I have to say, even though I am a total idiot with *nix in general, this was easy:

* Go into Synaptic
* Add deb http://http.us.debian.org/debian unstable main repository and reload.
* Pick "movabletype-opensource" (and plugin-core, for good measure)
* That's it!

Feels like it's been a long, long time to get here, but I'm more in the mood to celebrate than complain. Win!

As I've been trying to educate people via Twitter: THE FIST BUMP IS DEAD. (White people, I'm looking at you.) Please stop doing this now. It's over. The time has gone. As a public service, let me offer an illustration of what you will look like when I leave you hanging. (Thanks to Abe for the pic.)

Originally posted on anil.vox.com

As the most insufferable of his actions while we were contemporaries in high school, the kid who was president of my senior class interrupted his speech during our graduation at regular intervals to serenade us, a capella, with portions of the theme song of Cheers. Yes, the TV show.

I have to confess, I hadn't thought of this in years until today, when it came back to me what that otherwise unmemorable song is about: Being a regular. One of the great civic, and particularly urban, traditions of our culture is the idea of being a regular at the establishments that form part of the routine of living in a true neighborhood.

I realize it again because the past few days, as I've been home after a particularly long and arduous time on the road, and have been suffering through something of a lingering cold, I've gotten the chance to encounter time and again the fact that I'm a regular in my neighborhood. And that the sense of belonging, the sense of place, that this inspires is why the East Village, for me, feels like home.

From Saturday, I visited my neighborhood barber for haircut. The establishment's sign out front says, in big letters, "Neighborhood Barber". That's probably all the context you need for setting the scene. I trundled in with unkempt hair and a happy new year greeting, and got an affectionate, "Hey, happy new year! The usual?" in return. Now, I am not celebrating a new year, of course, but despite our neighborhood being predominantly hispanic, I'm probably the only person who frequents this barbershop who's not jewish or muslim, so it just seemed appropriate. And more importantly, I didn't even have to say "Number two razor, keep the sides and back natural" and my hair ended up as it should. If I hadn't have shaved the day before, he would have done that, too. Very dignified. There are some non-Muslim, non-Jewish regulars at the barbershop, too, mostly really skinny almost-famous hipsters who bring with them magazines or CD artwork showing the photo shoots where they try (unsuccessfully) to get Neighborhood Barbers a styling credit for their part in the burgeoning star's fabulousness. The guys at the barbershop always nod politely and then get back to cutting hair.

From yesterday morning, while heading out to a meeting, I walked by the guy who runs the tea shop at the end of the block. (It's like a coffee shop, only they serve a gentleman's drink.) Nothing more than a nod, but he was acknowledging me as somebody who makes his business go, and I was acknowledging him as the most talented enabled of my caffeine addiction. Fair exchange.

Yesterday evening, rushing back from being at a conference all day, I got into the corner laundry just as they closed. Well, technically, after they closed. The mother and daughter who run the place held the door open, and even retrieved my bag of washed-and-folded without me providing my name, phone number, address, or any other ID. "You almost missed us!" was half-teasing, half-scolding, in true Asian mother fashion. But I still got my clothes back, no problem.

Then today, at lunch. I went to eat at Ssam Bar, a block and a half from where we live. It's a much-praised restaurant, with a not-quite-celebrity chef, sure. But it's also a neighborhood joint where they know us as regulars, and take care of us accordingly. I wanted to try out the bento box, which I've never had, and while i was there (the place was almost empty!) a woman came in, asking basic questions about the place and clearly only there on a recommendation. I asked if it was her first time there, and told her "That's David Chang, he started this place." as he walked by, in the midst of me explaining how the pork bun was the place to start at lunch if you wanted to really begin to understand the menu at Ssam. Some more pleasantries were exchanged, and she made the (correct) decision to have her first visit be at dinner. The skeleton staff that watches over the place brought me a Diet Dr. Pepper, no need for me to order, and when I left and started to bus my little tray of food, they shook their heads. "Don't worry about it."

For all the (over-)explaining I've done about why I love New York City, it's probably never been more complicated than the simple fact that in the East Villlage, in the places I live my life, the people here know me, and I know them. We have a shared context, of being multiethnic and vaguely Asian and obsessed with food and in so many ways, really old-fashioned. New York is the biggest of big cities, of course, but my experience is actually a lot more personal and personable than when I lived in a small town. And it's a place where I feel like a regular. Where, you know, everybody knows your name.

Originally posted on anil.vox.com

I've got a bunch of little things left at my apartment that you should come and take. A few things are for sale, but most are for free if you take them away!For sale: (I don't know what these are...
» Read more on Vox

I just got this lj2me mobile client for my phone and I have to admit, I'm kinda diggin it for updating my LJ. I need this kinda thing for my Vox and Twitter, too -- why do these things have different APIs again?

i'd never seen any of the Bourne Identity movies (I think my mom watched the old 80s miniseries back in the day) but I thought I'd watch the first movie in anticipation of watching Ultimatum, since everybody was raving about it. my verdict? meh.

i thought synecdochic's post about getting your lj grievances heard was dead-on.

i'm really trying *not* to turn my personal LJ into some secret back-channel community support blog, but i'm loving the thoughtful, constructive feedback i'm getting from folks and just wanted to let y'all know what's up. i'm collecting all the comments on my last post or two (and of course the whole team is reading everything written on lj_biz's comments) and will pass them on to the team.

it'll probably be a coupla days until I can do that -- my day job is getting Movable Type 4.0 launched right (yay! it's great! and it's gonna be open source soon, so we can even share stuff between MT and LJ) and assuming that all goes smoothly (HAH!) then i'll circle back with the LJ team and pass on what you've told me.

until then, my favorite LJ post of late is my friend and coworker lisa's post about bradfitz leaving Six Apart. Lisa's the oldest-school member of the LJ team, and i found her post really thoughtful and moving.

i just caught this open letter to lj/6a that's in progress, and thought it's a wonderfully productive and constructive way of helping out -- it's making the assumption that LJ-the-business and LJ-the-community are on the same side, which we are! I don't honestly know enough of the details to know which parts are right or wrong or somewhere in between, but a lot of it looks exactly like the conversations we've been having internally about getting our relationship with some of our communities back on the right track.

Thanks and good luck to Brad -- can't wait to see what you do next. And a big hearty fuck-you to rumormongers who stir shit up just to demoralize people who do good work. If you don't have enough drama in your life, go make something that millions of people think is valuable.

Update: Just to make it clear, my frustration was with Valleywag gossiping about Brad and LJ and 6A without ever contributing anything positive to our community. I was not complaining about anything that people have said on LJ. (Except giving a bunch of good charities a bum rap, but that was only a few folks.)

That being said, anybody in our community who's got something they want me to pass along to the LJ team (we're definitely listening, and working to improve how we communicate) is more than welcome to comment here or on email or anything else.

For my (zero dollars) money, Jay Smooth is the best video blogger on the web. Witness the launch of Ill Doctrine. LOLCats? Check. Ze Frank name-check? Check? Credible rapping? Check? Actual editing? Check. Sooo good.

Originally posted on anil.vox.com

People like Ann Shirazi in this Times story bug the hell out of me. I only have the barest little bit of knowledge about city planning and urban development, but this woman clearly knows *nothing*. I'm certainly not uncritically in favor of development (the glass monstrosity in Astor Place is a perfect example of a modern tower that doesn't fit into its surroundings), but this is proof of idiocy:

“I loved my neighborhood,” said Ann Shirazi, a social worker who since 1974 has lived around the corner from the Ariel site. “Now I can’t walk from 100th Street to Broadway because I cannot — I cannot — look at those buildings.”

You're a social worker and the sight of a building you don't like is too much for you to take? Riiiight. They're finally undoing a Moses superblock -- this is cause for celebration. I'm sure there are people with perfectly reasonable objections, but I find it telling that the voice chosen to articulate the objections couches her statements in a complete lack of historical understanding, an overbearing sense of privilege, and no familiarity whatsoever with the costs of past development in her own neighborhood.

Originally posted on anil.vox.com

I get to talk a good bit about LiveJournal, since I do a lot of public speaking on behalf of Six Apart, or about blogs in general. And one of the ways that I've been referring to LJ is as "the original online community for original thinkers". Basically, it's my shorthand way of saying "yeah, maybe the stereotype is that people on LJ are weird, but really it's just that they're different. And there's a lot of us that are different."

Although I dress like a suit a lot of the time these days, so maybe all my indie cred is gone. ONOZ.

Anyway, the point was amplified to me by some of the recent analysis I've seen about LJ. Most notably, Discover magazine picked up the story about the great analysis by Matthew Hurst of Microsoft. (Shout out to Matthew for using LJ's Serious Business sister service, TypePad.)

In the graph that Discover used, LJ is the distinct part in the upper right corner. Check out Matthew's first graph to get an idea of how truly distinct LJ is.

That image, to me was reassuring -- LJ is different than the rest of the blogosphere, though obviously it's loosely connected to it. And if LJ shows up as substantial, well-established, and a little bit off to the side of the other millions of blogs out there, I think that's just fine.

Also relevant, of course, is XKCD's map of online communities. Given that LJ shares some open source tech with Facebook and some audience with Xanga, I don't mind that it's between them both on the map. But I think it'd be more appropriate as an island. :)

Interestingly, the relationships between all these different communities were confirmed for me when I wrote my recent post on LOLcats and kitty pidgin; The link to my post spread through different online communities at different times, and the diffusion on LJ was almost totally distinct and unconnected to the other communities. The post hasn't been huge on Digg or MySpace, at least yet. I take that as something of a compliment. ;)

just landed after spending a few hours of quality time with powerpoint on the plane.

Since we haven't seen the movie yet, I figured I'd finally get around to reading The Namesake. I had been delaying it for a long time because I was a little intimidated by what I'd heard about the story, and because it's been about a decade since I've read any fiction at all. (Seriously!)

Unsurprisingly, I loved the book (to an approximation, this is my story too) so hopefully i will get a few minutes to write up a proper review later. Until then, go get a copy or borrow your friends' and read it yourself.

Originally posted on anil.vox.com

Posts that contain Openid per day for the last 365 days.



That's a nice-looking trend line. :)

Ever run for office?  (School, club, organization, politics, etc.)  Did you get elected?

I ran for a buncha different things when I was in school. I don't remember if I just ran or was actually elected to student council when I was in middle school, but that year our class elected a special ed kid to student council as a joke that (I felt, at least) was largely at his expense. I found that whole episode so disturbing and typical that I never ran for any of our class offices again.

But! I did participate pretty actively in the Model Legislature program run by the YMCA. It's different than the (better-known, I think) Model U.N. program that a lot of schools do, though I participated in that as well. In Model Legislature, we played the role of legislators for our state, so kids from all over Pennsylvania, where I grew up, all came to Harrisburg and we even got to sit in the actual seats of the state capitol. There were a lot of really good kids in the program, and it was one of my favorite experiences from high school, but I'll just share the anecdotes you would all appreciate.

• My sophomore year of high school, the Model Legislature program introduced lobbyists for the first time. I immediately signed up to be one, representing women's issues. (Seriously!) Yes, I was the first influence-peddling, silver-tongued perverter of the democratic process in the history of that state's august faux-legislative body. And I did it for the chicks.
• At the end of my junior year, I ran for Governor, a term I would have served as a senior if I had won. I think there were four or five serious candidates, including one guy whom I was friends with (I forget his name; it's been 15 years) who was actually the son of a real-life state legislator. He and I both lost (my performance in the final debate was unimpressive, since I'd almost completely lost my voice campaigning) but my friend Hans was the Editor-in-Chief of the Model Newspaper, which oversaw the elections, and I think he told me I placed third or fourth. NOT LAST! :)
• Since I wasn't Governor, I was eligible to run for a different office my senior year. That time, I killed. I ran for Speaker of the House against four or five other candidates. Instead of a debate, we each had a few minutes to present the case for our candidacies, and for the closing line of my speech, I stepped from behind the podium I was standing at and said, "and my final qualification is that I'm not just wearing purple pants, I'm purple on the inside." I won in a landslide.
• There were a lot of weird scheduling problems that year, so I ended up having to kill time in the actual chambers of the Pennsylvania Capitol in front of a few hundred high school kids all in formal dress, growing increasingly restless. I had a gavel, which was largely ineffective, but being way up high on the speaker's podium made it really easy to command everyone's attention. So, during the course of the long weekend, I carried out the duties of my office by singing my acapella rendition of the introduction to Whitney Houston's cover of Chaka Khan's "I'm Every Woman", having the congressional pages deliver notes to my then-girlfriend, and having everyone wave their hands in the air while chanting "Hip hop hooray, hoooo, heeeey, hoooo" because Naughty By Nature was very popular back then.

I'm pretty sure nobody's elected me to anything since then.

Originally posted on anil.vox.com

How have people mispronounced your name?  How is it supposed to sound? 
Submitted by Lorie.   

I get "anal" from time to time, still, but not as frequently as when I was in junior high.

Hmm, maybe that doesn't read right.

Anyway, it sounds like "anneal", although I guess most people don't know that word. You can play the sound on this page to hear what it sounds like.

Originally posted on anil.vox.com

I was showing my Heelys off to some friends tonight (Hachi is awesome at rolling around, but Steve sucks like me) and got a chance to swing by their site. The page title says, "Heelys: Freedom is a wheel in your sole". I know I'm overtired and stressed out, but there really is something beautiful about that.

I think that's kind of what I was trying to say a few years ago when I said, "We're given this world that we may hope for a straw that shows through the flex of its neck that it wants to kiss us back."

Originally posted on anil.vox.com