Definition of a Nitwitter

My first Twitter post is dated June 19, 2009. I had once sworn never to join Twitter. But I love it. For my purposes, it works fantastically. (I basically use it as a news feed.) But the tool is only as good as its users. I've seen plenty of Twitter nonsense as well.

I knew somebody out there must have come up with a definition of a "nitwitter." I was right:

A person who discusses their twitting frequently and enthusiastically, causing irritation.

Person A: Did you read my tweets this morning? They were so funny!

Person B: Get lost, nitwitter.

I'd like to add two more definitions:

2. nitwitter: a user of Twitter who writes hopelessly incomprehensible Twitter posts. (I know 140 characters isn't much, but if you can't write a post that other people can actually understand, why bother?)

3. nitwitter: a user of Twitter who follows more people than he or she can possibly read, for the purpose of attracting more followers, who in turn neglect to read the first person's Twitter posts.

Don't be a nitwitter! In any of the three senses.

Still, I love it. Go to Twitter and follow me!

Wordpress Experience

Obviously I run with Blogger, but I've been curious about WordPress and occasionally irritated with Google (as when they shut down George Reisman's blog as "spam" for a time). Today I had the opportunity to try WordPress, so I figured I'd share a few comments about the experience.

One of my friends, Bob Glass, knows even less about techie internet stuff than I do, so he came to me for help. I went through several options, and he decided to register a domain with WordPress and set up a blog through that service. The cost is $15 per year, not a bad deal. We found (what I think is) a great domain: BobGlassRadio.com.

We set up a very simple site with a couple of blog posts. Eventually, Bob plans to upgrade the page, add permanent pages for a bio and links to archives, and so on. But at least we got up and running today.

Though I found the new setting a bit awkward, on the whole WordPress is easy to use. I was surprised that one must first establishe a ".wordpress" blog before registering a domain. But once you do that it's very easy to get the domain (with a PayPal transfer).

In creating blog entries, I was surprised that WordPress had trouble with my hand-coded "A HREF" commands. If there's an option that allows this, I didn't find it. But WordPress has a link button that's pretty easy to use. I guess it's largely what you get used to.

Like anything, tweaking a page will require a certain amount of playing around and trial-and-error. But I got the sense that WordPress can create a web page as robust as the user wants and has time to generate.

The main point is Blogger's favor is that it will transfer content to a third-party hoster at no charge. From what I gather, WordPress charges $10 per year for that. That's not a lot, but it contributes to my resistance to changing. I am glad, though, that there's a good alternative to Blogger out there. Let's hope Blogger doesn't persuade me to use it.

For most new bloggers, though, I'd recommend WordPress over Blogger, especially if you want to host your domain through WordPress as well.

Twitter, Here I Come

Color me green. I'm joining the Twitter revolution. So here's how I plan to work it: I'll use my Facebook account for personal news and my Twitter account to post news and updates about Colorado politics related to liberty. I'll also post some stories about national and religious items.

Follow me!

You Send It

I'm very pleased with YouSendIt.com. For no charge you can send files up to 100 megabytes in size to as many as 100 other people. You can pay a fee for larger files, more people, or added security. It's easy to use -- you just need to set up an account and establish a password -- and the service will send an e-mail straight to recipients telling them the file is available. (They have seven days to download it, again unless you pay extra for more time.) Today I sent a zipped folder of photos as well as a short video. Very cool.

Sennheiser Microphones

In the case of remote microphones, it is true that you get what you pay for. I purchased a lower-end Audio Technica mic that worked, but it offered steady background static, frequent bursts of interference, and practically no controls. I returned it.

Then I purchased a much more expensive G2 series mic system from Sennheiser (from B&H, by the way), and my preliminary tests came back with crystal clear sound. The only problem I've had is that, out of the box, it's a little hot for my camcorder. But I can adjust the volume, the frequency, and various other settings fairly easily. I haven't quite decided on the optimal settings for my equipment, but I've come close.

I'm a bargain shopper. Sometimes, though, the best bargains cost the most money.

ReCaptcha: Stop Spam, Digitize Books

Some readers may have noticed that I've changed my method of listing my e-mail address on my web pages. I now use ReCaptcha.

ReCaptcha hides a portion of the e-mail, and to access the entire e-mail, you must type in two words. This helps stop spammers, obviously.

But -- and this is the really clever part -- it also helps to digitize books. So we're getting some extra value for our time spent blocking spam.

ReCaptcha is a service of Carnegie Mellon University. Here's the relevant description:

About 200 million CAPTCHAs are solved by humans around the world every day. In each case, roughly ten seconds of human time are being spent. Individually, that's not a lot of time, but in aggregate these little puzzles consume more than 150,000 hours of work each day. What if we could make positive use of this human effort? reCAPTCHA does exactly that by channeling the effort spent solving CAPTCHAs online into "reading" books.

To archive human knowledge and to make information more accessible to the world, multiple projects are currently digitizing physical books that were written before the computer age. The book pages are being photographically scanned, and then transformed into text using "Optical Character Recognition" (OCR). The transformation into text is useful because scanning a book produces images, which are difficult to store on small devices, expensive to download, and cannot be searched. The problem is that OCR is not perfect.

reCAPTCHA improves the process of digitizing books by sending words that cannot be read by computers to the Web in the form of CAPTCHAs for humans to decipher.

This is very clever. Two problems, one elegant solution. Nicely done.

Posts On Religion

For the time being, I'll split posts on religion between this blog and (where relevant) FreeColorado.com. (As noted, I'm switching the focus of this blog to personal interests, including movie and music reviews, food, health, products, and Colorado living.) At some point in the future I may blog about religion elsewhere, either solo or as part of a group.

Change In Blog Direction

I'm dramatically changing the direction of this blog. No longer will it be devoted to matters of religion (or "reason versus faith," as my banner has put it), but to my personal interests. I will continue to blog about religious matters less frequently elsewhere (to be announced). I'll update the banner this evening.

I started the AriArmstrong.com blog back in October of 2007. At that point, I had in mind to write about pretty much everything, from politics to religion to personal interests. Then, early last year, I declared the blog "will be dedicated to issues of religion and culture." Why the change now?

First, I want to have someplace to write about movies, music, recipes, health, and other personal interests. I've been putting some material like that at FreeColorado.com, but it doesn't really fit there. (That page is devoted to Colorado politics.) I realize that my readership here will be small, but I'm okay with that (though I hope that an occasional blog earns broader interest). It makes the most sense to me to use the domain with my own name to cover my personal interests. This page will be free wheeling and, I hope, fun.

Second, I've grown tired of writing about religious issues as they appear in the daily headlines. The patterns have emerged. I've written about each major theme many times. I plan to spend considerable time delving into the fundamentals of religion -- the results of which will become available some months in the future -- but I want to spend less time with the pop aspects of religion. These are the major themes I've covered over the past months:

a) Islamist external terror and internal barbarism.
b) The Christian push to ban all abortion.
c) The Christian antipathy toward homosexuals.
d) The separation of church and state.
e) Claims that America is a "Christian nation."
f) Christian support for political controls of social and economic matters.
g) Claims of miracles and supernatural intervention.
h) Creationism.
i) Religious oddities.

Of that list, I most want to keep up with the separation of church and state, as I will do elsewhere. (Where such matters relate to Colorado politics, I'll probably write the material for FreeColorado.com.)

If you want to learn where I'll continue to write about religion, please check back here later today or tomorrow, when I hope to have everything sorted out.

With the change in mind, my next post will be about long-term wine consumption.

Welcome Rocky Mountain News Readers

In case you've found this web page via my Speakout in the Rocky Mountain News, welcome!

On January 16, I decided to dedicate this web page to matters of religion (from a critical perspective). If that's of interest to you, I hope you'll become a regular reader. If not, feel free to browse my entries here prior to that date.

If politics is more your scene, please see my other blog at FreeColorado.com. I only recently converted that page to a blog format; feel free to also browse the archives there.

Major Changes to AriArmstrong.com and FreeColorado.com

Henceforth, my blog at AriArmstrong.com will be dedicated to issues of religion and culture. Every topic and post will have some significant connection to religion (with the possible occasional exception of announcements regarding the blog) . As my readers know, my perspective is essentially critical of religion per se (though of course I recognize valuable contributions from various religious people).

At the same time, I am converting FreeColorado.com to a blog. All of the content created prior to the blog will remain intact. Every post that I write about politics and cultural issues not directly connected to religion will appear there. The old RSS feed for FreeColorado.com will be discontinued, so readers may switch to the RSS feed connected to the new blog.

Why the changes? I've found that my blogging lacks focus. At AriArmstrong.com, I've been writing about religion, national politics, local politics, films, and so on. While some readers appreciate the range of commentary, others probably favor a narrower range. Now readers who care only about religion and its impact on culture can stick with AriArmstrong.com. Readers interested only in my political commentary can turn to FreeColorado.com. (Hopefully some readers will frequent both blogs. I hope that the the hassle of reading two blogs is minimal, whereas the benefits of separating the content are substantial.) Even though religion is itself an extremely broad topic, my comments at FreeColorado.com will tend to cover an even broader range of issues. For that reason, I've decided to put any (infrequent) personal note there.

Since I started the blog at AriArmstrong.com, I haven't known quite what to do with FreeColorado.com. But it's a great domain name with nearly a decade of history behind it. However, the process of manually updating files has grown wearisome, especially when blogging is so much faster. Now FreeColorado.com will return to its original purpose: hosting commentary mostly about politics, with an emphasis on Colorado. Now, though, I'm more likely to post shorter comments along with more substantive articles, given that posting to a blog is so fast. The amount of commentary appearing at FreeColorado.com should increase substantially over recent weeks.

I plan to substantially change the look of FreeColorado.com over the coming weeks, and I may also make some updates to the design of AriArmstrong.com. Regardless of the look, I hope that readers find the content of both blogs to be interesting and considered (if often controversial).

Letter to Google

I've been fairly happy with Google's Blogger service. However, I just discovered on oddity with Google's "AdSense" program. I sent a letter to Google complaining about the problem. And, I thought, what's more appropriately ironic than using Google's Blogger service to complain about Google? Here's the letter:

Dear Google,

I was looking into using AdSense on my web pages, but I found the following policy:

"Sites displaying Google ads may not include... advocacy against any individual, group, or organization."

According to this policy, if I wish to use AdSense, I cannot "advocate against" the KKK, a dangerous cult, or a political movement that I regard as harmful.

Most of your other restrictions make sense, but this one does not. Moreover, I suspect that the large majority of your AdSense users flagrantly violate the policy on a daily basis. However, I will not sign up for AdSense knowing that I fully intend to violate the policy as stated. If you wish to rephrase your policy so that it does not explicitly prohibit normal and responsible blogging, then I will again consider the program.

Thank you for your consideration,
Ari Armstrong

Blog Evolution

I've already made a few technical changes to the blog. I turned the column widths into percentages rather than fixed pixels. I added a link for comments. Note that comments will be moderated ruthlessly, as most unmoderated comments that I've seen are basically worthless (or worse).

More importantly, though, I've decided to narrow the scope of the blog. One of my friends persuaded me that a more focused blog is more useful than one with random comments. Now, the description says, "Notes on politics, religion, and culture." Granted, that's still extremely broad. However, I had been planning to include more notes about products, recipes, etc. Now, I'll include such personal matters only rarely.

The purpose of the blog is to advocate reason based on sensory experience; individual rights, liberty, and capitalism; and life-enhancing values. I will therefore criticize religion, political violations of rights, and cultural problems such as moral subjectivism and nihilism. I am most influenced by Ayn Rand's philosophy of Objectivism, though I continue to struggle with some of its tenets.

I'm going to try to use the "labels" function to its full effect. I'm going to label every post with one (or more) of five main tags: politics, religion, books, art, culture, and personal. Then I may add additional labels that are more specific. For example, a post about art might be further labeled as movies, music, or fine art. The category for culture is intended as a catch-all for culturally interesting items that don't seem to fit elsewhere.

So now I think my blog is on track. Perhaps it's worth mentioning my goals in blogging. First, writing a blog will help me formalize my thoughts about particular issues. Writing for an audience generally demands more rigor than merely mulling something over. Second, I'll be able to search my own blog as a way to help me remember particular things. Third, I hope to persuade readers. The point, after all, is to facilitate positive cultural change, not merely to complain about what's wrong. Fourth, I hope that the blog draws readers' attention to my other projects.

So I'm ready to take the dive...

Welcome to AriArmstrong.com

Welcome to my blog. Even though the blog is new, I've been writing for the internet since 1998 via the Colorado Freedom Report. I'll continue to publish material on that page, as well, and I'll make a note on the blog about new material there. I literally predate blogs (which I guess makes me an old timer). According to Wikipedia's entry on blogs, the term "weblog" was coined in 1997, and the term was shortened to "blog" in 1999.

Yet I've never been that "up" on the technology. I'm more interested in the writing than in the presentation. It is with no shame that I admit to having learned HTML from one of the Dummies books. So my blog is simple. I'll improve it over time. I'm open to suggestions.

I started the blog because posting short comments is so easy. Otherwise, I have to load up a template in my word processor, save the file in the correct folder, load up the FTP software, and upload the file. Blogging services automate the process. I'll continue to use my traditional process with the Report for longer, more formal articles (especially regarding Colorado politics).

My goal is to use the labels to organize my blogs into broad categories. So far these are the categories I plan to cover: Colorado politics, national politics, movies, fiction, nonfiction, music, products, home, health, and blogging. My goal is to post at least one entry every day. So I hope you'll check back often.