For some reason my friend James seems to attract people that have widely divergent views from his views. This isn’t necessairly a bad thing - I think that a diversity in opinion is a key to success from the micro to the macro level. A healthy discussion with a goal of finding common ground and resolving differences is great; ranting from a soapbox and running roughshod over somone is useless.

Somehow I always manage to have some involvment in these discussions. I’m not complaining - I try and treat these as an opportunity to learn more and find better ways of communicating. On the down side, I tend to get heavily wrapped up in these discussions. This stems from the fact that I am extremely goal-orientated; I want to put the final checkmark next to the box that tells me I’m done with the task at hand and move on. Of course, life doesn’t really work like that. Which I am reminded of again and again.

Recently, I’ve been enjoying an email exchange with what I would classify as an fairly right-wing conservative that used to be one of James’ neighbors. It’s been an interesting exchange, and I’ve learned a few things in the half-dozen or so emails that have been exchanged.

At some point in the future I want to clean up and post the meat of not only this discussion, but with some of the other discussions that have taken place over the last six months. As I mentioned, James has interesting friends; this includes an evolution denier and a man who has an amazingly narcissitic view of God, salvation, and the ultimate truth in the Universe. The later person is also a medical doctor who seems to harbor the belief that spinal and cranial manipulation can solve ills of the body. He also has discussed “spiritual” and holistic healing. Like I said, it’s interesting stuff. More on all that later.

Right now I wanted to provide a quick summary of the process I go through when evaluating claims and evidence. This is by no means complete - it’s a reformatted version of a quick note I sent out the other day in a discussion regarding the importance of evaluating sources.

I hardly ever watch mainstream news - at lunch the other day the #1 story over the TV in the bar was about Jenna Bush’s wedding. Bully for her, I really don’t give a shit though, especially when the Fed is once again adjusting the interest rate…..which only merits about a 12 second sound bite.

I try to check several sites, getting as close to the primary source as possible. Sites that have proved themselves as being reasonably unbiased and accurate don’t get a free pass, but they get a higher inital value than some guy writing a blog out in Hoboken (or here in Ohio for that matter).

I’m more interested in hard facts than I am in anecdotal evidence, because it’s easy to form an emotional connection to one side of what I’m looking into. I try to avoid sites with a hard bias - be that right or left - because in many cases these sites filter everything through an ideological filter that (either intentionally or not) causes them to omit or gloss over facts (best case) or actively distort facts (worst case).

I prefer news reports over opinion pieces - not to say that the former aren’t biased, but they usually are easier to digest and analyze. I also try and figure out what vested interest the author has in the outcome - for instance, I probably would regard a report on Cigarettes/Cancer from Phillip Morris or the Coalition for Smoking Cesation with a bit more skepticism than I would a peer reviewed report in JAMA.

The use of Logical Fallacies (either intentionally or unintentionally) should throw up a red flag. We all can fall into this trap when we start to get emotionally involved in an issue; however, there are many people who use these fallacies to gain headway in an argument. Knowing them, and more importantly being able to recognize them in action, is key. Fortunately, there are many resources available for the skeptically minded - from Carl Sagan’s Baloney Detection Kit, to Dr. Steven Novella’s excellent paper on fallacies, and finally to the appropriately named www.logicalfallacies.info site.

Other reference sites are good for specialized research - Snopes.com is great for Urban Myths and Legends; many universities have extensive collections of documents online; and Google Books provides you the ability to search an extensive library of books online. I tend to use Wikipedia in a more skeptical mode than most. That is, I will always try and get a second source on any fact that is crucial to my argument or my understanding of an argument.

Finally, writing things down does an amazing job of clarifying things for me. Of course, this is easy to do in an email; much harder to do when you’re having a discussion in person or over the phone.

There you have it. Not very pretty, but it works for me.

Wordpress 2.0 was released around a month ago, and in that timespan I’ve been dreading going through the process of upgrading. Not that I didn’t want to - there are a number of reasons why I wanted to move up, the most important of which is that from where I was at version 1.5 I would frequently run into odd plugin issues.

But that is no more - as of around 30 minutes ago rants.psychoticpineapples.com is running the latest and greatest version from the hard-working, under-appreciated, and genius developers at Wordpress. All the difficulties that I was imaginging were no problem at all. The content came over fine, including all the links and graphics. The plugins that I use the most - Delicious Integrator, Spam Karma, Amazon Media Manager (not entirely integrated on the site, but in the works) - all worked fine. The theme I use - Equix - still looks the way it did earlier this morning, including the parts I painfully designed in Photoshop by myself (there was a warning on the page for Equix talking about a possible problem with the theme and archive pages, but I’m not seeing that).

This is all exactly what I was hoping - a nice, painless upgrade. And that’s what happened - I was able to backup my existing installation (well, OK, I very anally backed it up about 3 times on two different machines - but that’s more related to my OCD than anything else), follow the upgrade instructions, and then be back up and running. The complete downtime for the site was no more than 10 minutes. And some of that was me off making a pot of coffee. The perfect upgrade.

Thoughts on the upgrade? Well, as I mention above I’m only about 20 minutes into the new version, but the first thing I picked up on was the speed improvement. My pages are generating and loading faster than they were in the past. The other thought concerns the management console - the plugin configuration works across the board on all the installed plugins, they’ve cleaned up the interface a bit, and it just looks better.

Now for the big question - with this upgrade out of the way will I stop avoiding my weblog and post more often? One would hope so, but only time will tell….

Update: Ahhh, perhaps I raved too soon! I use the very excellent Ecto tool to post, manage, and generally keep some measure of control over my blog posts and the Wordpress 2.0 upgrade broke the ability to upload images to Wordpress from Ecto. This was discovered by trying to upload my little squirrel buddy at the top of the post to my server. However, there is a work-around that was able to employ which fixes the problem for now, and my guess is that this will be officially fixed in a maintenance release somewhere down the road.

Well, way back in this post way back in March I expressed my desire to unleash a burst of creativity this November as part of National Novel Writing Month. One month, one 50,000 word novel. Sounded pretty easy to me way back in March.

Well, it’s January. And my literary output, although much more impressive than it was a year ago, still does not include a novel. It would be easy to blame the lack of accomplishment on work, or on my grandfather’s illness, or on any number of excuses. In reality, the problem was more related to the story I was working with. I just reviewed the 5,000 words that I managed to write down the first few days of November, and the story drags. No need to discuss any further than that, just accept the fact that it was slow moving and boring. Trust me on this one.

Now, I know that in his book “No Plot? No Problem!: A Low-Stress, High-Velocity Guide to Writing a Novel in 30 Days”, Chris Baty explains that this shouldn’t really matter. In fact, he goes on to note that this is a quite common experince and one should just push on past it. That’s where I fell down - I wasn’t able to let go of the fact that what I was writing wasn’t up to my (completely out-of-whack) standards. Although I didn’t for one minute think it on a conscious level, there seemed to be one part of my subconscious brain that fully expected me to sit down over the course of a few weeks and crank out a New York Times Bestseller.

The next step for me is to pick a month and have my own personal NaNoWriMo - leading candidates at this time are February and March, but it’s still up in the air. At the very least it will be humbling (again).

I’m readying myself for the pain - WordPress 2.0 is out, and by all accounts is well worth upgrading to. The only downside I see is that….well, I like the way my site looks right now! And to get things like this involved many hours of pain and suffering….mostly my own.

If you’re truly geeky you can read the official announcement here. Don’t expect things to change overnight, though. We’re heading out for vacation this Thursday - and I’m thinking that this is definitely something that can wait.

If you’re looking for something a bit more, er, human and normal - I’ve got a number of half-finished posts that I’m looking forward to finishing off while sitting around a pool in Orlando.

Oh yeah, the picture. Ummm, it really has very little to do with the subject of the post - well, other than the fact that it looks like the laptop I’m using to write this. I’m feeling at a very low creative ebb right now, so this is as best as it gets.

Stay tuned…

You know, there’s something to be said for someone who can take Charlie Brown and H.P. Lovecraft and weave them together. Take a look at John Aegard’s The Great Old Pumpkin over on Strange Horizons Fiction. I came across this earlier this morning when it popped up in my RSS aggregator over at bloglines in my BoingBoing feed.

The tone, the use of adjectives, the descriptions (and yes, the very low amount of dialog) all make this work very….er, Lovecraftian, as the snippet below will show:

The camera fell from my nerveless fingers and into the clouds below as I beheld this blood-curdling horror. Instead of friendly cross-eyes and gapped teeth, into its wide orange visage were sawn jagged spirals of alien script, and though of course I could not read the glyphs, simply witnessing them was enough to understand their meaning. They dragged my mind away to their subject-places, each of them impressing upon me a cavorting pageant of despair and rot. Worse than that was what lay behind those awful incisions, for instead of a candle or (for safety reasons) a lantern, within the Great Old Pumpkin burned a queer kind of furnace that was tended by thready, murmuring minions. This furnace emitted not light and heat but rather madness, and with horror, I realized that its emanations were not illuminating the clouds, but rather that the clouds were fluorescing under them, just as a squid will fluoresce under certain radiations.

Howard Phillips Lovecraft was an interesting person. Often compared with Edgar Allan Poe, his stories of fantasy and horror did not begin to gain prominence until the late 1940’s, almost a decade after he died in poverty and obscurity in 1937. His stories - some of which were published in small magazines such as Weird Tales from 1908 through 1923 - are full of unspeakable evil, horrors from beyond the grave, and disruptions in time and space. Stories such as The Call of Cthulu, The Lurking Fear, and The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, formed a large part of my reading during seventh and eighth grade. For some reason I get the impression that the powers that be at good old St. Hilary’s wouldn’t have been too happy if they would have actually paid enough attention to me to notice what I was reading. A somewhat disturbing revelation is that Lovecraft’s works - as odd, twisted, and horrifying as they can be - are all said to be directly inspired by his nightmares.

In addition to the Great Pumpkin/Lovecraft mashup above, the web is full of other Lovecraftian excitement. Whether it is a Lovecraft Mad Lib Generator, a Lovecraft Film Festival, the Cthulu Lexicon, the Wikipedia entry on Lovecraft, or the Lovecraft Historical Society you can definitely get your fill of all things horrible.

I’ll close out with what has become the most famous Lovecraft quote, from one of his signature works The Call Of Cthulu:

“That is not dead which can eternal lie,
And with strange aeons even death may die.”