October 2, 2008 – 6:16 PM
I've not been blogging again. Naughty Raena.
Here's a flickr meme to keep you entertained in the meantime, courtesy monnie, alegrya and fifi!

1. @fulltimecasual and @raena, 2. My first strawberries of this season..., 3. Untitled, 4. Summer Berries Red Current01, 5. Daniel Craig, BAFTA 2007, 6. hotter than a Georgia July, 7. Iceberg Graveyard in Antarctica, 8. A symphony of desserts, 9. chiba_woman_tattoo_by_boost_samurai, 10. Dream a little dream of me, 11. FGR: Gettin freaky with the geeky., 12. 128-2852_IMG
- What is your first name? Raena, and look, that's me and fulltimecasual!
- What is your favorite food? Love me the strawberries.
- What high school did you go to? Sacred Heart College, New Town
- What is your favorite color? Red
- Who is your celebrity crush? Oh, don't make me choose. I picked Daniel Craig.
- Favorite drink? A delicious mint julep
- Dream vacation? Antarctica
- Favorite dessert? I like things involving mint and/or chocolate
- What you want to be when you grow up? Big in Japan
- What do you love most in life? Sleeping!
- One Word to describe you? geeky
- Look up your flickr name (that's raena) and find something/someone dedicated to you - I got nothing, but here is a picture of a baby named Raena.
August 26, 2008 – 6:30 PM
How Spot Us Works
1. Anyone can create a “story idea.” Example: “I would like to see somebody do an investigation into the quality of our water in San Jose.”
2. Journalists create pitches that can be inspired by your ideas.
3. We get pledge donations - but nobody’s credit cards are charged until we reach our goal. This way you know your pledge will play a meaningful role and won’t be squandered.
4. The finished content is licensed under a Creative Commons license and Spot Us will try and get it published in as many places as possible.
5. If any news organization wants exclusive rights to the story, they will have to refund a percentage of the original donations - so you will get your money back to invest in a new story.
6. Democracy flourishes, you feel good.
About “Spot Us” « Spot.Us - Community Funded Reporting
So, basically they’ll cover only the stories that:
- The crowd can afford? So, just the stuff that wealthy individuals in the crowd are interested in?
- The crowd think is worth paying for? So what happens to the necessary, if not-so-entertaining, stories? If you had five bucks to throw at a story would it be one you’d enjoy reading, or one that was challenging?
The crowd is a moron. I would be happy to be proved wrong, however.
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August 24, 2008 – 12:45 AM
I am thinking about moving back to Movable Type, for some of the following reasons:
They set it free :)
I initially moved away from MT around the same time that Six Apart kind of fucked us all over. Now that they're back into releasing a version under the GPL, it's worth supporting that.
Kick in the bum
I am sort of blogging more now, I guess. I think having a project to do (getting migrated, etc) will give me more incentive to concentrate on it and make it quality.
Multiple blogs
I know you can run several blogs off one Wordpress install in theory. In practice it is still, in my opinion, kludgey and horrid. A system that can do this properly out of the box is, in principle, a better solution.
The interface is fucking amazing
Seriously. So is WP's new interface, but MT4's is hella nice.
More intuitive templating
I've never loved Wordpress' templating the way I loved MT's. It doesn't hurt that MT's template tags are much like Matrix's design elements.
Less hassle for serving
Not that I have a massive amount of readership to be pushing files to, but in principle it is nicer to write static files when you can.
So, you know. There it is.
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August 23, 2008 – 5:57 PM
I won’t be able to vote, but given most of you reading this live in the United States, you may have influence. Dave Winer would make a most excellent US CTO, and we now give him our full support should he decide to officially put his name forward. Winer knows RSS, he knows blogging, and he isn’t shy is sharing his opinions. Spread the word: Winer for CTO.
Dave Winer for CTO of the United States
Dave Winer, renowned sulkypants?
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