Finally got Apropos En Passant moved, to its final resting place!  Do drop in.  I’ll be closing this site soon.

Apropos En Passant

OK, so I'm not a politician. The Clubhouse is back. So the change wasn't something you could believe in.

Wait, maybe I am a politician.

Forgive the confusion, but I quickly realized continuing down the path I was going was going to make things even more confusing. I've come to the conclusion that blogging would be beneficial in re-engaging fully in my profession after all the health issues of the past year or so. Initially I hoped these posts might be generic enough to be of general interest, like the first post on Syntax Errata. But as I got deeper into it I realized this wasn't going to hold true very long, that I was going to have to delve into technical discussions that would be lost on a reader tuning in to watch me blast away at MLBlogs, for example. Thus I realized I was going to need a second blog.

And once the illusion of a single, unified blog was shattered—well, might as well return to the original trinity. And so Apropos will return to what it was originally meant to be and The Clubhouse reopens. I must confess, I kind of missed it.

Sorry for the confusion. I have registered the perfect domain name to house these ramblings: virtuallynowhere.net. Soon I'll be moving the blogs under this domain.

Thanks for bearing with me...

I must confess I haven't been terribly impressed with the Obama candidacy of late. Actually it has been stumbling and bumbling since the end of February, when Obama reeled off those victories which essentially secured the nomination. Clinton won six of the final nine contests, several by huge margins, as Obama limped across the finish line. This exposed Obama's liabilities, not the least of which is his success depends in no small part in giving speeches, particularly the type of general speeches given after a victory before a national audience. He won't have those kinds of opportunities in the general election. He will have to sell himself to the public in other ways.

Backing off his earlier commitment to public financing, then ham-handedly spinning it as a noble act, was not one of those ways. It is not that I disagree with the act itself, necessarily. Public financing has problems, not the least of which is it is too easily short circuited, by political action committees, for example. Moreover, there is no doubt Obama would be giving up a tremendous advantage in what might very well be a close election. It would be hard to justify to your supporters that you are willing to lose an election on principle. That sounds horrible, but this is politics. But therein lies the rub: Obama is selling himself as a movement beyond the politics of the past.

Sounds like the same old song and dance to me. Promise something, then when fortune reverses itself and the opposite position is to your advantage, do something else. Fortunately for Obama the voice ringing in the ears is McCain's insipid "that's not change we can believe in."

Note: I wrote most of this a couple of weeks ago, I've been busy changing the blog host. Now it appears I'm not the only one rueing this.

It's the Fourth of July, as American as hot dogs, apple pie and baseball. So what is MLBlogs featuring when the rest of us are celebrating our great land, the birthplace of baseball? Why, Mark Newman and his running, of course!

Apparently the fool has managed to sell the even bigger fools that hire him that somehow this is promoting Major League Baseball. Read the blog and see how much you take away from it about baseball. This stunt is all about the same thing MLBlogs is all about: the personal aggrandizement of Mark Newman. First he abused his position to promote his personal favorites, i.e., those who licked his ass. Now that he has managed to chase away most of the real bloggers, he is abusing MLBlogs to show the only thing he has left: his ass.

It isn't like there was some legitimate baseball to feature this holiday weekend—the All-Star selections will be announced Sunday. Hell, there was even legitimate running: wonder if Mr. Running Man was even aware the U.S. Olympic Trials for Track and Field were being held? And God forbid MLBlogs should celebrate the birth of our nation.

But that's enough about US. He wants to talk about himself.

Baseball, as America's National Pastime, has received the lion's share of scrutiny in regards to performance enhancing substances, but cycling is a "better" example of the phenomena. Consider this: Last year's Tour de France winner, Spain's Alberto Contador, will not be allowed to compete in this year's Tour because of so many doping problems with his team, Astana, including the embarrassing positive test of team member Alexandre Vinokourov after winning a stage. The top three finishers of every stage were being tested along with a random sampling of others, so Vinokourov's offense reflects just how exasperating the problem is. You have to wonder if, as he sped across the finish line, he was thinking "Oh, shit. Now I'm going to be tested for sure."

Contador was essentially handed his 2007 Tour victory when Michael Rasmussen, who was dominating the race at the time, was disqualified after his team suspended him for violating doping controls, i.e., missing scheduled tests. Illustrating another aspect of grappling with the Hydra of doping, the timing of the release of information regarding Rasmussen's offenses was highly suspicious. Patrice Clerc, who headed the Amaury Sport Organisation responsible for organizing the Tour de France, charged that the UCI organization, which governs the professional tour in general, leaked the news during the Tour to embarrass it as part of their ongoing feud over how professional cycling should be run, a charge which, of course, the UCI denied.

As bad as 2007 was, the 2006 Tour could make a strong claim to being the most nightmarish event in any sport's history. This was the first race to be held after the retirement of Lance Armstrong, who has wrestled with doping allegations of his own, and was supposed to be a new beginning of the sport. But days before the race started a drug bust in Spain resulted in the expulsion of numerous riders, including the including two leading contenders for the yellow jersey, Jan Ullrich and Ivan Basso. This set up the race for the American Floyd Landis to finally emerge from Armstrong's shadow. That story seemed spoiled, however, when Landis had a disastrous Stage 16, losing eight minutes. Then, miraculously, Landis had a ride for the ages in State 17, setting an impossible pace on the first climb, tracking down and passing a breakaway group and racing alone to the finish. Well, not quite alone. Seems he had a little help. The miracle turned out to be scientifically explicable. Better living through chemistry. Floyd was stripped of his title.

As if that wasn't bad enough, the French newspaper Le Monde reported in January 2007 that the defaulted winner of the 2006 Tour de France, Oscar Pereiro, had failed some drug tests of his own. The International Cycling Union granted retroactive permission to use a banned substance for medical reasons to negate the positive tests. Hard to say which is more embarrassing, an excused positive test for banned substances or another winner disqualified.

Therein lies the real problem. Because of all the positives, cycling has a negative reputation. The uneducated consider it a dirty sport. The truth is, while cycling certainly has problems, it is probably the cleanest sport around. Cheaters are not tolerated. There is not the same hoodwinking as in baseball, where Barry Bonds head can grow as big as a basketball without any ramifications from the powers that be. The reason cycling appears so dirty is cheaters are actually caught and punished. Even association with cheaters results in severe ramifications. Note that Contador will not be defending his title not because of anything he has done, but because he is employed by a team that once had problems. America's best cyclist, Levi Leipheimer, will not be participating in Le Tour for the same reason.

Cycling is way ahead of the curve on the PED issue. It must be because of the nature of the sport: competition depends absolutely on leveling the field. This year's Tour de France holds the promise of being special. After having plumbed the absolute darkest depths of performance enhancing substances, this tour may very well represent the first professional sport emerging from the abyss. As such it will be a model from which other sports, including baseball, and football, which has yet to face its demons, can learn.

Viva Le Tour!

After much agonizing thought I have decided to focus my blogging to a single blog. There are a number of reasons for this, but the most persuasive is that I began finding myself wondering whether certain musings belonged to one blog, or another. The lines were becoming blurred. The Olympics in particular began forcing me to reconsider the delineations. Obviously it is a sporting event—and thus would fall under the purview of a sports blog like Some Clubhouse; but it is also a significantly cultural event, more appropriate for Apropos En Passant as I was defining it.

Indeed I view sports through a cultural and philosophical lens in any event. Sports is a phenomena to me. With Some Clubhouse my intent was to explore that phenomena apropos health, but health, like everything else, decomposes into balance, a pre-eminent concept of the art domain. To understand baseball one must study sport, from whence I gravitated towards gymnastics, and from there to acrobatics, where I landed once again squarely in the art department.

For me these things are inextricably intertwined, which leads me to another reason for merging the blogs and focusing on one: blogging is inherently personal. It is a daily activity, like washing, which becomes who one is. I am too amorphous to fill a niche. I never am going to be able to focus on the daily exploits of my beloved Washington Nationals anymore than I could consistently report on the banalities of politics. That is simply not who I am. I am an explorer by nature, and blogging for me is a record of those explorations, a tool to index and cross-reference discoveries fragmented by the dailyness of the process.

A tool is technology; or is it the other way around? Regardless, the last piece I had trouble integrating was the technology blog, Syntax Errata. Not that I had been doing much with it, anyway, partly because I couldn't seem to fit it into the picture. A technology blog is natural because technology is something I work with everyday. But I also realize it could be confusing to a reader to read a post one day about Chinese art and the next about bugs in Windows Server. But that is my life, meaning, I suppose, somehow there might be a relationship.

By definition, they are integrated.

I've taken the plunge and replaced Drupal as my content management system, that is, blog hosting software. That "that is" is the first reason: I have discovered my needs are blog-centric. While a full-fledged CMS like Drupal can handle a corporation's information management needs, I realized I didn't really need that kind of horsepower and, more to the point, that any content outside of blogging I would want to present with highly customized web technologies, which defeats one of the main selling points of a CMS, i.e., a consistent look and feel.

This recognition opened new doors. Drupal has some limitations. Category support for the MetaWeblog API, for example, that allows for remote posting from Windows Live Writer or Microsoft Word is broken. After much digging around, it appears there is a patch available, but my hosting service doesn't provide SSH access to apply the patch. I waited for the next release, but the fix wasn't included. The upgrade, meanwhile, broke my theme. Broken modules and themes is a chronic problem with Drupal, which has adopted the philosophy of not being shackled by backward compatibility, which has a certain merit but results in a junkyard of broken functionality. Drupal is what it is, though, and was good enough plumbing that I was willing to overlook these problems. I would need to modify any blog hosting software, I reasoned, and so rolled up my sleeves and began to look at fixing the MetaWeblog API myself.

But that brought me to the killer: Drupal is written in PHP. I know a lot of web developers swear by it, but I doubt they have been developing software as long as I have, and, if they have and still don't understand the fundamental problems with PHP, they aren't as good at it as I am. I'm not going to get into all the problems with PHP, from mixing business logic and presentation layers to lack of namespaces, just suffice it to say it was enough of an anathema to me that I began looking at alternatives. The .NET platform has certain advantages for me in that I have knowledge and access to the very best tools, not to mention that working in that platform as my hobby has the advantage of enhancing my professional skills.

Dot Net Nuke is the most popular .NET open source CMS, so I looked there first. Blogging wasn't even a second class citizen in the Dot Net Nuke world. Not only did the MetaWeblog support entail buying a third party product, the blog module itself did not support categories. The suggestion was to create a new blog for each category! Obviously they didn't understand blogging. At all. To tell the truth, I wasn't real impressed with Dot Net Nuke as a full-fledged CMS.

I was ruing my experience finding a .NET solution to a friend who googled "open source .NET blogging software" and made a couple of suggestions. I had not looked at blogging engines, per se, for the same reason I preferred Drupal to WordPress. I was looking for a CMS. But then it hit me: my requirements were heavily blog-centric. And, again, anything I envisioned doing outside of blogging would be highly customized. For example, I have dreams of consolidating my New World (Jamestown) meanderings into something highly visual and interactive. Microsoft Silverlight would be perfect; and, of course, I have access to all the latest and greatest development technologies and resources for the project.

Having changed my search criteria, I looked at a few open source .NET blog engines and fell in love with . . . BlogEngine.NET. It isn't for everyone. It is a new, immature product and has significant functionality gaps. There is no facility which lists posts, for example. But is that needed? One can manage list posts directly from Windows Live Writer, for example, via the MetaWeblog API (which BlogEngine.NET, incidentally, got right). And that is the beauty of it: the MetaWeblog provides for remote management. Functionality for managing posts would best be done remotely in client software where more robust controls like grids are readily available (or more sophisticated web applications). Thus the lack is not necessarily a fault. Indeed the very immaturity of BlogEngine.NET provides me with an opportunity to influence the growth of the product, meaning eventually the blog hosting software I use is suited to my needs. Because it is open source, moreover, I can at any time diverge from the main build and customize it to my liking.

What's not to like? So I've replaced the blog engine, which, while a momentary pain in the ass, will allow me to focus on forging this blog into what I envision it can be. Thanks for bearing with me.

For readers of my other blogs, including Some Clubhouse, who have been redirected here, I have consolidated blogs and will be posting to this blog only. If you are curious as to the rationale for such a drastic change, read my post The Merging of the Blogs.  I am beginning the process of migrating previous posts.

If you would be so kind, please update your blogroll links to point to this site.  I expect this will be the last move.  Thanks for your patience!