Tech Rants

I'm working on some site updates today, so delaflamme.org may be down for a bit, or not looking right, or not doing everything you expect it to. But it will be new and improved shortly.

House de la Flamme is the Number One SCA household hit on Google when searching for "SCA Household." It is preceded only by index sites that catalog lots of household sites and kingdom resources for household names and the like. Currently #2 for searches on "SCA Houses" and #6 on Yahoo for "Oldcastle Fighting style."

Much to my relief, The Armored Rose Disassembled appears #3 on google, even ahead of that book's Amazon linking!

Also #3 on Google for "make a shield" after only wikihow and "yourchildlearns.com."

Thanks for every one who links to the site. To get these results I did change the site tag line from "Harnessing the 21st century to explore the 13th," which I quite liked, but I think it is worth it.

Having set up the Students for Creative Anachronism web site for the group last year, we suffered for a while with the performance problems of the old old server UVa hosted it on.

In a brilliant bit of timing, they finally migrated to the new server--right at exams last semester. So all the students were far too busy to notice the changes, and just to make it more fun, they moved to a very efficient new way of managing admin access. One that made it impossible for me to log in to the site any more!

Which was bad, because the site broke big time with the move, and I had no access all summer to fix it.

In any case, the site is now accessible again, though it still doesn't have the old custom orange color scheme. Take a look! If you see any out of date info, let me know, or if you have an account, fix it your own self.

I'd post a mention of tonight's New Student Dance and Dessert revel, but there is some concern that the Michelle Obama rally may interfere with it and I don't know details. There's some concern the massive enthusiastic crowds might make it hard to get to our ballroom.

I'll be updating this site and several others over the next few days. I'm keen to get some of the newest Drupal features online.

I just signed up for Twitter as sircorby.

Theoretically, this will automatically be posted to my livejournal, if not delaflamme.org.

I'll use this for major events of the day at the war, like "arrived without trauma or drama," "really stupid hot," "raining tomcats and hoehandles," "broke my femur in the bridge battle," "garlic chicken bread bowl for lunch," "Atlantia kicked everyone's ass," "left site for beer and the 1:15 Dark Knight in Butler," and so on.

Hell, that could almost be my whole war right there. Hopefully not the femur stuff.

Oh, and PACKING IS DONE!!!!!!!

Not my normal SCA stuff, but this is really important. Please contact your senator about the FISA bill they will vote on soon. If Congress passes this bill (the "FISA bill"), it will become legal for intelligence agencies to bulk-wiretap American citizens without a warrant, using data-mining to listen in on millions of Internet and phone connections Please tell them this:

I'm a constituent and I urge you to oppose telecom immunity and the FISA Amendments Act. As a constituent, I am very troubled that during this patriotic holiday season, the Senate appears ready to toss civil liberties and the rule of law out the window, and so I urge you oppose telecom immunity with every vote that you have when the FISA bill comes to the Senate floor on Tuesday, July 8th: Vote "YES" on the Dodd-Feingold amendment, which would strip telecom immunity from the bill entirely. Vote "YES" on the Bingaman amendment, which would delay implementation of telecom immunity until after Congress has received the Inspectors General report on the president’s warrantless surveillance program. Vote “NO” on the cloture motion to end debate on the FAA, And finally, vote "NO" on the FISA Amendments Act, an unconstitutional and dangerous bill that would radically expand the president's spying powers and immunize the companies that helped him break the law.

Phoning them is best. If you aren't comfortable doing that, google them. Most every senator has a "contact me" form where you can make comments. More details here.

What Every American Needs to Know (and Do) About FISA Before Tuesday, July 8th from Tim Ferriss on Vimeo.

Anyone needing to email Thjora for the next 2-3 days is due for a delay. Our DSL modem died spontaneously last night and the new one will not arrive until Tuesday or Wednesday at the earliest.

By the same token, my internet communication will be limited to at work or via my dumbass blackberry.

If it wasn't born, does it have to be 18 to authorize?

Waiting around for a week for an answer that took one click to implement, but now the site is back up.

Let me know if you see anything strange--or at least anything strange that isn't supposed to be strange.

Coming soon: Brash Black Tie Billionaire Bash pics, more fun stuff.

See, I can make anything medieval. Though it isn't Norman.

Okay friends, I've now completed a bunch of upgrades to functionality and appearance for this site. Now we're running the newest fanciest version of Drupal 5.1, with some new layout and new graphics. Tell me if you see any problems or liked things better before.

For all you people who use LiveJournal, this site now has Livejournal Crossposting enabled. In fact, I've set this so things you post here will show up in your LJ (or DeadJournal if you set it up that way) by default.

To make this happen, first you have to have an account here. Then you have to edit your account settings here once. Click on "My account" on the left, then click on the edit button. Fill in your LJ/DeadJ info.

From then on when you go to the create content link you'll see some LJ options. If you don't want to cross post whatever you're writing here, you'll need to deselect that option.

If you prefer it to work the other way--to have to choose to cross post, let me know.

And last, do you think more people would read this stuff if I set up a real LJ of my own instead of just that syndicated feed? I would never reply to comments on that journal. This will always be the primary place I blog.