2005 was a good year for me. I still have a hard time believing that I bought a house. It’s a bit easier, but still somewhat mind-blowing, that my brother got married. Work’s been great. Hobbies have been great.

Oh, sure, there’ve been things that haven’t gone my way—lots of ‘em, much of it stuff I wrote about here. But I don’t want it to seem like all that stuff drags down what’s been a really great year for me, because in retrospect, it hasn’t.

I rarely regret action. I find that I regret inaction far more. That’s been my best lesson of the year.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to bed. My alarm is set for 0545, and I’ve got to be at church early in the morning. New Year’s Resolutions will start showing up here tomorrow.

God bless you and yours. Happy 2006.

I noticed that syncing my Treo with my Mac mini took a very, very long time yesterday. I noticed today that … all my contacts were gone.

After I stopped sobbing, I remembered that I sync at work, too. I’d go up there now and sync, but given that it’s half-past nine on New Year’s Eve, I think I’ll avoid the drunks and the road blocks and just wait until tomorrow.

Happy New Year from the Indiana Jones School of Management, where we’re going into 2006 not knowing who the hell anyone is anymore.

I find it quite humorous that I found my copy of Getting Things Done tonight while rummaging through boxes looking for the deed to my house [which I got right before I moved, then packed in a box I'd be sure to remember ... riiiiiiiiight].

I find it frustrating that the deed was in a box that I’d already opened—in fact, I’d opened it the week I moved here!—and that I spent a couple hours each of the last two nights looking for it.

Oh well … at least I’ve got a good idea of the boxes I’ve got to go through. My living room, though, looks like a bomb went off. [Wait ... that's the whole house.]

The alt.sports.football.pro.cinci-bengals guys were looking for me, so I showed up.

Who dey!

I know what WordPress needs: they need an independent young Weblogger/journalist wanna-be to chronicle anything and everything about WordPress—positive mentions, switchers, complaints, requests, interviews with WP developers, and news about the venture capital powering WP these days.

If you use WordPress and want to spend 2-3 hours a day sifting through Technorati searches, etc., you could make yourself one hell of a niche market with a weblog about WordPress. It would eventually be a positive thing for the community, I feel.

I’m throwing that out there because I sure as hell have neither the time nor the desire to take it on.

Jeffrey Overstreet, who is the sole reason I ever picked up Illinois in the first place, is just gushing with praise over Sufjan Stevens, who is receiving accolades left and right these days:

I liked his Seven Swans album.

Then I grew to love it.

I liked his Illinois album.

These days, I love it more than I can say. The two songs “John Wayne Gacy Jr.” and “Casimir Pulaski Day” are better on their own than any other full album I’ve heard all year.

Jeffrey goes on to note that NPR has called Illinois their album of the year. Illinois was Pitchfork Media’s album of the year as well, and heck … it was mine, too.

You’re probably wondering why Overstreet’s gushing so much [and why I do the same]. Well, let’s just let Sufjan speak for us:

If you only know one or two things about Sufjan Stevens, chances are the second is that he is a practising Christian who isn’t afraid to let his beliefs impact upon his work. “If someone asked, I would say that I was born again. I would look you right in the eye and say it.”

“I don’t know anything about CCM. I’m not an evangelist. I’m a songwriter and a storyteller. If that story happens to be about Christ, then perhaps, in some odd semantic way, the song could be termed ‘evangelical’. I gladly accept that. I also sing about divorce. And murder. And adultery. I sing about chickens and war and bathrooms. In my mind, the gospel is not something to pander and pawn off like a diet soda drink. There is no product. There is no selling point.”

“This is what it means to be born again: to fully and completely disengage with the preconceptions and preoccupations of the adult world and its religions, to dismantle all laws - of physics and society - and yield yourself to the birth canal, and what comes after, in which everything begins to shake and tremble with all senses fully turned to the centre of the universe, the creator, God the Father, in whose cultivation we begin to know and understand our true selves, our real selves, as a reflection of God’s image, his creation, like newborn babies, full, fresh, suckling, elated and laughing at everything. But honestly, I have no idea how this relates to my music. I hate talking about this stuff.”

“I’d like to spend less time talking about God and more time being in God’s presence. I think that would put an end to this conversation, once and for all.”

[I wish I had a source for the quote; one could look to the scans of the magazine article it's pulled from to find it.]

If Christians continue to make great art and are unashamed of their beliefs, I think the world will begin to engage the faith of those artists solely because they’re not trying to prepackage things in the CCM way. CCM is so easy to lampoon that most everyone—Christians and non-Christians alike—does it with impunity. Artists like Stevens, Derek Webb, and, yes, U2 are among the reasons that I, as a Christian who loves music and loves to hear artists share their faith through good art, am passionate about the things I listen to every day.

[As a postscript, I need to thank my friend Lara for pointing me to Jeffrey's Weblog in the first place.]

Check out the somewhat-pretentious and awkwardly-worded Ten Commandments of Goal-Setting, which does have some great advice.

Previously, I’ve eschewed resolutions. No longer.

[HT to Lifehacker.]

I’m just happy that the first Bruins game I’ve caught on TV this year was a good success, as the B’s won 4-3 in OT over the Crapitals. It looked bad for the team when they went down 3-1, but two goals in :49 usually provides a nice pick-me-up.

Man, I miss NHL Center Ice. :twitch:

Does anyone have any experience with the Treo Side Case? The sleeve that came with my Treo 600 has seen better days—I have owned the thing for a couple years now, and the cardboard inside the nylon is shot—and I’m thinking about a new case. This looks like it would work on a belt—I’m not a fan of that; I’m geeky enough as it is!—or down in a pocket.

I found a bunch of CDs that were in my office that I hadn’t ripped; combined with the torrents I’ve transcoded, I’ve got a goodly chunk of new music:

• August and Everything After by the Counting Crows.
• Recovering the Satellites by the Counting Crows.
• This Desert Life by the Counting Crows.
• Hard Candy by the Counting Crows.
• The Bravery by The Bravery.
• 24 Jan 2005 [Denver, CO, USA] concert bootleg of Hem. Too bad Sally’s voice is shot in this show; the band was totally on that night.
• 2 Nov 2002 [Tampa, FL, USA] concert bootleg of Wilco. I’ve not been real thrilled with this one so far.
• 20 Dec 2005 [Los Angeles, CA, USA] concert bootleg of Queens of the Stone Age.
• 22 Sep 2005 [Detroit, MI, USA] concert bootleg of Beck.
• 22 Nov 2005 [London, UK] concert bootleg of Jeff Tweedy. I really need to take some time and get this one right; the setlisting I’ve seen has been goofy, so I have some work ahead of me.

If you’re curious as to why I have all the Counting Crows stuff, well … I’m supporting Mike since Kari put a moratorium on listening to Counting Crows in their household until they put out another album. You can come to my house and listen to your boys any time, Mike!

Tin-pot dictators and military juntas are fun to lampoon, so the news that the military junta of Burma is packing up the capital and moving it 200 miles for no apparent reason.

I think the Alabama equivalent of this would be Montgomery deciding to pack up and move the state capital to … Gadsden. That would actually be somewhat funny. The Burmese stuff, though, is just troubling.

All the folks who watch movies in a group that includes me on Tuesday nights are shaking their heads as they read this, but I saw the Double Feature Finder today and figured that I should link it. Input your ZIP code and a movie you definitely want to see, and DFF will give you the opportunity to catch another movie at that theater on either side—and purchase tickets via Fandango if you’re interested in that.

The chances that I’ll use this are next-to-nil, but that’s just because … oh, sorry, I just got distracted by the hockey game.

[HT to Lifehacker.]

It sounds as if my friend Peter had a hell of a time with the first night of his honeymoon, and not in a good way: read his account of how the Park Central Hotel in NYC didn’t get him and his bride into his honeymoon until more than a five- and-a-half-hour wait!

I’m reading through GlobalIssues.org’s report on the 2005 World Trade Organization development meetings in Hong Kong and I’m just … depressed. Does Bono have to get behind elimination of domestic and export subsidies after he finishes his work on African debt relief for this stuff to get any kind of attention?

Mark M. Blumenthal makes a case for greater openness in modern-day polling techniques, and I think he’s on to something.

[HT to Jeff Jarvis.]

I love working without a net, if only because falling on my ass is good for my humility. Mark’s too nice to tell you, but there was a little SNAFU with my automated system for seamlessly transitioning from http://rmfo-blogs.com/rumorsage/ to http://foolishsage.com/. Karyn had approached me a little over a week ago about her plans, and we’d set up most everything. Mark didn’t know it at all, but he’s actually been working out of the new FS.c database for a week. I had a nice little shell script set up: it made the necessary database changes inside WordPress to work correctly, and then it triggered some .htaccess redirect action that would seamlessly move people from the old URL to the new one. [Go 'head ... try it out. ;)]

There was only one issue: in an effort to hide FS.c from Google’s prying eyes, I’d moved wp-config.php to wp-config-moved.php. No big deal, but … I’d forgotten to include that move in the shell script-fu. [Actually, I would have needed a second shell script, but anyway.] So, come 6:30 p.m. Saturday night, I pull out my Treo to check FS.c and make sure that all went well. I saw WordPress’s “I can’t see your database” error, and I began to panic.

After trying a couple different things with cPanel—forgetting that cPanel’s File Manager is written to use frames; my Treo never stood a chance—I sought Google’s help. “There’s got to be an SSH client for the Treo!” And there is: TuSSH will work on a Treo to give you that in-a-pinch SSH access. I then held my breath and downloaded it, not knowing if Treos were smart enough to install packages downloaded through its on-board browser. [Hey, I'd never had to do it before!] A minute or so later, and I was happy-dancing; another minute later, and all was fixed.

The lesson, as always, is that I’m never as clever as I think I am.

Well, in another half-hour or so—as soon as the last of the laundry is dry—I’ll hop in my truck and head south and west. Today, I’ll make my way to my maternal grandmother’s house, where I’ll see her, my parents, and my brother and sister-in-law. Tomorrow, I’ll leave, as my parents will, and head further south to see my paternal grandmother, uncle, aunt, and her daughter. Monday, I drive back home.

Yeah, if you’re doing the math on that, I’ll probably spend as much time driving as I will sleeping, and more time doing both combined than anything else. Ho, ho, ho.

Merry Christmas, everyone.

Yesterday, I emailed Mark Ghosh, who runs Weblog Tools Collection, to point him to my tip on managing WordPress uploads folders. Mark posted it a half-hour or so later, and it was fun for me to watch the traffic on GFMorris.org go from its usual 10-15 users/day to 300+ in one fell swoop.

Earlier this week, I noticed that I was having issues with cookies for the admin logins I have on [rmfo-blogs.com]. I asked myself, “Hey, man … why do you have issues with this on your Mac but not other machines?” Something in the back of my brain said, “Hey, man … you’ve solved this problem before.” Indeed, I have: cookies and logins.

As I said earlier today, this Weblog has a better memory than I do. I’d remembered to tweak my network settings, but not the other half to let me store unlimited cookies. Thankfully, all the searches inside IJSM.org took me far less time than it took me to write this post.

[As I watched this, I watched Whose Line Is It Anyway? re-runs. I do remember which of these re-runs I've seen. There's something to be said about what kind of learner this makes me ... but damn if I can't remember what that might be.]

In writing the previous entry, I remembered that Alex had corrected me in the comments over on his side of the conversation fence. Since I’d left myself a breadcrumb trail, I was able to find it pretty doggone quickly. Awesomeness.

I do get utility out of all the blathering I do about stuff that may not mean much to y’all … mainly because computers have better memory than I do! [Yes, I am one of those people who will blurt out random things they've been trying to remember all day.]

I inadvertently ended up on Ask Metafilter, as it seems that I’m not the only one who wants to let users roll their own syndication feeds.

It’s nice to know that I’m not screaming completely into the vacuum… However, Alex did tell me that authentication isn’t the issue that I thought it was.

I’ll kick off the new musiclogging category right with The Beatles’ White Album.

Yes, my music collection is woefully bereft of Beatles albums. Some would argue that this should mean that I can never claim to be a music snob. Me, I argue that I’m really not a music snob [if I were, I'd burn that 4Him album I can't bring myself to destroy], so it’s not that big of a deal.

[Holy crap ... did I just mention 4Him in an entry about The Beatles? I think I should listen to every Yoko Ono album as penance. Oi.]

Anyhow, thanks to Misty and Stephen for this one; they got it for me for Christmas.

I have some other new music hanging around the office today:

1. Blood:Water Mission’s 2005 Donor Thank-You CD. Yeah, I did Blogathon 2005 and all I got was this lousy CD. [Seriously, I expected nothing, and I am grateful for anything given in return. I believe in BWM, and I think that this is cool to do for their donors.] Due to a lot of goofiness, I’ve never gotten this appropriately introduced to my music collection.
2. An Elliott Smith bootleg from a show in Salt Lake City in 1999.
3. A Hem bootleg from a show in Denver in Jan 2005. I never did get this transcoded last week.

Lots of good music this fine morning.

I’m testing out using del.icio.us to track what torrents I’ve successfully grabbed from DIMEadozen.org; I’ve got some work to do to go back. I’m personally disappointed that my DIME user profile doesn’t do this for me—it seems like something that would be prudent to do.

If you’re curious as to why I’m using a combination of two tags, it’s pretty simple: I’ll use dad_torrent to point to torrents that hold my interest, and will add grabbed when I’ve got the full torrent. [I might choose to add a "seeding" tag at a later date; we'll see.]

I don’t know why pulling off a golden sombrero amuses me, but it does.

1. WordPress Upload Management Tip
2. My Best Music of 2005
3. Musiclogging
4. Waiting and Preparation

Heck, I even tossed a fifth one out there after updating some WP-Amazon plugin installations. Been a full day.

Just as I’m booklogging, I realized as I was putting together my list of my best music of 2005 that I need to be logging all my new music as well.

If nothing else, the depth of my addiction will then become quite apparent…