Alan Gutierrez

Microsoft has released a new advertisement, after the Jerry Sienfeld and Bill Gates advertisements (Shoe Circus, A Family Affair), which had the look and feel of sitcom spun-off of the Seinfeld TV Show of yesteryear. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Jerry and Bill go from one ordinary domestic setting to the next, brining their own brand (Jerry’s brand) of humor with them. One episode even had an entire sitcom family.

These were generally referred to as the commercials about nothing.

Now the advertising has made a preposterous leap to an incredibly defensive ad campaign.

The ad is passive-aggressive with a chilly tone of righteous indignation. I recalls the haughty politically correct types that I’d encounter in Ann Arbor. You might be talking about the Atlanta Braves when someone at the table says, “Well, my great grandfather was half Chippewa Native-American,” and glowers at you. Everyone stops talking about baseball and starts talking about nothing.

They start with a John Hodgeman look alike saying, “I’m a PC and I’ve been made into a stereotype.” Then they run through a litany of people who say that they are a PC, but they are not hip, they wear glasses, they study genes, they are not human doings but human beings, and they are all PCs.

Immediately, I recalled Principal Blackman’s You’re A Racist educational film from Strangers With Candy, the comedy that parodied the after school specials that are so familiar to me as a television weened child of the 80’s. (The video is available. Please click play.)

The ad campaign fails for me because of this overlay. More after the jump.
(more…)

Test Pattern by Jen.

About two months ago, my funding for a dedicated Think New Orleans server came to an end. Think New Orleans had been running well for a while, so I thought it wouldn’t matter much to consolidate it with the server that hosts this blog, ljubljana.blogometer.com.

Neither website gets large amounts of traffic. Think New Orleans receives 500 unique visitors a day on a good day. I can’t imagine that all the neighborhood blogs, the New Orleans Wiki, and my personal/professional blog together attract more than 2000 unique visitors a day. Even a modest dedicated server should be able to handle that much traffic, unless something is terribly wrong.

The server also runs postfix and dovecot (IMAP). It serves up the bloggers listserv using GNU Mailmain. It acts as a Subversion repository through Apache. None of these applications concern me. They are all very well written applications. The mail and Subversion services serve only a single user, me.

The Think New Orleans web menagerie includes WordPress, MediaWiki and Instiki. WordPress and Mediawiki are PHP applications running from Apache. Instiki is in a Ruby Webrick web server which is accessed via Apache mod_proxy.

Neighborhood blogs such as Northwest Carrollton and Think New Orleans itself are run in WordPress. There are two flavors of New Orleans Wiki. The Mediawiki version and the Instiki version. The latter is getting more use these days. It contains the definitive List of New Orleans Bloggers and the resources created by CHAT.

There is an instance of Jetty that is rarely visited that runs a few simple servlets that is also accessed via Apache mod_proxy. This is very low traffic and the Servlets are my own. The unconference signup servlet is an example. It writes a web form to file.

I run a script from cron that requests http://blogometer.com/. If it takes more than three seconds to serve, I kill all httpd processes and restart Apache.

Please have a look at the crash reports and tell me what you think.

Lance Hill sent me a link to another article by Adam Nossiter in the New York Times. Nossiter is off drinking at the trough of Uptown’s conventional wisdom in his article Whites Take a Majority on New Orleans’s Council.

There is a post at Think New Orleans called Is Adam Nossiter a Tool? That question stands. I don’t want to write a new article about the matter, but rather have people continue to discuss the issue under the existing article. What I really want is a website that will allow me to feature this article once again, or rather bring this subject up in the context of the conversations that took place before. It is very important to preserve both the existing discussion and the timeline of events.

Which is something that is common to most of my civic writing. I do want to encourage participation in the conversation, so I want to resurrect the existing conversation, with the exisiting participants. Most people subscribe to email notifications of comments of a particular post. To notify them that Adam Nossiter is banging on about race and quoting Greg Rigamer, I need to continue the discussion under the previous post.

Although, I’m pleased that WordPress is now performing acceptably, both blogs and Wikis fail to make my efforts in New Orleans easier.

In an IM exchange with Matt Hampel of ArborWiki, we discussed how I’m using the ArborWiki theme to create a new, database driven implementation of the List of New Orleans Bloggers. I asked Matt about forms and he pointed me toward work that he’d done at Ann Arbor’s Community High School, specifically the form guidelines for the school’s website. Moreover, he sent a link to a blog called Functioning Form where I found a post called Web Form Design Best Practices which has a presentation in PDF that is a great start in understanding form design.

I removed a hack that I’d thrown in to implement asides. Think New Orleans has been slow. It is now performs acceptably. I’d not feel like posting much lately, since I couldn’t imagine anyone wanting to read a website that took 30 seconds to load.

New Orleans taught me: When someone asks: What do you do? Take aback. Say: Tsk. That is such a personal question. Ask me something else.

Foundation Center and Foundation Directory Online.