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Friday, April 30, 2010

Updates to FortyToo

Almost there. Version 3.2 is finished, including admin capabilities. With that, FortyToo is complete and ready to roll out.

So what's next? Building a marketing site, self-registration, and the revenue model. Oh, and some self-installing widgets for Blogger and Wordpress. For now, I can set anyone up pretty quickly that wants it but once it gets rolling I won't want to do each site by hand.

One of the cool new capabilities is picking a skin for the program - I'm still using the default skin here, but you can check out the others with these links:

JP - Forest Green

Satan - Orange

Simplicity - no side toolbar!

The structural changes I've been making to the program make it very easy to create new skins - so if someone wants a custom layout they can have one - for a small fee. And I'll be adding more stock skins. Each site gets to pick one skin, but can change it at any time.  Of course, I built a back door into the demo site so I can show any one of them by using different links.

I'll also be adding a demo Admin account so you can check out how easy it is - for now, only registered users can see the admin pages ('coz I don't want you messing with my settings).

If you are already using FortyToo as your Blogger or WordPress comment system (or really, anywhere else) it's easy to update: edit your template and replace bensonmum.com with fortytoocomments.com - or just wait a couple of days, I'll be updating the scripts to point to the new site. Be aware that when you do switch over, all saved preferences, nuke lists, nyms, emails, etc. will be lost. It's a Flash security thing, I can't help it. But they aren't hard to reset.

Monday, April 5, 2010

Come on Jon... You Know Why

Jon Stewart expressed - in his unique style - anger and dismay at the insurance industry tonight. It seems that although the new Health Insurance Reform bill prohibits refusing coverage to children, inscos have already found a loophole.

Jon was shocked. Shocked! Not that there was a loophole, but that the inscos went looking for it. Are they just pure evil? Do they want to be sure to catch the Haydes Express?

No, Jon. It's far simpler than that. And less sinister.

What they are is businessmen. And corporations. And shareholders. They do not exist to help poor sick children. They exist to make money. That is the nature of the free market and for-profit service industry.

Which is of course the whole problem.

Three undeniable truths about the free market: You get what you pay for,
not everyone can afford everything, and profits come from charging more than cost.

As long as we have for-profit health insurance, we don't have univeral health care. By definition.

Saturday, April 3, 2010

Three Days in Spring

My regular readers (both of you) are aware that I am not particularly religious, in much the same way that Jupiter is not a particularly hospitable planet. This is not because I'm not familiar with the scripture - if anything, because I am. Which is why I can appreciate the cunning of setting the resurrection myth at the beginning of Spring. As though life from death were a good thing. Or rather, that our ability to perceive this great joke were. Intelligent Design indeed.

I've spent two days in the garden now, and tomorrow will be the third. Killing weeds. Tearing up unwanted wild raspberries. Hacking the limbs off perfectly healthy but overgrown bushes. The great destroyer, armed with clippers and rakes and hedgers and a chain saw. All to make room for new life. And if some of the bushes don't survive the onslaught no worries - they can be replaced with fresh ones. They won't be missed.

Or will they? There's the rub.

New life is a wonderful thing, no doubt. But it can never replace the old lives extinguished, the old loves lost, the flowers that never bloom again. And we alone perhaps in the universe get to understand that in time these too will fade, and new weeds will always return. The circle of life is necessarily a circle of death.

Which is why the resurrection myth is so appealing. This one time, and one time only, the same life comes back. The concept is wonderful to imagine.

I just would have chosen someone else to be that one.

Thursday, April 1, 2010

Donnie Darko

As I watched Donnie Darko on DVR tonight, it occured to me that someone wrote that movie. Someone thought of it, wrote it, and turned it into a movie.

And it made me realize again how little I want to go back to sitting in an office creating software to make someone else rich helping other rich people sell things.

Creating art is more than a desire. It is a physical necessity. Air and water. Life. And for as long as I am compelled to hang on to this rock, however tenuously, I am determined to live. Because survival just doesn't seem that important to me.