Via Annaliese, who did hers according to David Bowie (on Facebook). Instructions: “Using only song names from ONE ARTIST, cleverly answer these questions. Pass it on to 15 people and include me. You can’t use the band I used. Try not to repeat a song title. It’s a lot harder than you think! Repost as ‘my life according to (band name)'” (I’m not doing the 15 people thing; do it if you want!)

Pick your Artist:

Thelonious Monk

Are you a male or female:

Lover Man

Describe yourself:

Nutty

How do you feel:

Off Minor

Describe where you currently live:

Brilliant Corners

If you could go anywhere, where would you go?

San Francisco Holiday

Your favorite form of transportation:

Locomotive

Your best friend is:

Just a Gigolo

You and your best friends are:

Rhythm-A-Ning

What’s the weather like:

April in Paris

If your life was a TV show, what would it be called:

I Should Care

What is life to you:

Who Knows?

Your relationship:

Sweet and Lovely

Your fear:

Hackensack or Suburban Eyes

What is the best advice you have to give:

Introspection

Thought for the Day:

Nice Work If You Can Get it

How I would like to die:

Meet me Tonight in Dreamland

My soul’s present condition:

In Orbit

My motto:

Straight, no Chaser

We spent a couple days at the Oregon coast (highs of 60-65) after several days of 100+ in Portland with lows around 75. It’s still hot in Portland. We paid a visit (and a whole lot of simoleons) to the Oregon Coast Aquarium.

Maybe they’ll use some of that dough to send their shark divers to shark school.

In the window where you used to be able to watch not-Free Willy swim by, divers float amongst sharks and talk about them. They even take questions from the audience.

A kid asked, “What’s the biggest shark,” and the diver hemmed and hawed for a while before saying “Great White.”

The MC in the auditorium asked the diver, “What about the Whale Shark?” The diver said “I don’t know if that’s a whale or a shark.”

At this point, 7-year-old Jr., who knows pretty much everything there is to know about sharks, walked out. (Jr.: The Whale shark is, in fact, the largest living shark.)

The diver went on to say he was pretty sure whale sharks are vegetarians (Jr.: they’re not, though they feed mainly on tiny phyto- and zooplankton).

If you go to the Oregon Coast Aquarium, my kid is available for consultations.

Here’s a little number I whipped up for breakfast today.

Ingredients:

• a couple fistfuls of freshly dug spuds
• a fistful of basil
• half an onion
• half a bell pepper
• a dash of paprika
• salt and pepper to taste
• olive oil

Method:

Go out and dig up some potatoes. Admire them for their size. Rinse them with the garden hose and admire their surreal color (These steps can be done the night before).

Preheat oven to 425. Dice spuds and rinse. Chop onion and bell pepper. Put in roaster pan and pour some olive oil over them.

No, more than that. I said “pour,” not “drizzle.” There you go.

Add salt, pepper and paprika; mix well. Put it in the oven and go water the garden. When you’re mostly done watering, pick your basil. Slice it up, and throw it in with the spuds (which have been cooking, oh, 20 minutes by now). Stir well, then put it all back in the oven. Go back out and finish your watering.

Check out the raspberries… they’re past peak production, but some of those late bloomers have the best flavor. Graze a little. Pull some weeds. Get your feet and hands dirty, and enjoy the last fleeting moments of coolness.

Go back in and check the spuds. Put a fan in the back door. Spuds should be browned and basil should be crispy. Don’t forget to turn off the oven! It’s going to be hot today. Prop oven door open, and leave hood fan on high.

Serve with a fried egg, toast and coffee. Chase it with a ripe peach.

I. Love. Summer.

…beat blogging!

Two and a half years ago, I started ranting on this site about the gross educational inequities in Portland’s public schools. This eventually got the attention of the local mainstream media and the greater school district community. I didn’t set out with a mission, other than just speaking my mind.

Pretty soon all I wrote about here was schools, schools, schools. One day, while writing yet another blog post about schools, my daughter asked me, “How come you only write about school politics on your hockey blog?” “Good question!” I said, and started another blog all about schools.

Why? Because I can (my day job is “professional nerd”).

Eventually, PPS Equity started taking on the look of a… what? Online magazine? I settled on calling it a “new media publication.” I even came up with a mission statement: “to inform, advocate and organize, with a goal of equal educational opportunity for all students in Portland Public Schools, regardless of their address, their parent’s wealth, or their race.” Readership climbed steadily, with around 20% of visits consistently coming directly from school district computers.

Since I host my blogs on a server that I own, I decided to open up my platform to others working for the common good.

That’s it, I thought, I’m doing “new media publishing!” It’s got a nice ring to it.

But I’m also doing some kind of journalism, and that’s where it gets tricky. I have a great deal of respect for professional journalists, and a healthy disdain of bloggers who pick up the latest news reports, toss off 500 words of commentary, and call themselves “citizen journalists” or some such. The point being that they are leeching off of the professionals. The story doesn’t run if somebody doesn’t report it in the first place. That’s what journalists — a.k.a. reporters — do.

When I wrote for Portland Metblogs (moribund since last February), I floated the idea of doing citizen journalism there, which didn’t go over well with a couple other contributors who couldn’t accept that writing from a point of view does not disqualify one as a journalist.

When I was invited to be on a panel about blogging at a conference for professional journalists and journalism students last fall, I had a little trepidation about being chewed up and spit out. (It was a very friendly crowd, as it turned out.) The two other bloggers on the panel were very clear about considering themselves journalists, but I made a point of identifying myself as a community activist, not a journalist.

But… the kind of writing — and reporting — that I do is outside of the usual realm activism. I actually do reporting, is the thing, at the same time I’m doing advocacy and organizing. “New media publishing” captures the big picture of what it means to run a community blog, but the actual beat reporting I do is, in fact, journalism.

Which all became clear to me the other day when BeatBlogging.org, a project affiliated with New York University’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, gave me a nice shout-out on their Leaderboard, which they describe as “a list of the most innovative beat reporters in the world.”

Wha….? You’ve got to be kidding me! (Seriously, I’m floored over here!)

Their summary of my work on PPS Equity highlights the combination of advocacy and journalism. “…[I]t is starting to seem like good beatbloggers — especially education ones — mix in a bit of advocacy with their journalism. It’s not that they are biased, but rather that they care to see change,” writes Patrick Thornton, editor of BeatBlogging.org.

I poked around their site… man, great stuff. It’s all about “how journalists can use social networks, blogs and other Web tools to improve beat reporting.” I’ve only scratched the surface, but I’ve already found great information that I’ll be trying to incorporate into my work at PPS Equity going forward, like how in the hell to use Twitter effectively. (Sadly, I also found out that BeatBlogging.org is losing its funding. Damn, talk about bad timing!)

Most of all, I’m glad to have a name for what it is that I’ve been doing: beat blogging. It’s not at all what I set out to do, but here I am doing it. One of these days, I’ll have to figure out how to monetize it so I can quit my day job.

Garden report:

• weeded and thinned: beets, carrots
• harvested: the rest of the spinach, strawberries
• direct-seeded: pole beans, winter squash, zucchini
• transplanted: tomatoes, cuke, jalepeño
• pruned: Rose of Sharon
• confirmed: ladybugs released by junior yesterday are hanging out in the potatoes
• anticipating soon: raspberries, blueberries, new potatoes

I eat lunch most every day at an Indian grocery near my office. Since they’ve got B4U Music on the big screen, I can’t help but associate Bollywood and cholle.

And let me tell you, nothing tastes better than some good Indian food after a vigorous game of pick-up hockey. (What… you think that’s weird?)

I love the Latin-rock influence in this one. And Sneha Ullal is kinda cute, too. Okay, pulled Lucky Lips; was told it was eh, maybe not appropriate. How about some Tenu Leke from Salaam-E-Ishq (2007), a movie I had the pleasure of viewing while hopped up Percocet after a wisdom tooth extraction:

Per Terry’s request, more harmony (Lion Song by Jay Harden):

As for “more bass”, maybe it’s your computer speakers. The recording engineer thought we mixed the bass too high!

Just before I moved to Oregon from the broad American prairie, I was playing bass in a band called Totem Soul. We earned enough money playing in college bars to pay for three days in a professional recording studio (this was before the age of serious DIY recording, so it was a big deal), and recorded an LP’s worth of material.

Here’s Lear’s Shadow, by one of our three singer song-writers, Jay Harden:
[audio:Totem_Soul-Lears_Shadow-Shaking_Roots_at_the_Moon-track04.mp3]

Then we took the rest of our money, loaded all our gear into the back of my 1963 Chevy Stepvan (a.k.a. “the pig”), and headed west. The Chevy made it, but the band didn’t last. We worked a little in Eugene and Portland, then broke up a few months later, frustrated by the lack of venues for our peculiar sound and the intricacies of running a four-piece band with three frontmen. Our LP was never pressed, and the recordings sat in the can for nearly two decades before POD Web publishing made it generally available.

So, why the sappy nostalgia? Because I just figured out how to embed audio on my blog.

And after two decades in Oregon, it seems like an interesting time to look back. Portland looked a lot different in 1989. I was “creative class” when that meant a struggling musician could rent a room for $150 bucks in a big shared house in inner Southeast, bike commuting meant riding a one-speed to part-time, low-wage employment at a natural food store, and livability meant you could sleep in your van down by the Sunflower recycling yard when you were between houses.

The Pearl was a derelict rail yard (the title sequence of Drugstore Cowboy, released that year, was filmed there), MAX ran only from Gresham to downtown, and there was a temporary ice rink on Pioneer Court House Square between Thanksgiving and Christmas. Old town was awash in cheap heroin and prostitutes, and timber was still the dominant industry in Oregon. TriMet was still running buses built in the 70s, and the night club scene was dominated by white blues.

Northwest 23rd Ave. was already long gone by then, but Hawthorne was still lined with junk shops and dive bars, and the Bagdad Theater was a second-run house, with a porn screen in back. Who remembers the Ol’ Milwauke or the Tu-Be?

Okay, enough of that shit. Fast forward twenty years. It’s been quite a ride.

For the first time in our avocation as a Web publishers, the family server has been upgraded to a brand new machine.

Until the last box could no longer keep up with the load, I was committed to using only discarded hardware running free software to keep the ol’ Wacky Enterprises blog farm humming. I’m still committed to open source software, but ever-increasing traffic had grown beyond the last machine’s ability to cope.

The last straw was when a disk on the old box started showing errors, and the price of a new machine was only a little more than the price of a new disk. Go figure; I guess the time had come.

The new unit features a modern, fast, 64-bit dual-core processor and 2GB of RAM. This may not sound impressive, but it replaces a single-core 32-bit machine with 256MB of RAM, which was a replacement for the original box, a 200MHz Pentium Pro with 32MB or RAM.

For the non-nerds, that basically means that performance issues we suffered due to memory swapping on our old machine should be non-existent with this one.

For the nerds, on the old machine I had to tune apache to keep it from spawning too many child processes, lest the machine run out of memory, start swapping, and bring the blog farm to its knees. Even with careful tuning, the old machine was so short on memory, it was constantly teetering on swapping, and I had to have a process monitor the load average and kill and restart Web server processes from time to time. That meant the Web server would get itself wedged into a corner, visitors would have timeouts and authors wouldn’t know if their post got saved.

The new box hummed through its first day today without a hiccup (and without the load average rising above 0.31).

For those who are really interested in the nerdly details, here are the particulars:

• Intel Core Duo CPU E7300 @ 2.66GHz
• 2 GB RAM
• Linux 2.6.27.7-9-default x86_64 (openSUSE 11.1)
• MySQL, Apache, PHP, WordPress