This is where I scull in the morning. It is a very beautiful place. This photo was shot by Rick Heath and was found on Flickr.
Camp Candoit, mentioned in the previous post, was located just to the right of the center of this photo.
Day: September 14, 2008
Cotuit in World War II
Wish I was going to be in town this Wednesday so I could hear this presentation on Cotuit during WWII. The town was the site of a amphibious warfare training base, Camp Candoit, located in North Bay. The soldiers practiced their marine landings for North Africa, Sicily and D-Day here. The Cotuit Wikipedia entry blames this camp for a decline in quality of the oysters. Alas, I will be in RTP this week.
David Foster Wallace – 1962-2008
David Foster Wallace was my favorite living author and now he is dead, by his own hand, at 46, found hanging in his California home on Friday. The author of Infinite Jest, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again and Consider the Lobster (among others) he redefined digressionary erudition, made an art form of the footnote, and was one of the great shared pleasures in life between my son Eliot and me.
I am pretty devastated. Newsweek’s David Gates writes a great appreciation.
Here’s Wallace’s Kenyon commencement speech, 2005.
Whereabouts – week of Sept. 15
Sept 15: Monday, Cotuit
Sept 16-19: Morrisville, NC
Sept 20-21: Cotuit
First week in North Carolina since July. Lots of meetings and catchup, focus on HR stuff, strategy. Then off to Chicago and New York the week of 22nd to speak at the Folio Show and AdWeek. Vacation is needed, but may be deferred until October at this point.
WordPress auto-update — first time results
I’ve been blogging on WordPress since 2004, when Om Malik suggested I get back into blogging after a brief, but discontinued foray on Blogger back in 2002. I have my own host — Churbuck.com — at Cape.com (now Meganet) and had been running a simple Frontpage-built set of static pages for a couple years, primarily tending to the domain so I could enable the churbuck.com email address.
I installed WordPress and after some serious stumbling and fumbling, figured out MySQL, Php, and the old days spent in front of IPswitch’s FTP client transferring files and building directory structures on my host.
I love WordPress — indeed I would go so far as to claim it is the most significant and beloved piece of software in my life over the past twenty years — and it just got better.
Much better.
While I was in my admin dashboard this morning I saw the suggestion that I “automatically” upgrade to the latest version. In the past, any time I attempted a maintenance upgrade of my blog I would usually kill it, requiring the intervention of more capable minds, such as Mark Cahill to get thing sorted out and running again. Mark told me when he last upgraded me in July that the auto-update would be coming, and well, yes it is.
About one minute, a simple, straightforward set of questions, and ta-da, I am up to date with the latest verison. Gratitude aside, this auto update is a big step towards making WordPress the defacto opensource content management system for the world, taking out the technical/sysadmin barrier to entry that makes self-hosting so challenging for people like myself, who don’t have the time or cause to get good at the essentials of open source LAMP based hosting.
I love WordPress.