Midnight Hour

Back On Track

I am back on track with blogging. We released TexasWideOpen about two months ago. Growth is slow, but there is movement. I would appreciate any feedback or help with marketing you could do. Use the free trial and tell me what you think.

I am mainly writing to get myself moving again with technical blogging. I am really digging into python and django lately. I had the occasion to write an app to do A/B or multivariate testing the past week. It was a great exercise. You can see the results at http://github.com/ubiquitousthey/django-mvtester.

I have also split up our TexasWideOpen project into several smaller apps that I am hoping to release sometime soon. My favorite is one that uses a JSON file to define a file format and then allows you to import that file into django models. We have used it to import files from roughly 30 sources. It is very modular and easy to add new format types. I think it could be useful for a variety of projects.

In the coming weeks, I will be sharing various things I have learned just to help anyone out there who might do a search. I'd love to save someone time the way many others have me. Adios.

Where Have You Been

So this is my obligatory why haven't you blogged in so long. I don't really have to to explain it all, but I felt like I had to clear the air.

There have been some pretty big changes in my life in the last few months. One involves my profession. I am now working full time on Edenic Confluence, LLC (EC). EC is a startup a friend and I have…well…started. We started about a year and a half ago.

We are now re-arranging our vocational lives to make more room. We hope to release something in the next month or so. We're excited, but it is a LOT of work, and I just don't have time to reflect that much on it right now. I do want to share some tech tips, though so others can be helped as I have.

I really think Open Source is a great "love your neighbor as yourself" activity. So, you will probably start seeing some entries about technology again. Be prepared for Web GIS, PostgreSQL, Python, Django, Javascript, and CSS. If you're here for theology and philosophical reflection (like anyone is really reading this), you'll have to wait.

Cleverness and Facebook as the Public Square

I recently held back my finger from the trackpad to avoid posting a comment on someone's Facebook post. It was an old friend who made a comment on how prevalent stories of dragons are in all cultures. He asked, "What is the deal with dragons?" I was going to say, "Don't you know they are just projections of a father figure." A typical cryptic attempt to be clever.

I decided not to post because I realized that I was only posting to be clever. Being clever is one of those things I have taken on as part of my persona. I do it relatively well, and take pride in it even when my cleverness is taken for obtuseness. I was caught this time because I had never posted a comment on this friends status. And, this friend had recently had a scare with a serious illness that turned out to be unfounded. I thought, "How can I use his comment as a springboard for my own cleverness, while I completely ignored his real problems just two weeks ago." While I did say a prayer for him, I did not say anything to him. Holy Spirit had caught me prostrate before my idol.

Back in my seminary days, we once bemoaned the loss of the public square. With the privatization of all things and the complete individualization of Americans as a result of technology, selfishness, and other socio-cultural influences, America has generally lost the sense of a shared public life. One reason is the loss of a shared public space. The public square was once a level playing field where ideas of all kinds could be found.

Perhaps at one time mass media was more on the side of Christians or at least cultural conservatives, so the loss of the public square was not such a loss. However, with Christianity and religion in general increasingly alienated from public discourse, people of faith began to be keenly aware of this loss.