Administrative updates

[Brian Rice]

These are just a few assorted notes on what's going on with the  
project and me in particular:

Server Status - The tunes.org server hiccuped this morning, and  
rebooted. Everything is now available again.

New Server Status - The machine is installed and running. I am  
working out how I want the project to be handled, by learning to set  
up a jail to which I can hand out logins relatively freely so that  
people can assist more and have to go through me less.

My Communication Style - As has been a bit of a tacit "open secret"  
about the way the project is run, I primarily have interacted with  
people via IRC which is largely more productive than what most others  
do on said medium, but is of course in general a bit of a waste of  
time as the center of a communication style. What I need to do is  
maintain a blog and generally insist that proposals make it through  
email and blog discussions rather than in IRC, regardless of the  
public logging. So to that end, I am committing to only spend time on  
IRC for specific requests and meetings which I would like to schedule  
via this mailing list. Otherwise I'm going to try to set up a blog/ 
CMS system on the new server and publish my thoughts that way. It  
does concern me that email and blog content should not be too  
redundant to save effort on my part, so I'll try to figure a decent  
dividing line there. I'm also trusting those who do like the IRC  
channel to take part in assisting other users who are new in  
explaining concepts and getting them started. Hopefully by doing this  
we can all be a little more effective in gathering and filtering  
information/feedback.

Project Public Representation - It's pretty obvious (to me and others  
I'm sure) that our website does not really reveal as much as it  
should about what's good and relevant about our project and how it  
works, and basically for me the bottleneck has been the fact that I  
manually edit the server HTML and CSS in order to update the website  
and that some kind of CMS is in order to make news/structuring/layout  
much easier to deal with. I am leaning towards Pier, a CMS on Seaside/ 
Squeak, or Plone, or one of the other big-flexible frameworks for  
managing website components. Suggestions for particular things about  
website improvement or modules that should be there would be much  
welcome.

Personal - As I have not really discussed, but is sometimes relevant  
to my work habits, I have a severe and life-long case of psoriasis,  
an immune-system-related skin disease which basically has had a  
constant but low-level affect on my pain and stress levels and  
general sociability. I had tried treatments for years unsuccessfully  
but this last year I've been getting treatment through a US medical  
study which has been very successful. Right now, however, I'm on the  
trailing end of a placebo period. I realize that most people don't  
really want to know this, but in a month I'll be treated again and  
will likely be able to coordinate more without irritability, which  
should allow the project to accelerate. This free treatment will last  
at least 2 years. And to those who ask why I might be on a study  
instead of paying for the medication, my response is that $18,000 per  
year medical bills would make me significantly more tied to a boring  
career and not able to hack Slate as much. I feel that this treatment  
will let me bootstrap a business or other successful derivation of  
the work I do so that I won't have monetary problems when I need to  
pay for the treatment. We shall see.

--
-Brian
http://tunes.org/~water/brice.vcf

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: PGP.sig
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 186 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
Url : /archives/slate/attachments/20060306/0df0322b/PGP.pgp