The Republic of T.

I kind of consider myself the Kathy Griffin of political blogging (if you know what I mean). Nonetheless I’m taping one of these for PoliticsTV tomorrow. What I didn’t realize is that I’d be following such big name political bloggers as Stirling Newberry and John Aravosis.

I have a couple of ideas what I’d like to talk about, but give me some suggestions folks. Meanwhile, I’m going to comb through my archives to see what I can come up with.

So, yeah. I’ve completed the transition into a fresh, clean, new blog. I ended up going with a new WordPress installation because, frankly, there are some interesting platforms out there, but I wasn’t able to fine one that had a theme I liked. Textpattern holds some promise, though, if they make their templating system easier. In the meantime, I’m hoping that moving my old content to archives.republicoft.com and starting with a fresh database will be less taxing on Wordpres and MySQL. After all, I’m down several hundred thousand rows of data now, and the site’s cached (as it was before).

I’ve had help from several people on this, from my hosting company to technically talented friends of mine. From all of them — who looked at my database and site configuration — the verdict was that the problem was something in WordPress code that was causing the database load. Interestingly enough, it didn’t seem to be the traffic that was the problem. It happened whenever I posted something. I went a day or two without posting, and nothing happened. Then I wrote a few posts in WordPress and scheduled them to post the next day since I was going to be busy. That’s when all hell broke loose. Every time something posted.

So, I’m hopefull that the new set-up will improve things. I’m also optimistic that whatever the coding problem was, it will be fixed in an upcoming version of WordPress. I hope so anyway. If not, well, I now know several ways to get my data out of WordPress and into another platform. Maybe I’ll do a series of posts on those platforms and my experience with each of them.

For now, I have to update the new site with an actual blogroll and a few other thing. Also, my apologies to folks whose comments didn’t make the transition into the new set-up. Actually, none of them did.

So you want to know about me? I think the brief description on the homepage pretty much says it all. But for those who want a bit more detail, I’ll try to offer it here. This page will probably be updated from time to time, until I’m satisfied with it.

I’m a thirty-something African American gay man, living in Washington, D.C. I’ve lived here for more than 10 years, four of which I lived in the Logan Circle neighborhood with my wonderful husband and son. Now live in Chevy Chase, Maryland

From late July 2004 to June 2007, I was the blogmaster at EchoDitto, Inc., a political internet strategy firm. You can find the story of how I got the job here.

I grew up in Augusta, Georgia. I graduated from Davidson Fine Arts Magnet School, where I majored in acting and voice. Around the age of 12 or 13, I realized that I was gay. Shortly thereafter, I realized that I had to get out of Augusta, Georgia.

Upon graduating, I managed to get as far as Athens, Georgia, where I attended the University of Georgia and obtained a degree in English. While there, I also managed to write for the student-run newspaper (though I don’t think any of my old columns are online), do a talk show for the student-run radio station, join the university’s debate and literary society, and join and co-direct the campus gay & lesbian organization. It’s that last bit that led to my move to D.C.

After graduating, I worked at the university, and looked for a job in Atlanta. While in Atlanta for an interview, I met up with an acquaintance from my days with the gay group on campus. She said she worked for an organization in D.C. that might have a job for me. I sent a resume, got interviewed, and ended up accepting a job from the Human Rights Campaign. That’s where I cut my teeth on D.C. politics, so to speak. I was there for almost four years before moving on to a brief stint at the Lambda Literary Foundation as assistant editor of the Lambda Book Report. From there I went to work at the National Minority AIDS Council, where I remained for a number of years before moving on to Partnership for Caring (now defunct). After a couple of years, I went onto work at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.

Then someone at EchoDitto discovered this blog, emailed me, interviewed me, and I went to work there.

Some random stuff. I’ve been a vegetarian for over 10 years, I stopped smoking 6 years ago, and I also don’t drink alcohol. About four years ago, I was diagnosed with adult Attention Deficit Disorder (minus the hyperactivity), something I’ve pretty much had all my life, and finally started getting treated for it.

My husband and I have been together for almost seven years, after meeting through a personals ad on Love@AOL. (I answered his.) In November of 2002, we became parents upon adopting our son, who was just four days old when we took home from the hospital. A year after our son was born, I started this blog. And that, in a nutshell, is my life until now.

Parent Hacks links to a post about parenting in the age of Tivo that has a lot of interesting things to say, most of which I can relate to. But it was this bit from Asha at Parent Hacks that resonated with me.

My kids don’t even understand TV without TiVo. The concept of watching “whatever’s on” is foreign to them. They also get mildly annoyed when the radio plays music they don’t feel like listening to, accustomed as they are to iTunes. I, too, have wondered how this expectation of “on-demand” will play out as they get older.

We use Tivo a lot in our house, and it’s mostly to record shows for Parker to watch later. Yes, I’m well aware of the evils of television, etc., but the shows we prefer for him when he does watch television come on during the day when we’re all out of the house. So, we’ve set it to record those shows and we watch them with him him when we get home. I should add that Parker doesn’t so much sit and watch television as he just stops to notice it occasionally if it’s playing when he’s in the room.

We started right after PBS changed format and went commercial. In fact, when a show is over Parker likes to pick up the remote and press the Tivo button, then he hands it to one of us to play the next show for him. But, like Asha, I’ve noticed that Parker doesn’t exactly “get” the idea of not being able to watch a show because it’s “not on.” With Tivo, theoretically, it’s never “not on.”

It does strike me as kind of funny that Parker will never know a time when there were only three channels, or maybe three if you’re lucky. He’ll also never have to get up and turn a nob to change channels or adjust the antenna to get a decent picture. It makes me feel old, too. But it doesn’t quite make me agree with the Frazzled Parent on this one.
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archives up and running last night.

Now that I’ve got that accomplished, I’m looking at what to do about a platform for the next incarnation of this blog. Pivot’s been a good stopping off point, but I’m not sure I want to stick with it long term. I’m looking at a handful of other blogging platforms. Textpattern is looking more and more interesting to me. I’m also playing with local installation of DotClear, LifeType, and Plume. And there are a few more I want to test out.

Of course, I might also just go with a fresh install of WordPress. I’m familiar with it, and it’ll give me the same set-up I had before. Plus there’s always the possibility that the coding/database issues will be worked out in a future build. On the other hand, if I think I might go back to WordPress in the future, then Textpattern might be the way to go, because the two import from each other pretty easily.

One more day, and I’ll probalby have it figured out. Then maybe I can return to blogging out something besides blogging software. (Though it may be interesting to write down all the steps I took to get from WordPress to Pivot to whatever I finally end up with. Further bulletins as events warrant! ]]>

The Repubilc of T. Archives have been born.

Comments and pings are closed for all the old posts. I”ll probably leave the default theme intact and just add my blogads strip and the necessary scripts for traffic counting. Basically, I had to install phpMyAdmin in order to get into the wp_options table in the database and put in the correct information for the URL.

The next thing will be to decide what to do for the next incarnation of this blog. ]]>

if the soldier in question is Wiccan you’d be wrong.

Nevada officials are pressing the Department of Veteran Affairs to allow the family of a soldier killed in Afghanistan to place a Wiccan symbol on his headstone.

Federal officials so far have refused to grant the requests of the family of Sgt. Patrick Stewart, 34, who was killed in Afghanistan last September when the Nevada Army National Guard helicopter he was in was shot down.

“Every veteran and military member deserves recognition for their contributions to our country,” said Tim Tetz, executive director of the Nevada Office of Veterans Services.

The state’s top veterans official said Thursday that he was “diligently pursuing” the matter in cooperation with Gov. Kenny Guinn, Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., and Rep. Jim Gibbons, R-Nev.

“Sgt. Stewart and his family deserve recognition for their contributions to our country,” Tetz said.

“It’s unfortunate the process is taking so long, but I am certain Sgt. Patrick will ultimately receive his marker with the Wiccan symbol,” he said.

It’s not all that surprising when you consider how much respect has been given wiccan soldiers or wiccan’s in general for that matter. (Or that Dubya already declared that it ain’t a religion.)Back in 1999, not that long ago, Republican congressman Bob Barr declared that Wiccan soldiers shouldn’t even be allowed to worship.

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this before, if you read MetaFilter.

This is the primary reason I listen to my iPod on the subway, and with noise cancelling earphones. So I won’t hear the cell phone consersations, etc. ]]>

previous poll may be pointless. I’ve spent the better part of last night and today trying to import my old content into a new WP install on my host, for an archives.republicoft.com site where the old content would be easily found.

You can see the results of my work at archives.repubilcoft.com. It’s been a collosal waste of time and energy. At this point, I think my old content is lost to any useful access beyond being archived and searchable here. I’ve been emailing with my host’s tech support all day, also to no avail. I get different answers from a different person with each reply.

What it comes down to is that I’ve apparently gotten caught in the perfect storm of a blogging platform and a host that can’t handle the amount of content I have. At least that’s the diagnosis I’ve gotten from my host’s tech support and a few other techie friends I’ve consulted. I suppose I should have written less and posted less often over the last few years if I didn’t want to have any problems.

At this point I’m not sure exactly what to do as far as continuing this blog and keeping the old content available. I’m seriously considering going back to Typepad and somehow linking to the current incarnation of this blog as an archive site. It’s either that or pay someone to unravel it all. And I’ve no idea how much time or money that would take. ]]>

nanowrimo category. All the posts from the previous blog are on this one. As I link to them I’ll update them with categories, and you’ll find the categories in the footer of each post.) And now that I’m in the process of revising the draft I finished in November, I’m reading more fiction in the hopes that some mojo will rub off on me.

Well, what did I do that for?I suppose it’s normal. You read something by a really great writer and it’s either inspiring (i.e, “I’m gonna do that!”) or demoralizing (i.e. “How am I ever gonna do that!?”) Or both, which was my reaction after finishing Kindred by Octavia Butler. I’d never read any of her work, so I picked this one to start with, and ended up having the same reaction I have to reading works by other writers like Toni Morrison and Alice Walker (two faves of mine): How in the hell did she do that?
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Think you know? Click here and find out. ]]>

It occured to me that I’ve not yet asked readers here what they think I should do. So I thought I’d take a poll. Let me know what you think.

Take the poll

Free Poll by Blog Flux ]]>

the whole Jefferson affair — including the $90,000 he had in his freezer, or Pelosi asking him to step down from the Ways and Means Committee. Honestly, it makes sense to me. Democrats can’t make much noise about Republican scandals and look the other way when one of their own gets caught with a hand in the cookie jar. (Unless someone can give a logical explanation for the congressman having $90,000 in his freezer and being on.

But what caught my eye yesterday was the news that Pelosi’s recommendation to Jefferson roused the ire of the Congressional Black Caucus.

Furious black lawmakers, rallying behind Rep. William Jefferson (D-La.), were pulled back from the brink of open revolt against House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) in an emergency meeting with her Wednesday evening.

The meeting with a handful of CBC members was called after Pelosi wrote the embattled lawmaker, who is at the center of a massive bribery scandal, a curt note requesting his immediate resignation from the powerful Ways and Means Committee.

Outraged that one of its members was being picked on even though he has not been charged with a crime, the Congressional Black Caucus had intended to issue a defiant statement against their leader but agreed after the meeting to pause, at least briefly, for reflection.

Um. You’re kidding me right? Ya’ll did see the video tape, didn’t ya? The brotha is on the take, on tape. And while I guess there’s somethign to be said for wanting him to be held to the same standard as white criminals, there’s a bit of wisdom from Whoopi Goldberg that needs to be remembered here.OK. It’s not from Whoopi Goldberg. It’s from one of her characters: Fontaine. It was around the time of one of Jesse Jackson’s presidential run, and during one monologue Fontaine went off on Jackson’s candidacy. I’m paraphrasing here, but it went something like this.
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blog drama this week, you know I’ve been through some changes with this blog lately.

The database got locked down again yesterday. The odd thing was that I didn’t touch the admin yesterday. I wrote a few posts the night before and scheduled them to post throughout the day. Oddly enough, I haven’t posted anything today and the database didn’t blow up. That kind of underscores what the tech support person I talked to last night explained to me: the problem wasn’t the amount of traffic I’ve been getting. Intead it was the amount of content I have, combined with some coding that sent WordPress trolling through some 800,000 rows of data in MySQL.

So, my host gave me a reprieve of sorts by moving my database to a less populated server, where it wouldn’t cause such a ruckus. That, and the fact that I haven’t posted anything in over 24 hours is about all that’s kept this site live. It also bought me some time. I’ve spent the last few days exploring other blogging platforms and, as you can probably tell, I’ve found one.First of all, before I go any further, I have to give a huge thank you to my co-worker Jason, who did an awful lot to help me during his spare moments over the last few days, and walked me through the process of making the switch and salvaging my content. I also want to thank Scott and Steve for offering to lend a hand, and everyone else who either expressed support or listened to me stress about it.

As I perused potential new blogging platforms, I became intrigued by two. Nucleus and Pivot. I was intrigued by Nucleus because it had quite a few plugins and boasted of being able to handle huge sites with lots of content. Pivot got my attention because it doesn’t require an external database to work; instead it stores posts and stuff in flat files. Needless to say, given my recent database woes, I was reluctant to dip into those waters again lest I find myself in the same boat.
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Religious Liberal Blog had posted about the most recent baptist schism over homosexualtiy.

Following the approval of a large majority of its churches, the board of the American Baptist Churches Pacific Southwest region voted unanimously May 11 to withdraw from its covenant relationship with its parent denomination. The board’s action makes final the separation of the 300-church region from the American Baptist Churches (USA) in Valley Forge, Pa.

Theological differences between the Pacific Southwest region and the national denomination have made “close cooperation” between the two difficult for many years, according to the statement from the board. Many of the denomination’s self-governing regions, such as the Evergreen Association in Washington and the Rochester-Genesee region in New York, openly accept churches disassociated from other regions because they accept unrepentant homosexuals as members. The denomination’s general board has refused to discipline the regions who accept such churches, citing Baptist freedom and local church autonomy as reasons.

Imagine that. Some churches accepted “unrepentant homosexuals” as members. They were probably even nice to them too. Probably said good morning to them, and even shared a pew with them too. Probably didn’t even call them names from the pulpit. Imagine. And they call themselves christian.

Of course, schisms are nothing new when it comes to baptists or any other denomination, but baptists have something of a peculiar history with schisms.

By the 1830′s tension began to mount between the Northern and Southern Baptists. Baptists in the South were embracing slavery because it was the core of their social and economic order. Baptists of the North were saying that God would not condone treating one race as superior to another while Southerners said that God intended for races to be separate. In around 1835, the Southern states began complaining that they weren’t receiving money for mission work.

In 1844 the issues of missionary work and slavery came to a peak. The Home Mission Society gave a statement saying that a person could not be a missionary and wish to keep his slaves as property. This caused the Home Mission Society to separate northern and southern divisions. As a result of this the Baptists in the south met in May of 1845 and organized the Southern Baptist Convention . ¹²

When the dust settles on the latest schism, which side will be seen as having been on the right side of history? ]]>