Words by Woods

Archive for the ‘Admin’ Category

You may have noticed that Words by Woods is undergoing a spring sprucing.

Taking advantage of new themes created by PRODOS, we are now brought to you in the very sharp looking “Gather Your Thoughts 05” and feature 10 widgets along the right of the page.

Further, I have activated some plug-ins to:

• enrich your commenting experience with better editing options,
• add the capacity for you to respond to other commentators within the comments, and
• enable you to subscribe to track comments on a particular post.

On the side bar, I have added:

• a text box for quotes that I fancy at that time,
• a search box to content on the blog,
• a feed of recent comments made by you all,
• a feed of Top Stories that I flagged from my Google Reader subscriptions (see #2 below),
• a feed of recent posts from the Objectivist Blogger group (see #2 below), and
• lots of new links that I track through my Google Reader subscriptions.

As the spruce continues there are a couple of issues that I am aware of, which will be fixed as soon as possible:

1. I have not yet moved six links in the general Links group to either the Activism or Objectivist Bloggers group as appropriate, and
2. The RSS widget is not correctly parsing the link location for the “Top Stories” and “Obloggers” feeds, as a temp work around removing the trailing URL for the website that was appended to the item location.

For example, instead of:

http://www.aynrand.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id=22869http://www.aynrand.org/site/News2?lcmd=pub.date.desc&cmd=search

edit the URL to become

http://www.aynrand.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id=22869

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Diana Hsieh at NoodleFood has started a mailing list for Objectivist bloggers to facilitate communication and share blogging tips/news.

She has some good blogging tips available in an old NoodleFood entry.

Below is a list of new blogs I plan to check out.

• CORGIGUY
• Damon Payne
• The Edge of Reason
• Non-Trivial Pursuit
• Not PC
• Rational Jenn
• Semper Vigilo
• Trey Givens

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I have added several new links for my convenience and hopefully yours as well.

Activism: The Ayn Rand Institute, Firefly Sun, The Undercurrent
Daily Favorites: Gus Van Horn, Noodle Food, Sydney Kendall, Thrutch
My Other Blogs: Over the Top
The Good Life: DC Objectivist Salon, Forgotten Delights

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In response to my Geneva-Man post, I received a threatening comment from someone named Bloodstomper who has many, many, many comments around the internet. His or herÂcomments do not appear here because I did not approve them. However, omitting some portions such as libelous accusations of my committing crimes,Âthe comment was essentially:

“I wish I could personally torture you and all of your friends–and your mom! Yes, I know you did it, and I would love to torture you until you confessed. Then I could torture you some more! I need to torture you really, really bad. You might even die, so I really need to torture you until you confess!

I’m not sure what to do at this point as this guy or gal seems absolutely insane based on‚ the comment. Do I contact Yahoo about a TOS violation and find out how to obtain his information in order to forward it to the police? Could his ISP help me track him down through the IP address? Should I call my attorney for some advice?

UPDATE 9/17/2006: From research on other posts, it seems possible that Bloodstomper is either a woman or a frustrated transvestite that calls himself Barbie instead of Bill.

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In an effort to blog better, I am discontinuing several of my other blogs and consolidating those efforts here. The discontinued blogs are:

* Do Not Let It Go
* The Washington Re-Post
* Woods Workbench

I will move those types of posts here as I find Prodos’ ThinkerToThinker platform to be superior to AOL’s Journals platform.

However, I will still continue the Frank Wolf WatchÂÂon AOL, which is appropriate because AOL HQ is in the district. I have a new entry there from an LTE to the Loundoun Independent regarding Congressman Wolf’s opposition to Capitalism.

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A self-reported faculty member at Meredith College has commented on my post regarding that college’s rejection of a donation from the BB&T Charitable Foundation to fund a program in business ethics.

His point was that conditions made on the donation were a threat to academic freedom.

In part, I responded about the freedom the college sought:

For brevity, let me suggest that Meredith College was seeking freedom from reality, more specifically that the producer of value has a right to set the terms by which it is used. The college’s objection was not over BB&T Charitable Foundation giving money, but that it as the producer of the value should set the terms for how that money would be used.

While Meredith College is free to insist on this condition, BB&T Charitable Foundation was correct to refuse, and it is my hope that they will find a partner who would with deal with them on their terms.

For the full thread, go here.Â

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July 2 is election day for the next Mexican president. Recent polls show the statistical tie (margin of error 2.5%) between Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador of the leftist Democratic Revolution Party (36%) and Felipe Calderon of the conservative governing National Action Party (34%), with 25% going to the PRI candidate Roberto Madrazo.

In the May-June 2006, Jorge G. Castaneda (former Mexican Foreign Minister under Fox, and currently at NYU) has an essay titled “Latin America’s Left Turn”, in which he attempts to distinguish between what he identifies as good leftists (in Chile) and bad leftists (in Venezuela), although it is more aptly bad and worse leftists. In his discussion of Lopez Obrador, Castaneda identifies him with the bad leftists in the Chavez mold.

While I have heard many accounts of Venezuela’s economic decay under Chavez, Castaneda provides some statistical comparisons between Venezuela and Mexico:

“A simple comparison with Mexico–which has not exactly thrived in recent years–shows how badly Venezuela is faring. Over the past seven years [Chavez's reign], Mexico’s economy has grown 17.5 percent, while Venezuela’s failed to grow at all. From 1997 and 2003, Mexico’s per capita GDP rose by 9.5 percent, while Venezuela’s shrank by 45 percent. From 1998 to 2005, the Mexican peso lost 16 percent of its value, while the value of the Venezuelan Bolivar dropped by 292 percent. Between 1998 and 2005, the number of Mexican households living in extreme poverty decreased by 49 percent, while the number of Venezuelan household’s in extreme poverty rose by 4.5 percent. In 2005, Mexico’s inflation rate was estimated at 3.3 percent, the lowest in years, while Venezuela’s was 16 percent.” (p. 40)

With immigration reform thought to be on hold until next year in the US, a new crisis is a couple weeks could change that.

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PRODOSPHERE is now streaming collecting content from dozens of ThinkerToThinker blogs, including this one. Below is a list of some other top ThinkerToThinker blogs, which I plan to checkout. With a quick check, I saw some I recognized, some new ones that looked promising, and some I know that I will disagree with. Check them out for yourself.

Ad Hoc
Army of One
Christopher Schlegel
Dave Zornek
Ethon Be Damned!
Fish Wrap
Hence the Elizabethan
Life: A Reason Unto Itself
Lorenz Kraus
Mikko Ellian
Ms. Tulsa
Oak Tree
Observations
PRODOS Project Blog
School for Entrepreneurial Discovery
Sydney Kendall Says
Talking to Myself
The Mala Perspective
The Rational Nurse
The Venture Party
Thought Laboratory
Vappa Intellektuelli
Viridian Tango
Zigory

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I have started to play with the links and have added several.

From a user prospective, I like the categories.

From an editor’s prospective, it is very easy to move things around.

There a many options for the links that I have not tried yet, but I may play with them more later.

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Congratulations to Prodos on setting up THINKER TO THINKER!

When I got the email notify about this new service, I could not resist trying it out.

My recent blogging has been on AOL Journals and I am excited to see what this new tool can do.

I’m off to the gym to get the creative juices flowing while singing Prodos’ New Tune ‘If I only had a blog…’!

In the meantime, feel free to check out my other efforts at:

for commentary on recent news

for commentary on my Congressman

for playing around

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