Got Those Moving On Blues

It may appear I’ve gone on an indeterminant vacation after my recent trip to Colorado, but unfortunately it’s just not so. True, I’m still stuck on some of Steven’s long poems and haven’t decided how I feel about the next section of his poems, but I haven’t JUST been loafing (though I am looking forward to some loafing as soon as I’m done here).

After repeated “outages” on my old ISP, I decided to take Shelley Powers up on her invitation to join her network. As a result, I’ve spent most of the last two days trying to get my site transferred to its new home on the “burningbird.net, and despite Shelley’s reassuring title of “Linux for Poets,” there’s nothing poetic about this technical crap.

If everyday language had been as rigid about grammar as these technical languages, we’d still be wandering alone on the plains of Africa, throwing rocks at our nearest neighbor.

If I’d sent one of my ex-students into the virtual limbo that I was sent into because of a simple extra “/” he would have bolted the educational system and ended his days serving hamburgers at the nearest MacDonald’s.

I assumed that having gone through the anguish of shoving Movable Type around for nearly a year now that I wouldn’t have any particular problem merely transferring my site “as is” directly over to a new server.

We all know what happens when we make assumptions, now, don’t we? But in this case, at least, it only made an ass out of me, not you, because I couldn’t find a way to get “you” over there.

It turns out this filing cabinet metaphor only takes you so far. At least now I remember why I never put any folders within folders in my real filing cabinet. Who’d guess that the system just plain couldn’t find a folder within a folder? Or that it’d merely run around inside a folder chasing it’s tail rather than looking outside its own folder?

No matter how optimistic Bloggers are that they’re going to change the world, most of the world is going to avoid the virtual hell of setting up a blog until someone comes up with something a lot easier than this to work with.

I would send you over to my virtual new home, which is, after many hours of re-arranging, the same as my old home, except that wouldn’t make much sense because shortly my old address will become my new address even though my new home is an ocean away from my old home. Stange that I’ll be moving from England to Canada, even though I really live in Vancouver USA, but my address will remain the same, and you can still visit me here at my old location for another year.

Let’s hope that old friends like Jonathon Delacour will be able to find me at my old, new address.

6 thoughts on “Got Those Moving On Blues”

  1. The transition into new Blogger was hellish for me, though everything got straightened out and it’s fine now. I quoted your comment about how most of the world is going to avoid starting a blog until “someone comes up with something a lot easier” on -fait accompli-. Good point!

  2. Yes, Nick I had nearly the same experience a year ago when I transferred from the relatively straight forward blogger to Movable Type so that I could include comments, permanent links, etc.

    Unfortunately, many of the people online are so skilled at these things they don’t even speak the same language as the rest of us, not that lit majors and poets don’t have the same problem in discsussing poetry with beginners.

  3. Ahem.

    Some of us are trying, with things like DNS for Poets, and my upcoming Linux for Poets: The Ten Commands. A little acknowledgement wouldn’t hurt from time to time to know that we’re heading in the right direction.

    End of Ahem.

  4. Well, that’s not to say that “poets” can’t do this with lots of help, but it’s still frustrating and confusing, Shelley, and I don’t think everyone making a page can rely on good friends like you, Jonathon, and Dorothea for help whenever they need it.

    The truth is that I’m used to helping others with their computer problems, not being helped.

    In my high school, I was probably one of the more sophisticated computer users, networking computers together to produce a newspaper before most teachers could even set up their own gradebook. In fact, I created my first gradebook in Excel because there were none available.

    Working in Movable Type, though, has been a major stretch for me. The templates look like a foreign language, and only a good backup of the original and some wishful thinking allow me to modify my templates at all.

  5. hi! a quick google for landscape with boat landed me to your page.

    hope you don’t mind i already linked an entry to yours for the complete poem.

    my page was putsa – paanipedro. well, it’s almost entirely in filipino.

    thanks.

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