Category Archives: Site News

Housekeeping, HOUSEKEEPING!

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I am finally tired of the chaotic structure (viva la oxymoron) pf this, and some of my other weblogs and I decided to go ahead and clean them up. The Blog Cleaning to end all Blog Cleanings.

What I thought would be an easy task, isn’t. In itself, the technical aspect of it, it’s really trivial. If there are no comments on a posting, I can just copy and paste it; otherwise I have to do some import and export magic. Really, no matter.

But what I found to be incredible difficult is to rip apart my history of blogging. I’ve posted some stuff on here that’s really superfluous. people really need to know I ordered ADSL in Frankfurt nine years ago?

Then there’s some stuff I’d probably not post today – nothing really bad, just… not perfect for a site any potential customer, a future employer (no, I am not looking…), girlfriend (I am still not looking, I am using these as examples, don’t hit me honey! *ouch*), or any total stranger could look up. For example, I used to have a neighbor who liked to undress at the window. It’s there, in a bemused posting I made way back when it wasn’t even socially acceptable to call a blog a blog.

Then there are potentially harmful postings. Example: A rant ridiculing the ITIL fashion. Yeah, seven years ago you didn’t need ITIL if you had some common sense. But I’m now a project manager and service manager. I understand that ITIL is a reference that saves people from having to come up with that stuff themselves, and it provides for a common ground and terminology. But reading that old blog posting could give a potential employer a completely wrong impression of myself. I need ITIL as a tool and, more importantly, I need – and my employer needs me to have – ITIL as a badge to show off to my customers. So I actually “parked” this post already.

Another case are posts I really do not have any other home for. I could move my book reviews to my new Kindle blog, but then what about my DVD reviews? Shouldn’t I just keep them all together? I don’t want to start a reviews blog, really. A similar situation for my tech posts (though I have a solution for those), or my travel posts, or the ones about RIFT and World of Warcraft. And if I move all of these, my personal blog will have very little “meat” left.

A final and very special example is a post about Wizard of the Coast’s search for a new setting. It’s just a snippet, really, but it’d perfectly fit in with my world building blog. Except – That post is from 2002 and my world building blog started in 2008. Do I really want a lone post from the past in there? Doesn’t seem to be very useful.

I haven’t really figured out a good solution yet. I don’t want to delete too much. In a way, this blog and its ten year history are dear to me. And once you destroy data, you won’t get it back.

I think I must consider this matter in greater depth before I go ahead.

Blog Updates

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I’ve spent quite a bit of time on updating my WordPress theme, WPNJ, to WordPress 2.5. The result is an – in my humble opinion – cleaner looking theme. It’s still not perfect but then I am hardly a professional web designer.

There will be a few other changes, as well. I am going to dump gallery2, because it’s annoying to integrate into WordPress, and because it’s buggy in its maintenance. Instead I’ll just use the integrated image handling of WordPress from now on. Hardly a satisfactory solution, but quite convenient.

I’ll also consolidate my assortment of blogs. The travel stuff, especially, will be re-integrated into my personal blog.

What's the Dog-Ear?

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Because my anglophone readers will wonder: The dog-ear in the upper-right corner is a protest against a new data-retention law our government passed on November 9th: Basically, they decided that all communication connection data must be retained for six months. This includes phones, mobiles, email, text messages, and so on. And in the case of mobile phones, they will also log the location. This is being done regardless of suspicions of crime. Germany is now a surveillance state.

A lot of people will say: **But I have nothing to hide!** However, this is incorrect. **Everybody** has **something** to hide. Obviously, most people do not commit crimes, but is that really all there is in one’s life? Maybe someone cheated on his husband or wife, or likes to smoke pot. What about watching porn movies – or calling phone sex lines? A lot of people do that, and few of them would admit to it in public. Using your company phone to make private calls? It’s all documented now. Maybe you like to appear as a rough-tough macho in public, but enjoy folk music in private. Maybe you got really drunk at your last birthday party and made a scene – something you may not wish to become publicly known.

And then there are all the possibilities of misunderstandings, when these huge databases will be searched and used.

Finally, we should have no illusions that this will be the last law of this kind. Banking confidentiality is already history. Our biometric data – photos, fingerprints – are being entered in government databases. The police has started to automatically ID cars. And our interior minister Schäuble has a whole bag full of other ideas. This must not happen.

It saddens me to no end that Germany, the one nation that you would think should know better than this, has implemented this horrible law. There are only two hopes now; our President may refuse to sign it, or the superior court could stop the law. And the dog-ear links to just that initiative.

I hope this clears things up.

German? WTF Dude?!

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> Why is your blog suddenly in German?!

I was asked that question twice after I posted [two](/2007/11/06/demonstration-gegen-vorratsdatenspeicherung) [articles](/2007/11/07/medienecho-zur-demonstration) in [German](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_language). The answer, of course, is that it isn’t. My blog will remain mostly English for the foreseeable future. But those two articles were about something that is mostly of interest to Germans (new data retention laws pushed through parliament by the government).

I still intend to start blogging bilingually. However, WordPress doesn’t really provide the facilities for this. I have some ideas to work around those limitations, but they involve writing a new WordPress theme… and when I see (http://www.php.net) I get headaches.

Hello world!

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Welcome to Jeppe.de. This website will be the basis of my research into the family’s history. The going will be very slow, but there are some interesting rumours waiting to be dispelled (or confirmed, we’ll see). In the meantime, I have moved over the two relevant articles from [my personal website](http://nils.jeppe.de).