Month: August 2005

Unusual: Visitors to the No Child Left Behind page on the Texas Education Agency’s web site are greeted with a quote from Emma Goldman. It’s a fuzzy little quote about kids, but Emma Goldman? The “anarcho-communist known for her anarchist writings and speeches”? On a Texas state government web page? Unusual.

What business can learn from open source. “I suspect professionalism was always overrated– not just in the literal sense of working for money, but also connotations like formality and detachment. Inconceivable as it would have seemed in, say, 1970, I think professionalism was largely a fashion, driven by conditions that happened to exist in the twentieth century.”

We Stand on Guard for Thee: Canada’s Comic-book Heroes. Including Canada Jack: “This acrobatic adventurer first appeared in the March 1943 issue of Canadian Heroes, a comic published by Montreal’s Educational Projects. Jack was athletic, but wasn’t endowed with superhero-level powers; he fought evil as an accomplished gymnast, horseback rider and jiu-jitsu expert. Unlike Johnny Canuck, most of Jack’s adventures kept him on the homefront fighting saboteurs, kidnappers, firebugs, and POW escapees. He was helped by members of the Canada Jack Club, a children’s group organized to support the war effort.”

I’m back!
For those who didn’t figure it out, the web hosting company that is home to crabwalk.com was befallen by a very unfortunate circumstance about two weeks ago. That unfortunate circumstance was letting its servers go too long without preventative maintenance and watching the whole shebang crash — without there being any backups of user data.
In other words, crabwalk.com was gone.
The hosting company told us customers a data-recovery process would bring back “95 to 100 percent” of the files our web sites are built on. After two weeks of delays, it turned out that, in my case at least, the more precise number proved to be zero percent. The big goose-egg. That includes crabwalk and five other sites I run, all toast.
The only saving grace was that the underlying database that runs crabwalk was untouched, so I could rebuild a big chunk of the site with some techsweat. And judicious use of search functions, the Wayback Machine, and every last corner of my hard drive has brought back nearly every last byte of crabwalk. (As far as I can tell, the only thing irredeemably missing is a scary old photo of Suze Orman. Sadly, it appears lost to the ages.)
Anyway, poke around and let me know if there’s anything that seems off. Over the next few days, I hope to get my other sites back online.
And, oh yeah, I just got back a few hours ago from vacation in Argentina, Uruguay, and Chile. It rocked. Perhaps more about that later, including my secret plan to become Uruguay’s benevolent philosopher-king.