I've been following the writing of a new "Head First" book (see Head First Java for a great example of the series) on Calculus. This morning, I read about the author's loss of his 6 year old daughter. He has been writing an online journal to Elena. The writing on that journal is some of the most touching, deeply personal and phenomenal expression of humanity that I've read in ages.

It's a truly humbling experience to witness such tremendous loss in another human being. It's so easy to let your scale shift to a place where mundane frustrations fill our views. So easy to act as though our problems are actually critical. We need to include the genuine tragedies and triumphs in our scale. Only when loss of a job or other frustration is placed on the spectrum with the deep loss that comes from losing a loved one can we have a perspective that goes beyond the self-absorbed to being truly empathetic.

Dan my thoughts are with you and your family in this time of loss.

A while back I started an absolute minimum theme for Wordpress: a "skeleton" theme, if you will. I intended it to be used as the basis for building other themes without having to dig through so much CSS and HTML code. I got it about 80% of the way I wanted it and hadn't touched it. Last night I decided to take an hour or so and finish it.

It makes it relatively easy to take a static HTML design and convert it to a Wordpress theme. I optimized it (relatively) for search engine mojo and put one "float" in for the sidebar. Otherwise, it's about as basic as I think it can be made and still contain all of the bits you're likely to want in your own theme.

Download the Skeleton Wordpress theme

I'm looking to run it through it's paces by doing 2-3 conversions from templates at OSWD and Open Web Design. Any suggestions for which ones to convert? For one of them I'll document the process of taking a design from one of those sites and Skeleton and cranking out a new Wordpress theme. But, I'd rather choose one that is likely to be appealing to most people.

Photo: Julie Kertesz

A story this morning on MPR reopened an idea in my head. A while back, I registered the domain tenthousandvoices.com and put up a quick static site there. I haven't had the time to go back to it, but I've got a half-written email to local improv groups looking to do a bunch of non-serial podcasts of spoken word audio from Minnesota (hence, the 10,000 reference). I love podcasts, but most of them seem stuck in the model of a series instead of individual documentaries, mini-series, etc.

IT Conversations does something different from most podcasts in their capturing of IT conventions as basically 1-time events. Other ideas include recording local lectures, audio tours of places like the sculpture gardens, a day of storytelling, stand-up comedy, etc. I'd also love to be able to do more exclusive (possibly commercial) audio theater, etc. and pay performers to do it. Give away Act 1 of a murder mystery and charge for the rest, etc. I'd rather the podcast be a brand for high quality Minnesota spoken word content than that you get the *same* content every episode.

If you had enough stuff, you could do custom CD's and share the wealth. Lots of ideas have been bouncing around my head regarding this project (and I'd love to talk with anyone in Minnesota interested in the idea. I know Garrick does a lot of podcasting locally, any others I should talk to?)

All of that said, one of the things that's been nagging at me that would be part of Ten Thousand Voices is to capture oral histories and personal biographies from older generations of Minnesotans. I already love sitting down with Shelly's grandfather to hear all of his stories and there are stories like his all over the place. I'd give copies of the raw audio to the interviewee and their family and probably edit down the conversation for distribution.

What I'm wondering is if anyone has suggestions for how to go about finding people who would like to be interviewed. My first idea is to talk to senior-serving charities and see if they have ideas to find volunteers.

The resulting podcasts would be distributed via Ten Thousand Voices under a Creative Commons license. I expect I'd also need a release of some sort. Anyone know where I could find a legal template?

This is highly situational, but might be of help to someone going through the same problem, so I'm writing up a quick note, as much for my own reference as anything.

1. You're using (or want to use) Intellisync from Yahoo to sync your calendar with your Yahoo account. This is to get appointments from a client-specific Outlook calendar onto a consolidated calendar.
2. Said client-site blocks all yahoo.com addresses via a locked down IE setup, so you can't change the system proxy.
3. Administrator agrees that my use is legit, but won't unblock Yahoo.
4. SSH port is open.

Normally, in that situation, I would just use Putty to open an SSH tunnel and set up a dynamic port (usually 1080) that serves as a SOCKS5 proxy. This works for Firefox, Thunderbird and nearly every app I've ever needed to use it on. However, Yahoo's Intellisync doesn't like it.

So, instead, I set up a Squid proxy server on my home office LAN, and, instead of a dynamic port, I have Putty forward port 3128 to the Squid proxy machine. Then, I have Intellisync point to 127.0.0.1 and port 3128. This works.

Apparently, Intellisync can work only with straight HTTP proxies and not SOCKS5 proxies. So, if you set up a local HTTP proxy (which Squid is) via SSH, you can connect to Yahoo and the calendar appointments are now in sync.

All is right with the world. Both of you who needed this information can now rest easy.

As the king of both the parenthetical statement and the conversational tangent, you can imagine my glee when I discovered a nice little article detailing how to do web footnotes in CSS and Javascript. I will certainly be integrating that into this site to help me manage my tendencies while maintaining the primary flow of articles. Finally, a way to ensure that *everything* I think needs to be said can be included, without irritating the people who wish I'd finish a sentence on the same idea I started it on.