Penmachine

Any musician or music geek worth his or her salt knows about The T.A.M.I. Show, a one-off 1964 TV special/theatrical movie. It capitalized on that year's Beatlemania with an astonishing evening of concert performances by hitmakers from the U.S. and the U.K. in Santa Monica near the end of October of that year:

The film is now available for purchase for the first time (yes, the first time in 46 years). Like The Beatles' Yellow Submarine, The T.A.M.I. Show has been mired in copyright and ownership disputes for decades—bootlegs have abounded, but even those lacked footage of The Beach Boys, who had their part removed after the initial theatrical release in '64.

The T.A.M.I. Show is best known for the explosive performance (and amazing hairdo) of James Brown, then nearing the peak of his powers as a singer, dancer, bandleader, and musical innovator. (He would basically invent funk the next year, with "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag.") If you were among those who thought The Beatles were strange and radical in 1964, then this footage of James Brown and the Famous Flames would have simply exploded your head.

But check out the rest of the lineup too: The Barbarians, Marvin Gaye, Gerry and The Pacemakers, Lesley Gore, Jan and Dean (who hosted), The Supremes, Billy J. Kramer and The Dakotas, and Smokey Robinson and The Miracles. Plus a few other acts you might have heard of: Chuck Berry, The Beach Boys, and The Rolling Stones. All on one concert stage.

It's a shame the movie has been essentially underground since before I was born, but now it will be easy to find starting March 23. I made sure to pre-order a copy, and I'd like to thank Tim Bray for telling me it was showing on PBS tonight. I've been trying to see the whole thing since the 1980s.

Labels: film, movie, music, sixties, television

Our friends Miranda and Reilly had going-away party last night for Tanya, who's moving to Calgary with her fiancé Barry. Reilly made a video:

Interestingly, he used a digital still camera. Not even the movie mode on a still camera, but the super-high-speed burst shooting mode of his top-of-the-line Canon EOS-1D Mark IV digital SLR, which can fire away at up to 10 frames per second. (Miranda and Reilly are the kind of people who are supposed to have expensive cameras. They're wedding photographers, and very good ones.)

The final video, compiled from over 5000 individual photographs, is arty, and a bit strange. My wife Air and I are in it, mostly in the background, but we're featured about four and a half minutes in, just as we were leaving. I'm Mr. Handshaking-Guy-in-a-Hat.

Labels: friends, geekery, movie, party, photography, vancouver, video

Remember the crazy hype last year about "Ida," the beautifully preserved 47 million–year–old primate? The one I called a "cool fossil that got turned into a publicity stunt?"

It turns out that, yes, the original authors seem to have rushed their paper about Ida into publication, presumably in order to meet a deadline for a TV special. And even by the loosest definition of the term, Ida is no "missing link" whatsoever, and not closely related to humans. (Not that relatedness to humans is what should make a fossil important, mind you.)

So now, like Ardi, who's ten times younger, Ida is what it deserves to be: a fascinating set of remains from which we can learn many things, but not anything that fundamentally revolutionizes our understanding of primate evolution. And that's a good thing.

Labels: africa, controversy, evolution, history, science, television

Last week, around 3 a.m., there it was.

Chirp.

Somewhere in the house. Was it electronic, or alive? Probably electronic, but it didn't sound like any of our cordless or mobile phones when their batteries die. Then again, a few seconds later.

Chirp.

I got out of bed and stood in the hall, in the dark.

Chirp.

It seemed everywhere and nowhere. Was it upstairs or down? Living room? Kitchen? Bathroom? Downstairs office? In the walls?!

I waited.

Nothing. It had stopped before I could isolate it. Was it a battery not quite depleted enough? Or something that heard me? No way to know, so I went back to bed.

In the morning I saw that our new PVR was full, deleting the oldest recorded programs to make room for new ones. Perhaps it had chirped a warning? I purged some archives, leaving lots of room. Taken care of, perhaps.

I'm not sure if it was the next night, or maybe two later. 5 a.m.

Chirp.

I was up immediately, head cocked to the side. Where was it? What was it?

Chirp.

Maybe it was a phone after all, left out on a table or sucked inside the couch cushions. Or some other device we have that I'd forgotten about, an old Tamagotchi or McDonald's Happy Meal promotional toy, perhaps?

Silence again. Nothing. Back to bed, until the next night, only 1:30 a.m. this time.

Chirp.

Wait, it was quieter in the kitchen and bathroom. More to the front of the house.

Chirp.

Downstairs! I crept down our creaky steps, not wanting to wake everyone else.

Chirp.

In the carport? That didn't make sense.

Chirp.

Nope. Laundry room.

Chirp.

And I was staring at it, right over my head. The basement smoke detector, whose 9-volt battery was weakest late at night, when the house is coldest and electron-moving chemical reactions slowest. I pulled it down, removed the battery, and stomped back to sleep.

We had peace at night now. Until a couple of nights later, 2 a.m.

Chirp.

What the hell?

I immediately went downstairs. No, it wasn't the laundry room smoke alarm. That still lay on the dryer, dead battery beside it. Pushing its test button did nothing.

Chirp.

My younger daughter L's room. I'd forgotten that we'd bought two smoke detectors, of the same brand, with the same batteries in them, on the same day when we renovated her bedroom so she could move downstairs.

Chirp.

I wanted to rip it off the wall, but L was asleep right there, so I gingerly rotated it out of its mount, took it to the laundry room, tore out the battery, and left it in a heap beside its twin. In the morning she asked me why it was missing from the wall, and I explained.

Both alarms have new batteries now, and next time I hear that chirp, I'll know exactly where it's coming from.

Labels: family, fire, gadgets, home, sleep

...until the end part.

I wanted to like the whole thing, I really did. I've turned into a total Winter Olympics fanboy in the past two weeks, and I watched it on TV and made my way to several of the Olympic sites. I cheered and cursed and got myself in knots over curling (curling?!) and snowboard cross and hockey and bobsleigh and speed skating, and even events where Canada wasn't in the medal running, like the men's 4x10 cross-country ski relay.

First, let me note that the Derek Miller playing guitar and singing with Eva Avila and Nikki Yanofsky early on was not me, though since the camera angle was pretty wide, I probably could have gotten some good mileage from pretending he was. But no, he's won Juno awards and is way more talented than I am.

Anyway, watching the Closing Ceremony on TV today with my family, I liked its tone, happy and respectful when it needed to be, delightfully cheeky beyond that:

• The "repair" of the cauldron that malfunctioned at the Opening Ceremony, with Catriona Le May Doan on hand to relight it (she missed out on her earlier chance because of the snafu).
• The informal, casual return of the visibly relieved and tired athletes to the stadium—in a loose, milling throng instead of the regimented blocs of nations from the also-lovely Opening Ceremony a couple of weeks ago.
• The beautiful seaside figure skating piped in from Sochi, Russia as part of their feature during the event.
• The spontaneous (and lengthy) standing ovation after Vancouver chief organizer John Furlong's brief but apt tribute to dead Georgian luger Nodar Kumaritashvili.
• William Shatner's Canadian semi-slam poem. I mean, come on, The Shat, my friends! People joked about the idea online beforehand, and then IT ACTUALLY HAPPENED! Awesome. (I just wished they'd beamed him up at the end. After all, Scotty was from Vancouver, you know.)
• The whole every-Canadian-stereotype-and-the-kitchen-sink production number with Michael Bublé. Loved when the Mountie-ettes tore off his Red Serge uniform, when the giant inflatable beavers appeared, when the hockey players broke into a brawl. I'm not sure everyone around the world got the intended irony, but I don't care. It was hilarious.

Alas, the musical cavalcade during the finale was a disappointment. There is so much more diversity, talent, and power across the Canadian music scene, and much of it was on hand for the free LiveCity concerts during the course of the Games.

But not at the Closing Ceremony. Neil Young played "Long May You Run" as the flame was extinguished. Good job. k-os finished the evening with some of his distinctive and rousing hip-hop. Also good. In between, we got Nickelback, Avril Lavigne, Alanis Morissette, Simple Plan, Hedley, and Marie-Mai. All very mainstream, white, big-selling pop acts.

None of those acts, on their own, was particularly problematic. (Lots of people have a hate on for Nickelback, sure, but like the absent Céline Dion, they sell the records). However, all of them together reflected a profound lack of imagination.

The reaction among Canadians online, which had been mixed before that point, turned savage. Steven Page, former singer of the Barenaked Ladies (he or his old band should have been there), got in some of the best digs:

• "It's easy to make fun of Nickelback, but there are worse things. And Chad's hair looks nice. Like Katie Couric's."
• "I have nothing to say about Avril. Except I wish it was Anvil."
• "Wow. If I just arrived on Earth now, I'd believe that sports were better than music."

Entertainment Weekly piped up with, "Where is Rush? Be cool or be cast out, Canada..." Comments from my friends and other rank-and-file Twitter and Facebook users were less kind. At the end, my friend Ryan pointed me to Parveen Kaler, who summed it up with this:

• "FREE BIRD."

Think about some of the other options: Sloan, Blue Rodeo, Spirit of the West, Stompin' Tom Connors, Arcade Fire, Jessie Farrell, Tegan and Sara, Matthew Good, Alexisonfire, Bruce Cockburn, Hot Hot Heat, K'Naan, The Trews, Paul Anka, D.O.A., Mother Mother, Skydiggers, Lights, Sarah Harmer, Robbie Robertson, Metric, Diana Krall, The Tragically Hip, Bedoin Soundclash, Jann Arden, The Guess Who, Divine Brown, Odds (with my friend and sometime co-musician Doug on bass), The Stills, 54-40, Sam Roberts, Cowboy Junkies, Colin James, Great Big Sea, Bif Naked, Wide Mouth Mason, The New Pornographers, Shania Twain, Feist, and I could go on. Wouldn't it have been nice to see some of them in the mix?

I'm not even including French Quebec, jazz, country, blues, metal, R&B, folk, reggae, bhangra, and hip-hop artists I don't know much about. Doubtless there's a huge list there too.

So, as with its opening counterpart, I loved the ceremony part of the Olympic Closing Ceremony, and all the staff and volunteers did great work bringing it together. For this fan of Canadian music, alas, its musical finale felt like a fizzle.

Fortunately, the two-week-long street party that several parts of Vancouver have become continues, especially after the big hockey gold medal yesterday afternoon. I bet some of those revelers are singing Nickelback songs too.

Labels: band, controversy, music, olympics, sports, television, vancouver

Speaking of Craig Ferguson, watch this excerpt from three years ago. Not as funny as most of his pieces, but it cuts:

Thanks to T for the pointer.

Labels: addiction, celebrity, humour, television

I've only occasionally stumbled on The Late Late Show With Craig Ferguson since he started hosting the program in 2005. It starts after 12:30 a.m., after all, and I'm not the night-owl musician I used to be. I always found him funny.

Since we got an HDTV and a PVR in January, we're not only easily able to record whatever shows we want, but we also have access to channels such as CBS Detroit that are on East Coast time—so Ferguson is on at a much more reasonable hour. I've been watching him pretty much every day.

That's because he's both extremely smart and entirely hilarious. I don't think I've ever laughed as much at any other late-night show, not Johnny Carson, not David Letterman, not Stephen Colbert or Jon Stewart. Interestingly, while The Late Late Show has a fairly traditional talk-show format, with a monologue and guests, Ferguson has no co-host/sidekick, and no band. And he's better for it.

He's also keen to disassemble how talk shows work, to change the format, to take humour out of awkward pauses and improvisations. (His 1000th episode last year was performed almost entirely by puppets.) It clicks completely with the kind of humour I like.

His memoir, American on Purpose, is also a great read as I recommended before. And you can follow him on Twitter. But he shines on late night, and you should watch him there. I wish I'd discovered his show five years ago.

Labels: americas, humour, television

I asked this on Facebook already, but I'm still wondering. Curling seems to be the Winter Olympic discipline with the longest event time (matches can last for hours), but which event is the shortest? Moguls, snowboard halfpipe, and freestyle aerials seem to be candidates (tens of seconds per run)—anyone know which takes the shortest-event crown?

Let's ignore sports outside the Winter Olympics: events like the 100-metre dash or diving in the Summer Games are obviously extremely quick, under ten seconds.

Labels: geekery, olympics, sports, vancouver

Many Olympic victories are won by the slimmest of margins. For example, today, Canada's Christine Nesbitt garnered a gold medal in speed skating by 1/50th of a second, while traveling as fast as a car.

But then there are those athletes who so dominate their runs that they're almost in a different race. Maëlle Ricker did that in her gold-medal snowboard cross event a couple of days ago, opening up a huge lead within the first five seconds and disappearing beyond the other riders' horizon shortly after.

Photo by Gaeia

China's Wang Meng performed a similar feat in short-track speed skating, setting an Olympic record and leaving her rivals, including eventual silver medalist Mariane St-Gelais of Canada, to battle for the other two medals.

Photo by Harrison Ha

And of course there's Shaun White, the American snowboarder who already had the halfpipe gold medal sewn up, but used his second run to annihilate any prospect of competition from other riders. I was at the Irish House pavilion in downtown Vancouver when his run appeared on the big screen, and you could see jaws drop across the huge room. I don't know much about snowboarding, but even I knew that his near-impossible tricks meant no one could touch him.

Photo by Lee LeFever

The Olympics often seems like a huge circus of media and entertainment and money and megaproject building. It can obscure the actual sports. But when you witness the achievements of truly outstanding individuals, you remember, and you have to admire what they can make the human body do.

Labels: olympics, sports, vancouver

Today, while the kids were at school, and after I had another one of my chemotherapy-induced random barfs at home, I took the SkyTrain into downtown Vancouver to check out the Winter Olympics vibe. And what a vibe it was.

I walked from Science World (currently the Russian Pavilion) past the various provincial pavilions, up the downtown escarpment, along Georgia Street, to Robson Square, then down to Canada Place and the Olympic Cauldron on Coal Harbour. On the way I ate at the world famous Japadog hot dog cart for the first time (yes, even for a native Vancouverite!), and before I came home I had a coffee at the very civilized Cascades Lounge in the Pan Pacific Hotel.

I've lived my whole 40 years in Vancouver, and I have never seen it like it is this week. Even during Expo 86 (check this throwback I spotted), the crowds and events were largely confined to the Expo site on False Creek, while the Olympics—aside from being more intensely focused by being two weeks instead of five months long—permeate the downtown core, as well as extending elsewhere in Greater Vancouver and up to Whistler. But we are a more global, better-known city than we were 24 years ago too.

There are seas of people young and old downtown, night and day. Many are dressed in Canadian red, but others are sporting colours and languages from many other nations. Way out from downtown, at Metrotown near my house, the mall is full of Russians. There are flat-screen TVs all over the place showing live and repeat Olympic competitions.

I returned home, exhausted, to walk the dog, meet the kids on their way home from school, and then soak my feet. I didn't go inside any pavilions or Olympic attractions, and I hardly spoke to anyone. A number of my friends had been in the downtown area, but were busy at press conferences and other official events, and I was happy to go it alone, to get a sense of how downtown is transformed.

It is an odd thing, for a sporting event to energize my still-young, laid-back hometown. I expect something similar will happen when the next Winter Olympics come to Sochi, Russia in 2014. While almost the same age as Vancouver, Sochi is smaller and certainly less familiar to the rest of the world. It also has many palm trees—perhaps a first for a Winter Games host city? It may be unusually warm here for February, but it's not that warm.

Labels: food, olympics, sports, vancouver, whistler

February 14 has many meanings for me. It's Valentine's Day, of course—the 16th my wife Air and I have spent together. It is also our daughter Marina's 12 birthday. But with the Winter Olympics here in Vancouver, including Canada's first gold medal of the event, there's extra resonance, since one of our athletes won gold on the day Marina was born back in 1998 too.

Air had a long, hard labour that February, and with the Nagano Olympics half a world away, we were able to watch many events live as a distraction in the middle of the night. Now our daughter is nearly a teenager, with her own mobile phone and Twitter account. (I got my first mobile phone when Air was pregnant that first time. I was 28. And getting on Twitter? I was 37.)

Happy birthday, Marina. Happy Valentine's Day to my lovely, wonderful, resourceful, smart, sharp, and stylish wife Air. Happy Olympics to all of you too.

Labels: anniversary, birthday, family, holiday, love, olympics, party

Tonight's Winter Olympics opening ceremony was impressive, if often a bit phallic. There was one technical glitch with the hydraulics for the first, indoor cauldron in B.C. Place Stadium, but the ceremony did the most important thing right.

That was to remember Nodar Kumaritashvili, who died this morning in a terrifying crash during a training run on the Whistler luge track, at the age of 21. (He was born the year the Winter Olympics were last in Canada, in Calgary in 1988.) He was the fourth athlete to die during a sporting event at the Winter Games since they began in 1924.

Jacques Rogge, the head of the International Olympic Committee, pre-empted his prepared remarks with a memorial to Kumaritashvili. Vancouver head organizer John Furlong also included the late athlete in his speech. There was a minute of silence during the ceremony, and a standing ovation for the remaining members of the small Georgian team, walking sadly wearing black armbands.

And the bonus? Instead of the rumoured Celine Dion, we got a spectacular k.d. lang. Good choice.

Labels: death, music, olympics, sports, television, vancouver

Three years ago, I set a couple of goals: to try to beat back cancer long enough to see the Winter Olympics come to Vancouver, and to live a couple of years longer so I could renew my driver's license when it expires in 2012.

Well, I hit the first one:

That's the Olympic torch being carried up Willingdon Avenue, about four blocks from my house, on its way through Burnaby and Vancouver to the opening ceremony tomorrow. Two years and a bit from now, maybe I'll get that new driver's license too.

Labels: cancer, death, driving, olympics

Every few years, I get new glasses, not because my prescription has changed (it's been pretty stable for about a decade), but because my old spectacles simply get old and worn out. This year, I took advantage of a two-for-one sale and got one set of new plastic frames (centre below) and one set of metal ones (right):

They're not a big change from my old set (left), but I like the new looks, though I'm not sure which of the two I prefer. Back in 2008 when I bought my last set, I wasn't sure I'd survive long enough to need new ones, but here I am. Yay.

Which pair do you prefer?

Labels: cancer, death, ego, glasses

For Christmas, my longtime friend Sebastien bought me an Amazon Kindle ebook reader. It's been great—while it has its flaws, it's a convenient and non-fatiguing way to read electronic documents, much more pleasant than the backlit screens of my laptop or iPhone (or, probably, the iPad). But I find it has also influenced my reading choices in an interesting way.

I first read a few ebooks that I had kicking around on my hard drive, mostly in plain-text format. I honestly don't remember where I got them, since I've had them so long. They're almost all science fiction titles, and judging by the oddball typos, most of them were obviously illegitimately scanned and OCRed years ago. But the Kindle does a good job with plain text, so I was impressed.

Next, I moved on to buying a few books at Amazon's Kindle Store. And it's the store that altered my choices. So far I've only bought three ebooks there, but the ones I've sampled without buying have been similar, and uncharacteristic for me.

Kindle books, like most ebooks these days, are locked down by DRM, making then significantly less portable and shareable than plain-text or other open formats, or than traditional paper books, and more likely to suffer digital rot, likely making them inaccessible years down the line. So the ebooks I have bought and read aren't the type I would previously have kept on my bookshelf. All of them, oddly enough, have been memoirs, not a genre I've previously chosen much:

• Infidel by Ayaan Hirsi Ali
• Tokyo Vice by Jake Adelstein
• American on Purpose by Craig Ferguson

I recommend all three, by the way, though Infidel is the best if you choose just one. But I consider memoirs generally disposable: I can read them once and not have much interest in re-reading them in the future. Maybe that's why my mom has always been a reader of memoirs and biographies. For decades, she has picked them up second-hand and breezed through them in a few days.

My gut feeling is that DRM-protected ebooks should cost less than they do: $5 to $7 feels about right, while the current $11 to $15 range for many mainstream titles (like the three I read) is too much—though I might regularly pay the higher price for unlocked ebooks. I don't think I'm alone in this: notice that many of Amazon's Kindle bestsellers are in the cheaper price range. Also notice that many of those books are old enough to be public domain, so no one has to pay the authors anymore. You can even get them for free, and unlocked, elsewhere.

Ebook prices can be more flexible than traditional hard-copy paper book prices, though. Publishers seem to want to charge $15 and up for in-demand new titles, and then lower prices to pick up more price-sensitive readers later—and they seem willing to fight to be able to do that. I'm willing to wait, so I guess that sort of arrangement would be okay with me.

I'd still prefer they ditched the DRM. And I'd still pay a bit more for that if they did.

Labels: amazon, books, drm, ebooks, gadgets, money

Today I heard something I've never heard before: "your tumours have shrunk." Through all the many different varieties of chemotherapy and radiation and immunotherapy and experimental Phase 1 drug trials I've put myself under during the past three years, only surgery has ever knocked my cancer back. Everything else, at best, kept it at bay.

Until now. Of course this is good news—but that's all relative. The tumours I showed you back in September are still pretty big, but they are measurably smaller than they were in November. And that includes the new ones that had just appeared in the fall. So I still have cancer, a lot of it all over the inside of my chest, but just a little less of it than I did a couple of months ago. As I wrote to some friends, I'm not out of the woods, but at least I'm no longer sinking slowly into quicksand either.

Thus, this afternoon on the way out of the cancer clinic, my wife Air and I smiled a little, held hands, and bought some flowers to put in the house in celebration. Later on we had takeout sushi with the kids. And tomorrow I go back in for more chemotherapy, which I hope will continue to beat the shit out of those metastatic growths.

So I'll be a sleepy, nauseated lump of crap for the next three or four days. A bit of good news doesn't suddenly make things go easily, you see.

Labels: cancer, chemotherapy, love, news, vancouver

UPDATE: My files seem to have moved successfully, and now I'm just waiting for the Internet-wide DNS updates to do their thing, so when everyone types www.penmachine.com they go to the right place. If you can read this, you already are.

I'm going to disable comments for half a day or so here, because tomorrow morning, February 4, my blog will be moving to an upgraded server computer at the Texas server farm of my host JaguarPC. That means, to avoid losing anything, I should lock down the site while the move is taking place. Comments will return later in the day, I expect.

This is all in preparation for my installing new blogging software in the next few weeks. I have not yet decided what exactly I'll be using to publish yet (here's a big list of options), but it can't hurt to be running the latest and greatest web thingies to do so. I'll let you know when it's all finished.

Labels: geekery, hardware, web

For close to a decade, since October 2000, I've published this home page using Blogger, the online publishing platform now owned by Google. That entire time, I've used the original hacky kludge created by Blogger's founders back in 1999, where I write my posts at the blogger.com website, but it then sends the resulting text files over the Internet to a web server I rent, using the venerable FTP (File Transfer Protocol) standard—which was itself last formally updated in 1985. This is known as Blogger FTP publishing.

While often unreliable for various technical reasons, Blogger FTP works effectively for me, with my 13 years of accumulated stuff on this website. But I am in a small, small minority of Blogger users (under 0.5%, says Google). Almost everyone now:

• Uses Blogger's own servers for their sites.
• Or another hosted service that takes care of everything for them.
• Or if they want to publish on their own servers, another tool like Movable Type, WordPress, or ExpressionEngine, which you install on your server and publish from there.

So, as I've been expecting for years, Blogger is now permanently turning off FTP publishing, as of late March 2010. And, in my particular case, that means I need to find a new blog publishing tool within the next month or so.

This has been coming for a long time

Blogger has all sorts of clever solutions and resources for people using FTP publishing who want to migrate to Google's more modern server infrastructure, but they don't fit for me. I have specific and very personal needs and weird proclivities about how I want to run this website, and putting my blog on Google's servers simply doesn't meet them.

That's sad, and a little frustrating, but I'm not angry about it—and I think it's misguided that many people commenting on this topic seem to be. I realize that I have been getting an amazing, easy publishing service for free for almost a quarter of my life from Blogger. It has enriched my interactions with thousands of people. Again, for free. (Actually, I did pay for Blogger Pro back in the day before the 2003 Google acquisition, but that was brief. And as thanks, Google sent me a free Blogger hoodie afterwards—I still wear that.)

The vast, vast, vast majority of users find the newer ways of publishing with Blogger meet their needs. And any of us who has used FTP publishing for years knows it's flaky and convoluted and something of a pain in the butt, and always has been since Ev and his team cobbled it together. I've been happily surprised that Blogger has supported it for so long—again, free.

Yes, it was a distinguishing feature of Blogger that you could use a fully hosted editing and publishing system to post to a web server where you don't have to install anything yourself. Very nice, but I think there are good technical reasons that no other service, free or paid—whether WordPress.com, TypePad, SquareSpace, or anything else—ever offered something similar.

I applaud the Blogger team for trying to do the best they can for us oddballs. And it serves as a reminder: Blogger FTP can go away. Gmail could go away. Facebook could go away. Flickr could go away. Twitter could go away. WordPress.com could go away. If you're building your life or business around free online tools, you need some sort of Plan B.

I've had this possibility on my mind at least since the Google takeover, seven years ago. Now I have to act on it. But I'm thankful for a decade of generally great and reliable free service from Blogger. I haven't had ten free years of anything like it from any other company (online or in the real world), as far as I know.

Getting nothing but static

One other thing I've always liked about Blogger's FTP publishing is that it creates static files: plain-text files (with file extensions like .html or .php or .css, or even no extensions at all). It generates those files from a database on Google's servers, but once they're published to my website, they're just text, which web browsers interpret as HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) to create the formatting and colours as such.

Most other blogging tools, including Blogger's hosted services, generate their web pages on the fly from a database. That's often more convenient for a whole bunch of reasons, and I'm happy to run other sites, such as Inside Home Recording and Lip Gloss and Laptops, with a database-dependent tool such as WordPress.

But this site is my personal one—the archive of most of my writing over the past 25% of my life. And I'm a writer and editor by trade. This website is my thing, and I've worked fairly hard to keep it alive and functional, without breaking incoming links from other sites, for well over a decade now. I've always wanted to keep it running with static files, which is one reason I didn't migrate from Blogger to WordPress four or five years ago. Over on Facebook, Gillian asked me why I'm so hardheaded about it. (She's a database administrator by trade.)

I'll be blunt about the most extreme case: I have cancer. I may not live that long. But I'd like my website to stay, even if only so my kids can look at it later. If necessary, if I'm dead, I want someone to be able to zip up the directory structure of my blog, move it to a new server, unzip it, and there it is, live on the Web. I don't want to have to plan for future database administration in my will.

In that worst case I won't need to update my site anymore, but I think static files on a generic web server are more reliable in the long run. To make a bulk change, a simple search-and-replace can update the text files, for example, to note that it's not worth emailing me, since, being dead, I'll be unable to answer.

On other blogging and content management systems I've worked with, I've had MySQL databases die or get corrupted. Restoring from MySQL backups is a pain for non-techies, or even for me. I've blown up a WordPress site by mis-editing one part of one file, and I've been able to fix it—but I don't want someone else to have to do that.

Right now, if Blogger died entirely, my site would still work exactly as-is. If my web host went belly-up, anyone with a teeny bit of web savvy and access to my passwords and one of my computers could redirect penmachine.com to a new server, upload the contents of one of my backup directories to it by FTP, and (other than visitors being able to post new comments) it would be up and live just like it was within a day or two.

In addition, tools like WordPress are brittle. I like using them, but there are security updates all the time, so the software goes out of date. That's fine if you're maintaining your site all the time, but if not, it becomes vulnerable to hacks. So if a database-driven site choogles on without updates, it's liable to get compromised, and be defaced or destroyed. That's less likely with a bunch of HTML files in directories—or at least I think so.

Betting on text

Plain text has been the language of computer interchange for decades. If the Web ever stops supporting plain text files containing HTML, we'll all have big problems. But I don't think that will happen. The first web page ever made still works, and I hope and expect it will continue to. My oldest pages here are mild derivatives from pages that are only five years younger than that one. They still work, and I hope and expect that they will continue to.

At worst, even a relatively non-technical person can take a directory dump backup of my current website and open the pages in a text editor. I can do that with files I've had since before the Web existed—I still have copies on my hard drive of nonsensical stories from BBSes I posted to in the '80s (here's an HTML conversion I made of one of them). I wrote those stories with my friends, some of whom are now dead, but I can still read what we wrote together.

Those old text files, copies of words I wrote before some of the readers of this blog were born, still work, and I hope and expect they will continue to. Yeah, maybe a SQL backup would be wise, but I'll still place my bets on plain text. Okay, I'm weird, but there you go.

Suggestions

Okay, so I need a new blogging platform. Probably one I can install on my server, but definitely one that generates static files that don't depend on a live database. Movable Type does that. ExpressionEngine might. More obscure options, like Bloxsom and nanoc, do so in slightly more obscure ways.

If you know of others I should look at, please email me or leave a comment. However long I'm around, I'll remain nostalgic about and thankful to Blogger. It's been a good run.

Labels: blog, death, geekery, history, linkbait, memories, software, web, writing