto, as FTP publishing will be discontinued tomorrow. So... if NoodleFood goes all wonky for you today, just come back later. By Monday, everything should be straight. If you encounter anything amiss on Monday, please drop me an e-mail.
Unfortunately, the Migration is seriously hampered right now by the fact that we don't have power in the house due to some major electrical problems in the line between the pedestal and the house. My DSL modem and laptop are running on battery for now, but my web development files are all on my iMac desktop. That's a problem!
If I get desperate, I might have to move my iMac down to the barn! (That runs on a separate line.)
Last week, I totally blew past the NoodleFood blogiversary. As of March 4th, 2010, I'd been blogging for eight years. (EIGHT YEARS!!!) In that time, NoodleFood has published 4,125 posts. (4,125 POSTS!!!) That's pretty awesome.
Hooray for me! Hooray for my co-bloggers! Hooray for my commenters! Hooray for my readers!
Blogger has decided -- for seemingly good reasons -- to stop allowing publication of blogs via FTP. Hence, I need to migrate NoodleFood and my other blogs to Google "custom domains." My blogs will still use their existing domain names (i.e. not blogspot.com), but they'll be at subdomains hosted by Google. NoodleFood, for example, will be at blog.dianahsieh.com.
You won't need to change your bookmarks or update your feed: everything will be redirected. However, you'll notice a change in the template, as now I'll be able to take advantage of Blogger's "Layouts," including its various cool widgets. Also, I'm going to switch the comments to some new system -- probably Disqus -- as that's something that I've been meaning to do for quite some time.
I've already done the transfer for some of my blogs, and that's gone well. However, I'm a bit worried about NoodleFood. I have over 4,000 (!!) posts to transfer, and some of my comments scripts will be partially broken.
So here's what's going to happen. I've already posted Sunday's posts. I'm going to work on the migration tonight (Saturday) and tomorrow (Sunday). I hope to have everything -- except perhaps the comments -- up and running on the new Google domain by Monday.
If something seems really broken, you can always e-mail me at diana@dianahsieh.com. But ... please don't do that until Monday.
As a general matter, I'm happy to post announcements of events of interest to NoodleFood readers -- particularly lectures by Objectivist speakers, calls for activism, and the like. So suppose that you want me to promote your event. What should you do?
Most of all, you need to e-mail me a clear and simple announcement that I can simply quote in a blog post. Links and italics should be HTML-ified, but please don't use any other HTML. All the essential information should be included, but the announcement should be brief.
Also, I need at least 24 hours of lead-time before the announcement must be posted. I prefer a few days though. If time is too short, you can post your announcement in an open thread.
If you'd like other Objectivist bloggers to post the announcement, you can ask me to forward that HTML'ed text to OBloggers. If you want me to send the announcement to OActivists or FRODO, I'll need a text announcement too.
Yes, that's fussy of me. I just don't want to spend my limited blogging time constructing or formatting other people's announcements. However, if you make posting your announcement easy for me, I'll do what I can.
I've decided to take it somewhat easy for the rest of the week, so I won't post another podcast until Monday.
I'd hoped to post my next episode of Rationally Selfish Radio yesterday. However, the topic -- of the proper response to offers of government welfare -- is somewhat tricky, so I want to work out my views carefully. Plus, I have other pressing work. Tomorrow, I'm giving a short talk to Front Range Objectivism on Luck and Liberty, so I need to finish preparing for that. Also, I really want to finish up all the web updates that I started last week. Oh, and I'm trying to get to the bottom of some health problems too -- hypothyroidism, I think. That's taking some time, and I'm just not feeling as zesty for life as usual. So a break seems in order!
From what I hear, some of you could use some time to catch up. So get to it!
In the meantime, enjoy this picture of Conrad playing with a Boxer at the dog park this morning. They were doing more vertical jumping than I've ever seen Conrad do; the Boxer has all four paws off the ground in the picture. (Click for the full-sized version.)
The slew of changes required to divide my blogging and podcasting output into distinct streams has gone remarkably well so far. (I planned out the process pretty meticulously, thankfully!) It's now 1 am, so I'm headed to bed. Just know that -- for the moment -- my various web sites are something of a mess. I'll be able to get everything into working order tomorrow -- Saturday, that is.
Read more...I'd planned to record and post my next podcast on design arguments for the existence of God today, but I've decided to delay that until Monday. (I won't have an Explore Atlas Shrugged podcast for Monday. We canceled the Front Range Objectivism Atlas Shrugged Reading Group meetings yesterday due to the snowstorm.)
In the meantime, I'm using the break to massively re-organize my blogging and podcasting output into distinctive streams, based on the nature of the content, with NoodleFood as the river that incorporates everything else. I need to separate out my future career -- that's the practical advice, which I aim to do on radio -- from my other projects and interests. More generally, the division into streams will allow me to market my output more effectively to various groups of people. People will be able to subscribe to all and only what interests them -- whether one or two things or the whole enchilada.
For now, I am creating three distinct streams:
I'm delighted to report that I'm currently averaging over 550 downloads per episode of Rationally Selfish Radio. My traffic is growing in a very nice upward direction, and I've only just begun to promote the podcast.
Hooray me!
As you might have noticed, I updated NoodleFood's template earlier this week. I changed some font and other style settings. I added and removed some links. I still haven't updated my blogroll though. (I'll get to that eventually, I swear!)
I've also pared down the NoodleFoodlers to just Paul, Greg, and me. We've not had any kind of falling out. Rather, given my future career plans, NoodleFood needs to become my own blog again, as opposed to a group blog. As my better half, Paul will remain on NoodleFood permanently. Given Greg's excellent contributions over the years, including during my dissertation crunch, I just couldn't bring myself to give him the boot. Plus, I definitely want him to continue his regular updates on The Objectivism Seminar. However, for the sake of PR, I'll probably demote him to "Guest Blogger" soon, likely when I overhaul the whole of DianaHsieh.com.
I must say, that overhaul is long overdue. For definitive proof, look at the first line in the "about me" on the main page: "I am a graduate student in philosophy at the University of Colorado at Boulder in the process of finishing up my coursework." Ha! That's about two and a half years old!
Craig Biddle, who I recently interviewed for Rationally Selfish Radio was kind enough to post a recommendation of my podcast on Principles in Practice.
Go see what he has to say -- and then check out the podcast for yourself, if you've not done so already!
One of my podcast listeners wrote to me this morning saying that he'd had trouble downloading my latest podcast. My host -- podbean.com -- seemed slow. It seems okay now, however.
If you have similar problems, now or in the future, please drop me an e-mail. I can switch hosts, if necessary.
Much to my delight, Kevin McAllister has agreed to act as the commissioner for a fantasy football league for fans of NoodleFood. Hence, the "John Galt League" has been resurrected!
You need not be an Objectivist to join the league, but you should be a fan of NoodleFood, not hostile to me and mine. Kevin has told me that "If Immanuel Kant tries to join, I'll reject him." (So there, Manny!)
The league will be run on ESPN.com. When I managed the John Galt League two years ago, my greatest frustration was that communication between teams was difficult. So I often felt like I was playing with a bunch of strangers, not friends and acquaintances. To alleviate that problem, I've created a mailing list for the league on Google Groups. That way, we can trash talk at will discuss some of the interesting epistemic and ethical dimensions of the game over the course of the season.
If you want to join the league, you need to sign up with the Google Group. Then we'll all sign up on ESPN, then Kevin will schedule a draft. If you have any questions or problems, please contact Kevin McAllister at kevin@mcallister.ws.
Space is very limited, so sign up now if you want to join.
Thank you, Kevin!
I've created a Twitter feed for NoodleFood posts under the name @NoodleFood. Notably, that new account won't be used for anything other than the blog feed. I don't plan to follow anyone from it. I'll continue to use @DianaHsieh for my real tweets and follows. Of course, I'll likely re-tweet some of my favorite blog posts via @DianaHsieh, but if you want the whole lasagna, follow @NoodleFood.
Wow, I just realized that nothing about that paragraph would have made the slightest bit of sense to me ten years ago, before the rise of blogs, let alone the creation of Twitter. If you're baffled, please just go on your merry way. It's only useful information for people on Twitter.
I'm considering switching the NoodleFood comments to Disqus, as that would enable me to add a whole lot of awesome features without the burden of programming them myself. Any thoughts on that -- or suggestions of alternative systems?
Read more...As I mentioned in Saturday's post, I'm suffering from server problems related to file permissions. Some upgrade to the kernel created security problems, so my internet host turned off chmod access. That wouldn't be so terrible, except that any new file uploaded to the server is now created with permissions of 600 (read and write only for the owner) rather than with 644 (read for all, write only for the owner). I can't change the permissions manually, neither through the shell nor with ftp.
That means that individual pages for new blog posts are not viewable on the web; you'll see an "Error 403: Access Forbidden" page instead.
That sucks hard, particularly because my internet host has only offered vague promises about when the problem will be fixed. Hopefully, some work-around will be hit upon soon, as the current set-up means that all my web sites are either frozen or broken.
In the meantime, you can read posts from the the main NoodleFood page and view and post comments using the "New Page" link at the bottom of the post.
Update: My internet host just finally told me a method by which I can chmod the files manually. That will be a pain, and I can't guarantee that I'll be able to do it pronto, but at least it's something.
NoodleFood is long overdue for an update of its blogroll. I never managed to implement the requested additions posted in these comments back in February. So those requests are on the agenda for this update. If you have a different addition to request, please post a comment with the URL and title below. Thanks! (Please don't e-mail me; I'd like the list of blog to add to be gathered in one place.)
Also, I'd be interested in using some kind of software or service to help me manage my blogroll more easily. I'd like to be able to see which blogs have new posts, to sort blogs by tags and ratings, to see when I last visited them, and so on. Any suggestions?
Due to restricted internet access, posting will be light this upcoming week. I'll post just one thing each day. Also, please don't behave like wild beasts in the comments.
Oh, and please don't e-mail me. I'm unavailable.
I'm Diana Hsieh, a philosopher specializing in practical ethics. I received my Ph.D in philosophy from the University of Colorado at Boulder in 2009.
Paul Hsieh is a physician specializing in orthopedic and emergency radiology. He blogs about science, technology, and random humorous items at GeekPress. He's a co-founder of Freedom and Individual Rights in Medicine (FIRM) and regularly writes for its blog, We Stand FIRM. He has published a slew of op-eds and essays on health care policy. You can e-mail Paul at paul@paulhsieh.com, and follow him on Twitter @PaulHsieh.
Greg Perkins is a software architect working in the R&D labs at Hewlett-Packard, Boise. His degree is in mathematics and computer science. Greg hosts The Objectivism Seminar. Aside from work and philosophy, he plays jazz saxophone professionally with groups such as The Sidemen and Onomatopoeia. You can e-mail Greg at greg@eCosmos.com, and follow him on Twitter @gregperk.
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