Ian Smithdahl

In my quest for a rating system which is less arbitrary than the usual 4- or 5-star system, my friends and I first came up with the Speed rating system.   But that proved even more problematic.   So, back to the drawing board, I thought that a system based on the actions that I actually recommend would be more grounded.   Even if there is a skew in this system, I can at least justify it. Here's how it works with movies: 5 stars mea

I'm generally an upbeat, optimistic person. I believe in hope. I think that things will turn out in the end. These are the things that often come across to people when they first meet me. I'm an upper. But, the few people who take the time to get to know me better, realize that I'm often quite pessimistic -- just in the literal sense, and not the emotional sense. I generally forecast that bad things are going to happen. I'm constantly preparing myself, mentally as well as organizationally, for the worst. I expect to get fired. I think about myself or people close to me dying.

I've always had problems with the usual methods of rating movies, either out of five stars, or thumbs-up/thumbs-down.  There seems to be no real rhyme or reason to these systems.   And I've noticed that, when I use them, there's very little consistency to my own ratings.   I tend to rate an enormous number of things 4 stars, and almost nothing at 1 or 5 stars. In college, a group of friends and I tried to make a system where we started with the smallest possible unit of a good movie.  In other words, a movie which was in fact a good movie, but only barely so.   Any less good, would be no go

I've tried a lot of different computerized systems for managing my task list, but I find that nothing beats one single 8 1/2" x 11" sheet of paper for capturing the top of the stack, next actions.   For the last few weeks I got a little lazy and allowed my next actions list to grow into four sheets of paper, and the loss in my personal efficiency, as well as my sense of control, was shocking.  For me at least, I really do have to be disciplined and keep it down to one page.   If I have too many tasks to fit on one page (of course I do!), then I really need think hard and put tasks that don't n

I have a great respect for the continuum of Eastern religions that includes Buddhism and Hinduism. But, I have to take objection to the concept that reality, even physical reality, is an illusion. Illusions must have referents; an illusion must be an illusion of something in particular. A mirage is an illusion of water in the desert.

Some years ago, I first started to kick around with Wordpress Multi-User, aka WPMU. In the last few months, I've been exposed to the most excellent plug-in WP-Hive. At first glance, these two seem to do the same thing: allow you to host multiple wordpress blogs on one installation -- one codebase and one database. And both products are excellent.

I've been playing around with Wordpress MU for some time now, but always using the option for installing each blog on its own subdirectory (for example, http://www.example.com/foo/), rather than each blog sitting on its own subdomain (for example, http://foo.example.com).

I yearn for religion, I yearn for God. But I often feel like I'm drifting on the ocean alone, perhaps with the stars of holy scripture to guide me, but without fellow mariners with whom to compare notes. But sometimes something breaks through for me, and helps me to realize that I'm never alone. Father Balmer's short interview on The Colbert Report was one of those moments for me. Religion should be positive. It shouldn't be about exclusion, even when it's framed inclusively (as Balmer says, "if you have the same biases I have, you are welcome").