alt.larryanderson.org

Converts with a sense of humor will see themselves in its pages. Those without a sense of humor may be offended. Both are excellent reasons why it should be in your collection. Buy this book!

Pithless Thoughts: Orthographs - THE BOOK!

The problem? Blogger only imports sites in a specific Blogger-only format. If you want to import a Wordpress, Tumblr or Posterous blog you’re out of luck. Or are you?

As it happens, no, you’re not. I was able to import some of my Posterous stuff into Blogger, but I did it using Wordpress.com. Wordpress?

Yes, Wordpress. Turns out that Wordpress.com has an importer that can handle Posterous blogs quite nicely—images, comments, and everything. Go into your Wordpress dashboard (once you’ve opened a WP account, of course) and click on Tools > Import > Posterous. But once you get it into Wordpress, you’re only halfway there. You still need to convert it to a format that Blogger can handle.

Solution: Wordpress2Blogger. Hosted on Google App Engine, it allows you to upload your file, converts it, and downloads a Blogger-friendly XML file to your computer. It’s supposedly limited to files of 1 MB or smaller (although it handled my 1.1 MB file just fine), but it’s open-source and you can run it locally by going to code.google.com/p/google-blog-converters-appengine/. There are also links there to other apps that will convert a wide variety of formats, including converting your Blogger files to something else if you want to move on.

Thanks to Google’s Data Liberation Front for making such a useful tool!

Twitter had its fourth birthday not long ago, and then a few days ago Twitter founder Biz Stone announced at the Twitter dev conference that the service now had 105 million users. This got me thinking about my own history with Twitter, which is appropriate considering that my own "Twitter birthday" was just six days ago.

OK, so maybe not so cogent and insightful. But then, I really didn't have any idea of how to use Twitter, or what to use it for. Back then, I don't think anybody did. The question on the Twitter page was still "What are you doing?", and people were still blithely posting what they were eating for lunch, as I did.

I got off to a slow start. It took me three months to post my first 18 tweets, and then I followed Leo Laporte over to Jaiku for a while. That little adventure ultimately didn't last, and in November I came back to Twitter, only to change accounts the following June in an ill-advised rebranding exercise. My first tweet on the new account was no more scintillating than that of my original account:

Eventually, I gave up on the new account--for one thing, the username was just too long when people only have 140 characters to reply to you--and I came back to my original account.  It's interesting, though, to see how the service grew in the short time I used the alternate account. All Twitter posts being numbered sequentially, my first tweet on the second account was tweet number 842,199,062; by the time I mothballed it six months later, my last tweet was number 1,127,386,938. By way of comparison, the first tweet on my original account was number 23,318,311, and as of this writing, my most recent tweet is number 12,226,329,143.  

*To find your Twitter user number, hover your mouse over the RSS feed for your Twitter account. The number of your RSS feed is your user number.

Seen on I-210: a Mexican-market Dodge Ramcharger, a model not sold in the U.S.

My academic field was history, and anyone who thinks that history is neat, tidy and orderly needs to do some reading (and should listen in on a faculty argument sometime). Two of the biggest mistakes that beginning history students make are 1) thinking that an outcome was obvious or predetermined and 2) judging historical events by the standards of our time, which on some level is really just a variation of the first mistake.

Pardon me for going off on a personal tangent, but I wish to cite one example. One of the things that drives me the most nuts is the current fetish for believing that Ronald Reagan was somehow prescient about how to end the Cold War, and was singlehandedly responsible for its end. As I look back, it's hard to argue with the fact that he was right about a lot of things, but there were numerous instances where things might have gone badly wrong in ways that most people would rather not think about.

There is controversy in history circles on this topic, but I believe that people matter. Let's assume just for a moment that Mikhail Gorbachev did not succeed Konstantin Chernenko as General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. It was by no means certain that he would. The black art of Kremlinology has never been an exact science, but there was a point at which it was believed that his chief rival for the succession was Grigori Romanov, the party boss of Leningrad. Romanov was a true Cold Warrior, a hardline Communist. Had he been leader during the time that Eastern Europe was in turmoil, it's entirely possible the Red Army would have been sent in to brutally crush the protests and restore order, and the Berlin Wall might never have fallen. Certainly, this would have made the Communist leaders of the Warsaw Pact happy. East Germany's Erich Honecker and Romania's Nicolae Ceaucescu, to name two, were never terribly happy with the processes of perestroika and glasnost and would have been eager participants in a modern renewal of Stalinism.

So imagine this: a comparatively young, hardline leader in the Kremlin, backed by the Soviet Union's nuclear arsenal, and not afraid to use force and repression to stay in control. Suddenly, the events of 1989 take on a different, and ominous, overtone. It could have ended in a confrontation that made the Cuban Missile Crisis look like a day at Disney World.

I'm glad things turned out the way they did. But I'm not enough of a fool to think that it was the only possible outcome.

From Posterous Photos

Following on from a Buzz post by Sean Walsh (http://goo.gl/ipGD), today is Gmail's sixth birthday, and in honor of that, here's a screenshot of the first Gmail I received.