django 1.0.1 upgrade

So I upgraded from Django 0.96 to 1.0.1, which involved a fair amount of refactoring. Which was necessary anyway. Possibly not my best idea to do the change in the middle of the day when the kids are running wild around me, but most things except actually looking at individual blog pages seems to be working.

The admin side of things is ugly, but functional and I expect to be doing some tweaks over the next few days.

UPDATE: Individual blog entry views work, comments work, though the process could be prettier, akismet seems to be working. On the front end everything looks pretty decent, though I'll need to tweak the feed URL a bit.

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Open the door get on the floor

Transitional whale, with feet. That's just damn cool. I should've majored in archeology.

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So lights, camera, action - all hail the one that gets the job done

I'm great at setting goals. It's the follow through that always kills me.

I've got binders full of projects I'd like to tackle someday. I've got a notebook full of drawings of woodworking projects, most of which are my 'next project' at the time I come up with them. I have dozens of snippets of songs, some even half finished, that I am going to work on just as soon as I have time to mess around in GarageBand and figure it out. I have over a dozen half-written blog entries that I've just never gotten around to finishing. I've done some massive updating of the code that runs this site, and porting all the content from the old Zope site into the new Django framework. It's about 85% done with no clear timeframe to finish.

I've dabbled with GTD, fully leveraged reminders in Outlook for work and iCal at home. I've got pop-ups for everything I plan on doing, and I've gotten remarkably efficient at ignoring them. Discipline is the thing. I'm easily distracted and somewhat absent minded. Writing things down on paper helps a good deal, but even so is no guarantee.

I go through phases where I'm highly motivated and aggressively follow through on everything for a few weeks, and then I start slacking again. I haven't thought to check if it ties in at all with sleep patterns, but I wouldn't be surprised if it does. I find myself setting target start dates but no firm milestones or end dates which I suspect is also a large part of the problem. I realize "Gee, I only made it to the gym twice this week. Oh well, I'll blow it off again today and next week I'll start clean." This sometimes happens as early as Wednesday.

How do you make sure you follow through once you've set yourself a task?

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I saw the news last night

It's Morning in America. It wasn't a dream.

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Election Day Update 3

I am a cynical person. When the Dem race got down to Clinton -vs- Obama I declared that McCain would win handily because I thought that racism and sexism would guarantee him the win. I have said so vocally and often in the months since, and I am thrilled beyond any possible description to be dead wrong.

This is the first time I've voted for the winner in a Presidential election. This is a bright day for the future of this country and a wonderful world in which to raise my children. I am proud of my country as all of us should be.

McCain gave a truly honorable and noble concession speech as well. "Let there be no reason no for an American to fail to cherish their citizenship in this, the greatest nation on earth." "I urge all American who supported me to join me in not just congratulating him, but offering our next President our goodwill and earnest efforts to find ways to compromise and work together."

And of course the right wing blogs and forums are already flooded with "I'm not proud of my country, I'm ashamed of my country" and "R.I.P. U.S.A." How is that not anti-American?

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Election Day Update 2

MSNBC's coverage is interesting: they have the best on location material and the absolute worst commentary and analysis (for wildly flexible definitions of 'analysis'). Then again, Chris Matthews is involved. CNN is surprisingly good on the analysis front. Current TV is broadcasting bad techno with pointless graphics and running scrolls of Twitter updates. This is surreal.

BBC America has pretty nice on location work and top notch analysis, hampered only by high tech toys that don't quite work. PBS has the only in depth local coverage, and does so really well.

Fox and MSNBC are over-eager to declare states done, often with less than 1% of returns counted.

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Election Day Update

I saw this sign on one of the major streets in North City (over 90% minority neighborhood). It says "Ask for a Paper Ballot (OptiScan)". I'm encouraged that the word is reaching lower income communities that electronic voting machines are not to be trusted, but curious as to why this message doesn't seem to be penetrating white middle class neighborhoods. I suspect there is a fascination with high tech that makes the bourgeois prone to think that it is automatically better. The more someone knows about IT security, the more likely it is that they are to not trust the current generation of high tech voting machines.

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Election Day Report

My polling place hosts four precincts. At 7.35 am the line was about 200 yards long (from the gym at the school down the hall out the door and up the sidewalk). A poll worker was going up and down the line and checking people's precincts, as there are two precincts that are more heavily populated than the other two. Anyone from one of the smaller precincts was pulled from the line and sent straight into the gym to stand in the lines for their precincts. Fortunately that included me. And having a last name in the S-Z block put me in a line with all of two people in front of me.

All the poll workers were friendly, if frazzled, and were all wearing ID cards and polo shirts that clearly identified them. There were also two police officers standing by in case there were any problems. The general mood was upbeat and excited, which was nice to see. Interestingly, there were signs on the fence outside for all the state candidates and most of the local ones, but for the presidential campaign there was a lone Obama sign and no McCain ones. I live in a heavily Dem ward so both parties probably figured there wasn't much point.

I opted for paper ballot because electronic ones are considered unreliable by pretty much all security experts. It took me longer to actually fill out the ballot than anything else. When I left there were people who had been outside had just gotten in the door, so I figure for those people the wait was going to be about 30-40 minutes.

Yes, I broke my standard headline convention for this post. I only mention this so the few who are entertained by them don't spend hours trying to track down the song with that specific string in the lyrics.

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