Oct 24
Last week I experienced something that all web page owners dread. My website, timepage.org, was hacked.Â
I only noticed it because some of the formatting suddenly became garbled. I didn’t see any new comments or activity. When I went into the web files I saw that most of them had long bits of random spam inserted into the code.  I, being the strong logical person that I am, immediately panicked and started flailing around the web directories, trying to see if I could figure out some pattern. It soon became apparent that it was a pretty complete graffiti attack.
Eventually I had the web people restore a backup (Thank goodness for those.) and I have been fiddling around with various permissions and file updates all week to get it back to where it was. I think I may be OK now. We’ll see.
The really bad part is the insecurity it has introduced into my computing life. We had a break-in at our house many years ago and I remember how we felt violated and vulnerable for a long time. It seems that way again. They apparently had used a password to gain access. My ISP thinks that they must have got the password off of my personal computer with some kind of virus/malware that I picked up. I can’t find any such application with any of the pile of security applications I know about and have access to.  Very disturbing. I am in the process of removing password caches from my browsers and applications and changing passwords to more secure versions.  Who knows where he got the darn things.
Computers were supposed to make thing easier, remember? When something like this happens, all of the efficiencies you have spent all this time building up go down the toilet. It is really getting harder and harder to have fun on these things.
Tagged with: tech • timepage
May 23
In an earlier post I hinted that I was thinking about trying to incorporate my Family Tree into the TimePage structure. I have just made my first baby step in that direction. The Family Generations web page lists my family ancestors in relation to the social cycles of U. S. history as set out in the TimePage. As time goes on, and in concert with other updates that I am working on, I will be expanding the scope of this content and integrating it into the timelines.
Tagged with: Genealogy • timepage
Apr 05
Monday is opening day for the Seattle Mariner’s American League baseball team. They are my team of preference, me being from the Seattle area and all. Baseball has been a big part of my life. My father’s family were baseball people. My grandfather played on local baseball teams in Montana when he was a young man in the early 20th century. My dad and his brothers played. I played organized and sandlot ball all the way through high school.  Needless to say baseball is in my blood.
This time of year I get a little excited when spring training winds down and the final lineups are set for that first game of the season. It’s a little harder when your team hasn’t been playing well but there is always something to get you going. Ichiro has developed an ulcer problem so he won’t be starting the season but Jr. is back. Ken Griffey Jr., possibly the most exciting player I ever watched, has returned to Seattle for a career ending stint with the team who brought him out. He won’t be the player he was but he will probably be the person he was and that is worth a lot. Good omens and bad. We are starting and I am ready.
It was about this same time of year, 2 or 3 years ago that it occured to me that it would be really interesting to look at major league baseball history from a generational standpoint. That gave me an excuse to spend hours pawing through old baseball statistics online and in various giant baseball statistics books. I eventually ended up with a web page I call Baseball Generations that essentially proposes generational all star teams for each of the generations since major league baseball became a reality. I made some changes recently but it is essentially the same idea. It was a blast and I would invite you to visit the page and see if you agree with my picks.
With all that in mind I wanted to announce that, once again, I have started thinking about baseball in the spring and I have decided I need to recognize all of the baseball Hall of Famers on my baseball page. I am in the process of adding them into the generational lineups and I am glad I am doing it. A lot of people that get picked for the Hall of Fame do so in spite of not ending up on the Top 10 lists because their ongoing, consistent contributions are overshadowed by the statistical wonders that dominate the headlines every day.  To me, that seems like a good enough reason to make a spot for them on my lists.  Also, since my lists spans the entire history of major league baseball, this exercise brings back some deserving names that have faded with time.
Tagged with: history • sports • timepage
Mar 12
I have been working with the TimePage, in one form or another, for a dozen years or so now. Â It isn’t surprising, then, that my notion of history has been thoroughly shaped by the generational model of social cycles in history. Â About two years ago, for reasons completely unrelated to my TimePage activity, I became interested in my genealogy. Â I spent many hours grinding through the seemingly endless databases at Ancestry.com, wandering through old family photo albums and bothering relatives with requests for information about the family. Â Then, just recently, I was quietly staring at the family tree one night when a thought suddenly pushed its way into my old, cluttered brain. Â You know, my TimePage time lines and my family tree are really the same thing. Â Wow. Â Talk about a light bulb moment. Â In retrospect, it seems so obvious that I don’t know how it could have escaped me. Â At one time I had even mentioned a couple of my direct ancestors in the time lines. Â Maybe, all this time, I have been tapping the same, hidden need to understand my past in both of these commitments.
Anyway, to make a long story short, I am now trying to come up with a way to combine the two elements within the TimePage structure. Â I have mentioned in earlier posts that I am instituting a slight philosophical shift in the content of the TimePage. Â In fact, part of that shift is related to the inclusion of genealogical data into the timelines. Â I haven’t completely sealed the deal yet in my head but as time goes on expect to see a few more family tree details appear in my time lines. Â If you think about it, the representation of social cycles are really just a family tree for everyone. Â I just have to come up with a good way to hook the two together.
Tagged with: Genealogy • plan • timepage
Feb 28
It is becoming more and more apparent, as time goes by, that we are living through a truly historic time. The politics of the recent election and the enormity of the economic and governmental crisis that we are facing, will both someday rank right up there in the top events in our country’s history, maybe even the biggest. And that doesn’t even count the Big Three issues of energy depletion, climate change and population control that I discussed in an earlier post. We are living large my friends and I’ll bet you can feel it swirling in the air around you. Continue reading »
Tagged with: history • society • timepage
Feb 28
I have not had any big problems with TimeLog2 recently, and I have added just about all of the features that I will be using for now, so I am going to call the new page stable. In keeping with the new philosophy (see earlier post), I am only loading bios from my “most important” list in the Today-in-History pages. As time goes on, I will be doing the same with events. Eventually, I will sync up these entries with the data in the TimePage itself so that the two data sets will be compatible.
I am going to leave the old TimeLog on line so that there is a path for any of the old followers that may have missed the transition. This will also allow me to make a clean break since the old content can be accessed if need be.
Tagged with: plan • timepage
Feb 16
As the TimePage evolved (see earlier article), there was little thought given to the sense of the content. I spent a lot of time gathering links and timeline items so there was obviously thought given to the quantity of content presented. I tried to review and check everything so I was clearly concerned about the quality of the content.  But I really didn’t have a strong vision for the total sense of the content and how it would advance the point I wanted to make with the TimePage.
Continue reading »
Tagged with: timepage
Feb 13
The TimeLog is a blog for the TimePage website. I thought I should mention that I am presently in the process of upgrading the TimeLog to a newer version of the blog software and working out some minor changes in organization. The new version is essentially a fresh start and I am not going to reproduce all of the content from the old version on the new one.  For now, the old version is still functioning even though I am not adding anything to it. The new version is called TimeLog2 and when it has been thoroughly exercised it will become the official TimePage blog.
Tagged with: timepage
Feb 12
Back in the early ’90s William Strauss and Neil Howe published a book titled Generations. I read the book and I was captivated by its ideas.  At about that same time I was getting drawn into the computer world that was exploding around me.  I built a little set of tables in a new-fangled piece of software, called a spread-sheet, that illustrated the ideas that I had read in Generations. That little spread-sheet sat on my computer for a couple more years until, about ‘96, I ran head-on into the internet. As soon as I understood what the world wide web was all about the first thing I wanted to do was get my little spreadsheet out there so I could find out what others thought of the ideas. Continue reading »
Tagged with: timepage
