the roots of The War On Christmas run deep

Who knew the secular humanists had been working their plan since WWI?
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And as for the old canard that the use of Xmas means that we’re “X-ing out Christ” read on: surely a reporter for the National Review couldn’t be on the side of the atheistic hordes?
John J. Miller on Christmas on National Review Online:

How did Christmas become Xmas?

It’s Greek to us — literally. The Greek word for Christ is Xristos. That’s where the X in Xmas comes from. There’s a Christian website called www.xristos.com. Here’s what it says: Xristos is a transliteration of the New Testament Greek word for Christ “criston.” The Greek letter Chi ‘c’ was retained to insure a connection to the roots and original texts, as well as visually represent the centrality of the cross in all. The visual symbol Chi-ro is also employed at various places by Xristos, recalling one of the earliest practices of the Christian community.

So referring to Christmas as Xmas is no sign of disrespect, as many people believe. But it helps to know its origins.

Knowing origins, or the refusal to think things through, is how these arguments start, after all.
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glad I didn’t read this a month ago

On the advice of Neil Gaiman, I picked up The King of Elfland’s Daughter and looked up some information on the author.

Edward Plunkett, 18th Baron Dunsany – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:

The Gibbelins eat, as is well known, nothing less good than man. Their evil tower is joined to Terra Cognita, to the lands we know, by a bridge. Their hoard is beyond reason; avarice has no use for it; they have a separate cellar for emeralds and a separate cellar for sapphires; they have filled a hole with gold and dig it up when they need it. And the only use that is known for their ridiculous wealth is to attract to their larder a continual supply of food. In times of famine they have even been known to scatter rubies abroad, a little trail of them to some city of Man, and sure enough their larders would soon be full again.

I was a little surprised at this. I won’t say that my NaNoWriMo attempt is similar but there is something in the stuff I wrote that could be a very faint echo of this, though without the bloodthirsty aspect.

The Elfland book seems to be very good. Strong stuff though, needing to be taken in sips, not great draughts.

Now playing: Humpty Dumpty by Aimee Mann from the album “Lost in Space”

analytics

I was lucky enough to get in on Google Analytics (née Urchin) before the registration for testers filled up. I have been running it for a couple of week and every now and again I take a look. (NB: it works in Safari if you resize the text and force the page to render once again after loading. Hat tip to someone somewhere who mentioned that.)

Below the fold is a grab of a recent day’s report.
Continue reading “analytics”

what does the LazyWeb know about iTunes?

So here’s my dilemma. I store my music files on an AppleShare file system, since the iBook I use lacks enough disk to hold it. All is well, most of the time, but occasionally, when iTunes syncs my iPod, it claims it can’t find some files. I can find them and, using Get Info in iTunes, restore iTunes’ awareness of them. Surely, there is some way to find unlinked files programmatically, and best of all, restore those links.

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removing unwanted meta tags in WP 1.5.x

I tried the Geo plugin in my 1.5 install, as I suspected GeoURL wasn’t finding me anymore. Turns out the plugin doesn’t work as expected and doesn’t come with instructions on how to clean up after it.

Took me a few searches of the WP support forum, and finally found something that worked. Go in your mysql database, change to the wp database, and use this:

delete from crank_postmeta where meta_key='_geo_location';

You can of course replace _geo_location with anything you need to clean up. To see what your options are, try:

select * from crank_postmeta;

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Beware Security Update 2005-009: I think it may be flawed

It is killing Mail.app’s performance. Takes forever to open email messages and uses tons of cycles as it tries. I can’t even use it on an 800 MHz iBook.

Apple – Support – Downloads – Security Update 2005-009(Tiger Client) :

Delivers a number of security enhancements and is recommended for all Macintosh users.This update includes the following components:

apache_mod_ssl
CoreFoundation
CoreTypes
curl
iodbcadmin
OpenSSL
Safari
sudo
syslog

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Part the first

This is where I started. I took up an idea I had played with for last year’s NaNoWriMo but had to bail on. I got sick and lost a few days and that blew it for me. What I learned from that comes in two parts. One, don’t quit. Two, don’t force your writing. In a stunt or event like this, quantity over quality is what counts (bear that in mind if you read further).
Continue reading “Part the first”