Now here’s nostalgia. I remember watching a lot of music video on Soundproof. Punk, alternative, new wave, and all kinds of goofing around. Some great fun.

A UBC Archives pdf of a UBYSSEY newspaper story on Soundproof from 1984. A year and a half into their show.

I once ran giantkicks.com on Moveable Type. I thought it was utterly unintuitive, too complicated and kind of ugly in the back-end. I gave it a couple months and threw my hands up in exasperation. Installed cafepress/b2 and then wordpress when cafepress and b2 withered away.

Apparently China Digital Times has migrated some 16,000 Moveable Type post to Wordpress. They’ve since seen posting times reduced from 15 minutes to a few seconds, with a huge increase in server perforance due to lower loads.

I have unfortunately been recommending Joomla as a content management system to friends with businesses and online communities.  Joomla is a lot less intuitive than Moveable Type. i don’t know about server loads, but having read Scot’s article. I will stand by Wordpress and recommend it instead.

- original link via Holy Shmoly

My intention was merely to restore the site. I don’t know yet if I will start posting again.

The problem I resolved in order to restore the site was that I had all the posts and comments from giantkicks.com saved in a sql file from when I was hosted on a different server/host, 1and1.com. The site files were all pointing to the old URL and a different database. Using phpMyAdmin I exported a sql file of my new install. With a copy of my old sql file open in notepad++, I used replace, found under “search”, or by pressing Ctrl+H, to update all the URLs, the database name to “wp_” from the old name ‘wp1_”and copied over the new “Data contents of table `wp_users`”.

It would have been nice if there was a simpler way to do it, but I couldn’t find one.

By the way I am now using hostgator. Their support has been excelent, as has been the stability and speed of their servers. I recommend them without reservation..and if you sign up using my link I get a referal bonus.

The Death Squads - Google Video

The torture and slaughter of Iraqi civilians is reaching unprecedented heights with estimates of up to 655,000 dead.

Night after night … all » death squads rampage through Iraq’s main cities. In Baghdad, up to a hundred bodies a day are dumped on the streets. Often they’ve been tortured with electric drills. Yet those doing the killing have little to do with al Qaeda or Sunni insurgents. The majority of the killings are carried out by Shia death squads who want to turn Iraq into a Shia state aligned to Iran.

This shocking film investigates the links between the death squads and high-ranking Shia politicians. It reveals how the Shia militia that these politicians control have systematically infiltrated and taken over police units and even entire government ministeries. It investigates how these units are closely linked to the death squads, indeed they often are the death squads. And the killers act with impunity — there’s little investigation into their activities.

Dr Temple Grandin has a legendary ability to read the animal mind and understand animal behaviour when no one else can. But this is no feat of telepathy; her explanation is simple. She’s convinced she experiences the world much as an animal does and that it’s all down to her autistic brain.

In this half-hour film, Greg Palast and his team travel to New Orleans to investigate what has happened since Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast last year. On his visit, he discovers that the population of New Orleans is miniscule, the reconstruction sparse, suicide rates are climbing, and many have not, nor know how to, return to the city that care forgot. He examines why residents had to leave, what really caused the flood and why they aren’t returning.

Bonus Features Include: Tomorrow’s New Orleans - Whose City Will it Be? A half-hour conversation with Amy Goodman and Greg Palast where they sit down to discuss who is accountable for the ongoing disastrous situation in New Orleans.

“Oil, Smoke & Mirrors” offers a bleaker view of present global circumstances than many of us would dare consider. It deals with issues that are largely marginalized, if not ignored, in the discourse of mainstream media and politics.

However, as the film argues, it may well be that mediated political culture itself which, by sidelining some of the most challenging questions of historical truth in our time, poses the gravest threat to our future.

“Oil, Smoke & Mirrors” is an independent production. The producer has neither association with, nor membership of, any political organization.