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Okay, I'm not actually quite ready for alpha testers just yet, but soon I will be initializing the alpha version of the Vox export tool to those willing to help me test it out prior to making a formal release to the masses.  I wanted to get names of people interested in helping now, so that as soon as I'm ready I can contact you individually and get you started on the testing process.  Please read below and if you are interested in alpha testing the tool, please email me at VoxPorter@gmail.com .  I NEED A VALID EMAIL ADDRESS from each alpha tester so I can be in communication about updates, bug fixes, and requests for more information if I'm trying to figure out what went wrong in your setup.  I will NOT be communicating this through Vox comments or PMs, so if you're not willing to email me, please don't volunteer.

Testers should:

• Be willing to try out the tool (possibly multiple times if bugfixes are required)

• Be able/willing to import the resulting file into a WordPress blog (instructions may be provided if you don't know how) (free WordPress blogs can be created at WordPress.com, or you can set one up on your own server if you know how)

• Be able/willing to review the resulting blog for problems/errors in the import process (i.e. checking to make sure content imported properly, blog post titles, dates, and tags appear correct, etc)

• Be able/willing to inform me of any problems you experience or notice, as well as provide comments/questions about using the export tool, the process as a whole, and any specific areas you think need improvement.  You won't need to be available to run the tool the same day I send you notification, but please only volunteer if you think you can support the testing in a timely manner (i.e. within about a week of getting a notification for testing).

Again, if you are interested in alpha testing the tool, please email me at VoxPorter@gmail.com . I'll select testers based on my current needs and the number who volunteer.

Oh, and FYI, the current planned Alpha version of the VoxPorter (name still in flux) tool includes the following:

• Export all publicly viewable blog posts from a user's blog to a WXR .xml file (WordPress import file)

• Importing this file into a WordPress blog will import blog titles, posting dates/times, content, and tags from posts to the new blog (note: links and media [pictures, music, videos] will still link to their current Vox enclosures for now)

• Select whether trackback pings and comments will be globally enabled or disabled on all imported posts

Future improvements planned once this version is tested and available in a steady-state form:

• Option to also export post comments (would show up under each blog post, just like they do on Vox)

• Automatic splitting of WXR file on the fly into 2 MB sections for blogs with massive archives

• Secondary tool to allow you to quickly and easily download your entire uploaded photos library for use on your new blog

• Secondary tool to allow you to quickly and easily see what other social media services your Vox neighbors use (along with links to their individual accounts) so even if you decide not to stick with Vox, you can still stay in contact with your 'hood through other apps or sites

• Converting Vox links to your blog posts on the fly so they link to other posts in your new blog

• Converting to other blog formats besides Wordpress (Blogger, MovableType, etc)

• Automatic widget/banner creation that you can post on your Vox blog to point people to your new blog location

The House of the Scorpion

Nancy Farmer

Rating: 4 of 5 stars

I really enjoyed this novel.  This is one of those rare few young-adult novels that adults will be able to read, appreciate, and enjoy as much as its "intended audience".  Like Heinlein's "juveniles", just because The House of the Scorpion's main character is a juvenile doesn't mean the writing, plot, and characterization have to be second-rate.

This book paints a very interesting picture of a quasi-future where Mexico and the US have made "The Devil's Pact"; they have turned over a tract of land between the two nations to a group of drug-lords known as the "Farmers" who grow and harvest poppies for opium in return for curbing all illegal immigration between the two surrounding countries.  In the 100 years of their existence, the Farmers have created a civilization of their own, rich and isolated and abusive of its workers, most of whom have computer chips implanted in their brains that turn them into "eejits", or zombie-like workers who won't even take a drink of water without being told to do so.

The main character is a young boy who is a clone, but a very special one: he is the clone and heir-apparent of El Patron, the despotic dictator of the country of Opium.  And as he grows and begins to learn about what makes him different from all the servants and other clones in this repressed land, the household cook Celia (his adoptive mother) and El Patron's most trusted and faithful bodyguard, Tam Lin, help him discover some shocking truths about himself and the world into which he has been delivered.
 
View all my reviews on Goodreads.

Note to the lady driver of the SUV in this picture:

Hypocrite of the Day

If your car has a yellow ribbon with "Share the Road" and a bicycle emblazoned on it, it's probably best to exhibit the same courtesy to other drivers that you are claiming you demonstrate to your two-wheeler friends, namely:

DON'T DRIVE ON THE DAMNED SHOULDER AND PASS THREE CARS (including me) JUST TO CUT INTO THE TRAFFIC FLOW AT THE LAST SECOND (right in front of me, forcing me to slam on my brakes) TO GET TO YOUR FINAL DESTINATION 5 SECONDS FASTER!

If you avoid doing this in the future, you might refrain from looking like a huge ass, and it just might save you from getting rear-ended by a less awake (or aware) driver than myself.

Today I am posting this on 5/7/09 11:13:15 AM.  Make of that what you will.

That is all.  (More substantial post to come when I have a chance to take a break from work overload).

EDIT: I guess this is known as "Odd Day" and is one of only six this century that will feature three consecutive odd numbers.

More information (including details on the $579 prize for those who "involve the most people in the Oddest Parade of Odd Characters, write the best Odd Ode, or create the best Odd Celebrations" can be found at http://www.oddday.net/ .

Don't get me wrong - I think Amazon MP3 is a great service, and over the last ~1.5 years that I've been using them to buy music, I've usually had no problems with either purchasing music or dealing with their customer service group.  But a recent issue makes me wonder if the right hand knows what the left is doing (or in this case, whether the developers are talking to the customer service reps, and vice-versa).

My most recent fiasco with them involved The Mysterious Disappearance of Leon my "Purchase Review" screen from the site:

Purchase Review Screen Example

When you first start using Amazon MP3, any time you try to get any album/mp3, this screen will pop up after you click the "Get MP3" button.  It provides one last sanity check and confirmation that you're actually purchasing what you want - in this case, the song is free, but if you click on the wrong button or misread the price, this gives you one last review screen to confirm you want to continue your purchase.

Unfortunately, it seems that if you uncheck the box "Always ask before completing purchase" shown on the picture and then continue, it is IMPOSSIBLE to re-enable this option to show this purchase review screen in the future.  Not difficult, but actually physically impossible to ever see this screen ever again.  There are no toggles in the user preferences/settings to turn this back on.  No way for customer service to reset it.  If you turn this off, it's gone the way of the dodo bird.  I had three different customer service reps confirm this. 

So, after going through the following steps (spanning 3 different customer service reps):

1. Calling rep #1
   
2. Deleting all my 1-click payment methods from the account
3. Transferring to rep #2
   
4. Deleting all the saved addresses from the account
5. Arguing with rep #2 that this "Purchase review" page even exists and that it wasn't something new (I've used it for the last year without problems)
6. Transferring to rep #3
   
7. Logging out, deleting all cookies, and logging back in
8. Still seeing the problem and finding out this rep had no clue on how to fix it either
   

the last rep suggested I do the following:

If you're feeling uninspired, or just want to kill some time, check out David Horvitz' tumblog.  He's a New York artist who shares ideas of things to do, with a new idea posted each day.  They vary from the bizarre (see the photo below) to the - well, yeah, they're all pretty much bizarre.  But they make for interesting reading and just might inspire you to come up with something to do on your own.  And if not, you can always fall back on one of his ideas, like documenting the act of switching the positions of two leaves, or slipping packets of seeds of your favorite flower into the pants pockets of every pair in a department store, and then taking pride in being potentially responsible for the existence of those flowers the next time you pass them by in someone's garden.

The Freezer Task

Freezer heads

I was feeling silly and wanted to blow off some steam from the crazy work crunch, so I made a picture:

No pears were bruised in the creation of this photo.

What do you call this?  An LOLfruit?  Whatever you call it, I'm afraid it's not pear-y good.

This weekend held an exciting event for the wife and myself: a nearby city 5k race.  It was actually a pretty momentous occasion for a couple of reasons:

For Dee:

• This was Dee's first race, EVER (excluding field-day activities in elementary school, that is).  Since she's training for a triathlon in the fall, she wanted to gauge her progress with a 5k and see how far along she's come since she started her training program.
• Dee ended up finishing faster than she expected and she and I were very proud of her performance!

• This was my first race in almost 6 years.  The last one involved me collapsing on/near the finish line and spending 6 days in the hospital diagnosed with rhabdomyolisis.  Needless to say, I was a little nervous about how this race would fare, given my last race experience.
• I ended up winning an award for my placement in the race!
  

Place Name                Guntime Pace  
===== =================== ======= ===== 
 28   Ross G              23:28   7:34 
147   Dee G               35:15   11:21 

As for myself, I finished more than 1.5 minutes ahead of my goal.  As I ran the race, I kept forcing myself to ease back and keep a little bit slower pace than I normally ran, but by 2 miles I was still well ahead of my goal pace, so I decided to just go with it as long as I could.  As I was winding up for the last third of a mile of the course, I went ahead and boosted to my full-out kick, passing an unsuspecting runner before he knew I was there and sprinted full-out for the finish line.  And because of my sprint, it turns out I ended up passing the one person who stood between me and 1st place in the Male 25-29 division!

1st Place! (in my division)

Yes, I won a medal to go with my "free" race t-shirt.  Totally unexpected, but very satisfying to come back from 6 years away from any racing and feel like I was right back in the swing of things.

I'm not expecting to win any awards on any future races, but I'm definitely going to keep up my regular training and try to fit in a road race here or there when I can.  As I've said before, to me, the fun is in the running, not the winning.  But bringing home a medal will always bring just a little bit extra of a smile to my face.

The Course - Harrisburg 5k Race - 2009

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Harrisburg 5k Race Pace - 2009

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Note:  The post below is extremely geeky and probably not interesting to anyone except those who would like to follow along with the progress of HOW I'm implementing a Vox export tool.  If you're just interested in hearing when I'm done with it, this is not the post for you - that'll come soon. 

I'm more laying this out for my own thought processes than in any sort of attempt to educate on how the export tool is going to finally work.  The good news is I have a tentatively working solution that will theoretically import a full Vox blog onto a self-hosted Wordpress installation.  The bad news is that the solution in mind will NOT work for (free-hosted) Wordpress.com installations, so I'm still trying to figure out an alternative for those.  Preferably one that does not involve someone having to find a friend with access to a self-hosted version to do an intermediate conversion for them.

After countless hours (days? weeks?) of half-assed research online, here's a summary of what I've come up with regarding exporting from Vox (VoxPorting?  Anyone got a better name for the eventual tool I'll be posting?)

1. Blogging services SUCK at normalizing on an export standard.  Every single one of them is different.  Likewise, almost all of them try to trap you into their service by only allowing you to import their export types and/or only export a type that will be incompatible with other services.  This means people have to get crafty if they want to jump from one platform to another, especially if they do it more than once.
2. The big contenders for free (hosted) blogging services out there seem to be (in no particular order): Vox, LiveJournal, Blogger, and Wordpress (hosted on Wordpress.com).  Yes, MySpace and its clones exist, and no, I'm not going to even try to get content over on to them.
   
3. Additionally, you've got Wordpress (self-hosted) and MovableType (self-hosted) which are free, but require you to host them somewhere.
4. Paid services exist (TypePad, etc.) but since they require you to front money, I'm not focusing on trying to export to them.
5. That being said, looking at the free services, I've found the following:
   

• I'm not looking to import into Vox, since that's obviously contrary to the whole point of a Vox export tool.  I believe there are easier ways to migrate content from one Vox account to another than exporting/importing.  That being said, if you're just trying to back up your Vox blog, you can either use BlogBackupOnline (to back up online only) or Simon Wistow's VoxSlurp (to back up to an .mbox file) - more on these in another post.
  
• Apparently exporting to a file to import to LiveJournal is out, as LJ doesn't even appear to be able to import its own export files.  Unless you're planning to repost every individual post on LJ, probably not an option.  I'm not even considering this at the moment.
  
• Blogger only imports "Blogger export files".  There are solutions out there that seem to use Blogger APIs to get around this limitation, but this looks like A LOT of work.  I looked at what the Blogger export files look like and don't know that I can forge one to duplicate a Vox account onto a Blogger blog.  Holding this out as a last resort option, especially as there seems to be an alternative (see a couple bullets down, below).
• Wordpress (self-hosted or on Wordpress.com) seem to be the most likely choices.  I've had success importing an RSS feed from Vox to a self-hosted Wordpress blog.  It would be fairly trivial to expand this to create a custom RSS .xml file to encompass a full Vox blog, and import that into a new Wordpress blog.  HOWEVER, Wordpress.com blogs (free-hosted) do NOT have the "import from RSS" as one of their options (for some bizarre reason, they don't offer this??)  Instead:
• Wordpress.com imports from Wordpress export files, called WXR (WordPress eXtended RSS).  Both self-hosted and free-hosted solutions export to WXR files, and both can import from the other (I believe).  Furthermore, once you've got a WXR file, you can use a solution to convert this into a Blogger-compatible format to import to Blogger!  Sounds like the winner, if I can figure out how to properly create a WXR file from a Vox blog.  Except documentation on the WXR format seems to be pretty much non-existant, so the only way to figure it out is to analyze an existing blog's export file, the Wordpress import code, and experiment.  Not the ideal way to make sure I'm doing it correctly, and definitely a way that's going to take more time to get to complete.
  
• One added benefit to doing a WXR file - if I set it up properly, I could actually scrape the Vox blog posts for comments, and forge new comments to be imported along with the blog posts - this way, not only would you be importing your hard work to a new blog, you'd be carrying along the comments (which oftentimes are as informative/entertaining as the original post!)  Currently the plan is to do the first pass with just blog posts, and then once I get that up and running, consider devising the import w/ comments.  The big problem is my approach to getting the content off the Vox blog will vary tremendously depending on whether or not I'm capturing comments - if I am, I have to do the much more tedious (and much slower) page-scraping, as opposed to taking advantage of the Vox RSS feeds that I would be using for the other non-comment method.  I'm not sure I'd want to commit to doing a page-scrape for every Vox export - I currently am doing that for my Picture and MP3 backup tool and it takes a bit of time - this would be even worse, given that some people have thousands of posts on Vox.
  
• Movable Type also seems to be able to import WXR files.  Definitely looks like WXR is the way to go, and then provide that file to the user for their use in importing to Wordpress or MT (directly) or Blogger (via the converter).

Since I know you CAN import to a self-hosted Wordpress blog from Vox and then export that right back out to a WXR, the cynical part of me says I should post this solution and then people who self-host can go ahead and import, and people that don't can find someone to do it for them.  Heck, I might even go ahead and do this as an intermediate step to the final soltuion.  But in the end, I don't want to create half a solution and have most of the users have to fend for themselves.  People shouldn't be penalized just because they signed up for a free blog on Vox and now want to have a free blog somewhere else instead.

Rosalie followed in the footsteps of her older sister (and me for that matter) and had ear surgery this morning to put tubes in her ears.  Check out that recap if you're interested - this was almost an exact duplicate of what happened during Violet's surgery.  We're back home now, and she's pretty much fully recovered, walking around and acting normal, but it was another painful (for us) morning waiting for her to recover from the anesthesia.

I forgot the camera but snapped a couple of pics with my phone of Rosie getting prepped for surgery.  When I took these, she had just been given the "goofy juice" that they administer to the kids before they take them back and put them under with gas, so as the shots progressed she got progressively more loopy (think of a drunk 15-month old toddler to get an idea of how she was acting).  We had a bit of a laugh watching her act all out of it, but had to console her most of the way home from the surgery until she was back to normal.  Everything looks good for now, though, and hopefully the beau coup bucks we had to pay for the deductibles will be paid back in a lack of ear infections for the next 12-15 months or so...

Checking out her hospital gown

Posing for the camera

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Feeling the effects of the goofy juice

Carefree and ready for the surgery