blogwaffe

I know you’ve always wanted to post on blogwaffe. Or perhaps you’ve dreamed of publishing content on Apparent Horizons or \_jeff_{krimmel}.

Well you can’t.

Sukah.

But you can hit up the next big thing (next great American novel, big) over at email for pics (dot com).

In a way, I’m a little sad to see it go. My unconventional port and I have been together for a long time now. It’s been a source of conversation, intrigue and misplaced pride. Sadly, the pros of moving on outweigh the cons.

For those of you who hadn’t noticed after this ~day of being offline: http://blogwaffe.com.

I didn’t want to name names until all had settled, but I’m now very happy to say that blogwaffe is being served by TextDrive. I absolutely could not be happier with the service or its people. TextDrive’s servers are fast, highly configurable and very usable while all the while the folks running the show are friendly, helpful and knowledgeable nearly to the point of being scary. I had a couple questions about the best way to move the site over while maintaining the old links. Not only did they have answers, they had implementable solutions. Many thanks to Ryan, Jason and the lot.

Also, I’d be remiss if I didn’t give a loud shout out to Matt who was responsible for setting us up the bomb in the first place. So thanks, Matt.

This is not something I’m proud of; this is something I’m admitting: I make people’s lives harder.

As a reminder, automobiles (typically) drive on the right hand side of the road in .us. This is something that has been ingrained into my consciousness starting from the day I was taken home from the hospital as a newborn. It’s one of those bits of cultural DNA that structures the way society intraäcts.

Two people walking toward one another in .us also tend to veer to the right to avoid collisions. Whether the law of driving on the right came before or after this pedal social mos is irrelevant; they are certainly highly correlated. People in this country strongly expect pedestrians beset with such a situation to veer right, and they justify (rightly so) this expectation by citing the driving laws.

I always veer left.

I can’t explain why. I’ll see the imminence of such a situation, think to myself, “this time, make sure you head right”, look my opposite straight in the eye, and take a left. I’m not being spiteful or intentionally disruptive. It’s just that there’s some fundamental mental disconnect that happens between understanding the appropriate thing to do and getting my body to actually do it. My legs seem to have a peculiar yen for leftward motion.

So to all those I’ve ever unintentionally forced into the dance of the sidewalk (and to all those whom I will thusly encounter in the future), I apologize.

This weekend’s release of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince is a non trivial event both in terms of thirteen year olds’ “Oh. My. God, I <3 Ron Weasley! I’m not going to eaven BREATHE ’till I’m all the way done with the book. Augh! I wonder if there will be any lethifolds *shudder*. Do you think Hermione is pretty? HP43vr!!” and how it will alter the daily activities in seemingly unrelated sectors: “No, I’m sorry, the doctor isn’t in. How many cockroaches did you say? That’s really a poison control issue, do you have their number?”.

I’ll be interested to see and hear how the world will be affected. The Royal Mail is planning to have an extra 150 lorries on the road this week. Hollywood worries that the release will seriously effect ticket sales. Some more words that end in “orries” (yes, you read that correctly: “ovarian growth worries”).

I’m particularly curious about various nations’ transportation and shipping infrastructures. Is it possible that unleashing tens of millions of books on the world all at once could overload the system? I’m thinking of some kind of phase transition in the shipping sector effecting some odd, emergent behavior: give just one too many parcels to the carriers in Montreal and, WHAM, there goes the Dutch chocolate industry. Traffic backed up at O’Hare? Harry Potter. Massive gladiolus phage? Harry Potter. Jerry Falwell consulted by White House on Supreme Court appointments? Harr- no wait, that’s all Bush.

Anyway, I fully expect some strange things to go down over the next few days whether it’s shipping related or not. So if anything happens to you, just blame HP.

Harry Potter: the new El Niño.