All politics is loco

I met Michael Lewis at a new media conference back during the dotcom go-go days when he lamented how he coulda been a millionaire had he just accepted an offer to write a crappy column for TheStreet.com.

Well, Lewis is doing all right these days. (See JD's Bookstore for his latest book, Moneyball.) In the Sunday New York Times Magazine, he wades into the California recall mess with All Politics is Loco.

Running Linux in sweet ignorance

I've been lucky to run into several high-quality people through this weblog, including two tech wizards who've been helping me wth my blog problems. Damien Newman (a programmer at MovableType and proprietor of mdn studio) advised me to lose my individual entry archives, which take up as much as 323MB of storage space. I did so, but had to restore them when MT wouldn't let me rebuild anything. (There was a better way, but I apparently got some erroneous advice in the MT Support Forum.) Damien returns Sunday after a noteworthy weeklong trip.

Kynn Bartlett, who's a regular visitor to these parts -- and whose credits include chief technologist of Idyll Mountain, the Kynn.com site, the Shock & Awe Blog, the Inland Anti-Empire Blog and who's the author of CSS in 24 Hours -- stepped in for several minutes today. He, too, suggested I lose the individual entry archives. I did so but, just as the day before, MT lay down and died on me (giving me error messages when I tried to rebuild all files). But then Kynn borrowed my log-in, did the exact same thing, and dang if it didn't work. Sometimes you just have the touch. So now I'm moving on to the Great Transition to TypePad.

Kynn also asked me what this blog runs on. I confessed my ignorance. He let me know about the Netcraft site, which informs that my website and blog are running Apache/1.3.27 (Unix) DAV/1.0.3 mod_gzip/1.3.26.1a mod_ssl/2.8.10 OpenSSL/0.9.6c PHP/4.2.3 on Linux.

So I'm a Linux guy without even knowing it. Cool.

And speaking of Linux, today the NY Times Magazine has a Q&A with Linus Torvalds.