Category: Site News

Colin Powell At Humphrey

I just returned from the Carlson Lecture at the University of Minnesota, featuring former Secretary of State Colin Powell. One thing that is striking about the former Secretary is his keen sense of humor — undoubtedly that’s one thing that diplomatic considerations usually obscure. However, Powell was engaging, frank, and always interesting. It’s clear that he has his disagreements with the Bush Administration, and believes that we did not commit sufficient forces to Iraq (an argument that has a lot of weight behind it), but he refused to directly speak out against his former colleagues. His sense of loyalty and propriety are obviously too great for him to do that.

Powell was an enjoyable speaker, and the University of Minnesota Carlson Center and the U of M’s Hubert H. Humphrey Center did an excellent job of generating turnout despite that other event occurring just across the river…

UPDATE: The Star Tribune has a piece on Powell’s speech.

Settling In

Blogging will be light this week, as I’m still unpacking all my stuff from various and sundry boxes having just schlepped them from South Dakota to Minnesota. If you notice the state of Minnesota looking slightly redder, that would be why…

Because What The World Really Needs Is One More Lawyer

Glenn Reynolds has a bit on whether law school is a good idea or not these days.

Which is great, because in about a month I’ll be starting law school.

As he mentions:

My take: Now that a standard B.A. is worth about what a high school diploma used to be — an entry ticket, and no more — a law degree is probably the closest graduate analog to what a liberal arts B.A. used to be. It’s good for a lot of things besides law. But, like a liberal arts degree, it’s not for everyone. An M.B.A. does something similar, though perhaps a bit narrower, but does it in two years.

In a lot of ways, I think that’s true. I’ve always joked that a BA lets you manage at the Gap rather than just fold clothes – and sadly enough, that’s not all that far from the truth. Unless you want to found your own business (which is stressful in its own right), the best way to get ahead today is to have some sort of advanced degree. College attendence is much less exclusive than it was, and since so many people have BA degrees, the level of competition is that much greater.

I’ll be moving back to Minnesota (where voting Republican actually matters) in the next two weeks, and then will start law school in late August. Given that my first semester schedule includes Contracts, Torts, and Civil Procedure, I figure if I can survive that much I should do fine.

I’ve known this was a step I wanted to take for a while now – although it’s not for everyone. The next three years will involve a massive amount of work, but it’s a challenge I’m anticipating. Then again, we’ll see how much I like it once I’m hip-deep in contract law and torts…

It’s Redesign Time, Again

In my tradition of getting utterly sick of the design of this site at regular intervals, I’ve done another overhaul of the visuals and functionality of the site once again. This design tries to be clearer and more usable than the old site, and is also formatted for today’s larger screen. The small percentage of you still at 800×600 will just have to deal – the world has moved on.

You’ll also know I’ve added AdSense ads to the site. This site doesn’t cost a great deal to maintain, but it would be nice to at least break even. Plus, in a few months I’ll have a rather momentous personal change that will mean that I’ll be pinching pennies until Abraham Lincoln cries uncle. So, you’ll have to deal with some unobtrusive text ads for the moment. There’s an ad bar along the right-hand side and also one before the comment boxes. I’m not a big fan on online ads, but they do help pay the bills, at least in theory.

I’m a typography fanatic, so I’ve been looking at ways of improving the contrast and typographic style of the site for some time. As always, Mac users get the best view of the site – they have the great Gill Sans font as one of their standard system fonts, so that’s what they get in the sidebar. Sadly, PC users are stuck with a second-rate font. Then again, they should be used to being stuck with second-rate by now…

The main body text and headings are both the excellent “Georgia” font, one of the best for online typography. Serif fonts are normally difficult to read on computer displays, but Georgia is one of the more readible font options, and it isn’t as blaisé as Times New Roman has become. You’ll notice it’s the same body text as the new New York Times website uses – if you’re going to steal, steal from the best, I say.

Undoubtedly, I’ll be tweaking things as I go along. I’m not sure about the archive system yet, or what needs to go where in the sidebar. I’m never quite happy with designs, and since I have the luxury of eternally tweaking various elements here and there, you can bet that I will.

If you happen to notice any problems, leave a comment here or click on the author link at each post to send me an email.

Back Online

The site was down over Christmas so I could run a deep-cleaning of the site database – there were tens of thousands of spam comments in the database, and I wanted to have a clean site for the New Year. Thankfully, the database is working fine, several thousand annoying ads for various poker sites have been sent to the bit bucket, and all is well…

I also updated the site to the latest version of WordPress – which is really, really nice…

UPDATE: For the technically inclined, the old size of the MySQL database for this site was nearly 97MB – 60MB+ of which was in the comments table. There were nearly 70,000 spam comments still in the database compared to about 11,500 legitimate comments. So, obviously, there was a lot of junk data taking up space. Those entries were deleted from the table and the table was reoptimized – I also deleted some old unnecessary tables from previous spam control systems, bringing the database down to 26.5MB – an incredible difference in size.

For spam control, I’m currently using the Askimet distributed spam-killing system which should do an excellent job of keeping the poker/drug/pr0n spamming morons off my comment table without me having to constantly tweak spam control systems.

It doesn’t look like any legitimate comments were lost – but if you happen to see any, let me know and I can try restoring them from a database backup I made. (Yes, I’m finally getting wise to the making sure that everything is backed up as frequently as possible…)

Art Is Never Finished, Only Abandoned

So, here’s another redesign of the site. This version features a background with a bit more depth than the previous template, and a wider width. The roughly 8% of you at 800×600 will have to live with a bit of scrolling, but that’s life.

This is a bit more of a traditional design than the Single Malt Pundit design, although I may slowly bring some of those design elements back into this design over time. You’ll also notice a new section for Impromptus in the sidebar. Impromptus are short links and notes that don’t really require a full entry’s worth of comment. That way I can concentrate on more substantial articles, but also feel free to put in a few gratuitous links as well.

Again, I’ll be adapting the site templates and making tweaks and fixes over time. If you notice anything amiss, leave a comment to this post and I’ll try to make fixes as I can.