Liberal Religion and Neo-Astrology, Champagne Breakfasts, Clusters and CMSs

[tcpip]

Gave an address at the Melbourne Unitarian Church on Sunday on Reverend Stephen Fritchman, a radical liberal in the U.S. who caused a great deal of trouble for the political establishment during the 1940s, 50s and 60s. On a vaguely related topic I found myself debating on convert_me last week with astrologers, of all people. Intrigued to discover that some of that ilk now claim (or rather, admit as the statistics and science is beyond reasonable doubt) that it has no predictive value whatsoever, but rather can only be used as a metaphorical and instrospective approach. So, after all those centuries it is finally acknowledged to be fiction.

Last Saturday the deco-apartment of Das Hoehnhauss/Casa di Lafayette held a champagne breakfast with various teas, Timorese coffee, lots of pancakes, almond shortbread, silverware and fine china. In attendence were caseopaya's new workmate and partner along with imajica_lj. We're hoping to turn this into a semi-regular event as it's a delightful way to waste away a Saturday morning and most of an afternoon and catch up with a small group of people as well. We're gradually building a list of people to come along, but if anyone is particularly keen to attend in the next couple, please drop a line below.

Work-related matters have been quite busy of late and we've been somewhat short-staffed. Upgrading the dual-core Opteron systems to quad-cores on Tango is a necessity if we wish to reach at least somewhere close to the c7 Teraflop peak but (as one would expect) it hasn't entirely been smooth sailing. On a completely different tangent, I've been investigating the relative competitive benefits of Drupal vs Plone CMSs for ARCS. Having some experience with both does lead me towards the former for the sake of simplicity, but I'm interested to hear contrary views.

Comments

[catbiscuit.livejournal.com]

I don't suppose you saw the first part of The Enemies of Reason by Richard Dawkins last night on Compass, did you? He spent a while looking at astrology.

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

Duh, I had been reminded of that.

That's two shows I was supposed to watch last night (the other being the 40th anniversary of 2001: A Space Odyssey).

Instead I ate pizza and drank wine :-)

[catbiscuit.livejournal.com]

Sounds like a terrible evening. ;)

The second part will show next week - on alternative medicine.

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

Ahh, now that one should be fun..

[jahbulon.livejournal.com]

I've always thought of things like Tarot, Astrology and I-Ching to be entirely to do with the brain functions of the operant, rather than any mystic or supernatural force. It's like looking through a prism - different facets are thrown into light or relief. Tarot is especially good because it deals with a set of symbols quite fundamental to the western mind, symbols that are easily interpreted subconciously, leading to a revelation or revelations sourced entirely from the self.

Like inkblots, ya?

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

I think so as well. It has therapeutic value for those who want to use it as such.

One of the interesting discoveries I found during the discussion tho' was a split in the middle ages between natural astrology and judicial astrology.

[jahbulon.livejournal.com]

Is there any point to me enquiring the difference?

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

I think so. Natural astrology, tied to physical objects, provided the foundations, imo, to astronomy as a science. Judicial astrology, relating to human affairs, initially tried to be as predictive, but I think has ended up interpretative.

[trayce.livejournal.com]

Been meaning to get back to you abt this weekend - seems we're unfortunately otherwise engaged and alas can't pop along, Rob is finalising the mastering on an album he's been recording for some time, and I have sadly been quite unwell in any event :( But perhaps some time soon we can attend!

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

You'll keep :-)

OK, so not the next one but perhaps the one after that...

We intend to have a few :-)

[trayce.livejournal.com]

Most certainly! :)

Hmmmm.

[imajica-lj.livejournal.com]

Short staffed eh?

Re: Hmmmm.

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

One on holidays/conference. One taking time in Lieu. One sick. One chased out of the country by immigration :-)

[txxxpxx.livejournal.com]

Your champagne breakfast sounds delightful. Very much in line with the High Tea events we do occassionally, only in the morning...with alcamahol. Mmmmm.

Looking forward to seeing you in a few weeks at Chez Pop. Menu is underway & not at all what I was expecting, but I think it should be nice all the same.

:)

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

Exactly. Shall we see you this Saturday morning?

[txxxpxx.livejournal.com]

Hmmm, thanks for the offer. Mr Pxx is currently studying so I need to see what his homework schedule is like. Can I get back to you in the morning?

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

Sure can. I just sent an email invite as well.

[strangedave.livejournal.com]

I found Plone has some annoying overheads and scalability issues for large deployments, but has some exceptional capabilities for developing your own stuff. They are the two CMSes I tend to prefer.

If basically what you want is to simply roll out fairly straightforward CMS functionality I'd go drupal, if you need to develop your own data types etc I'd go Plone.

[lardarsegreg.livejournal.com]

Are either of them installable on shared hosting though (which means no root access)?

[odubtaig.livejournal.com]

Most shared hosting doesn't support Plone because it relies on the Zope Application Server which is a hocking great overhead and tends to require its own physical server per deployment.

Drupal and Joomla only require PHP and MySQL (or, more recently, PostgreSQL) and are not only commonly available as a provider installable (through somthing like Fantastico) but can also often be dropped in as the raw scripts so long as you can give them a database username and password on the installation run. You should also be able to lock the site down to password protected access only until you've got everything installed.

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

What odubtaig said. Shard hosting sites almost invariably have Drupal available, but not Plone because of the dependency on Zope, rather than the standard LAMP stack....

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

That's a very succinct summary which concurs exactly with my research and experience on the matter.

One other issue with Plone (I don't know whether it's been fixed in more recent versions) I've read is conflicts between modules and the advantages with Drupals taxonomy system.

cf., http://www.hofmockel.org/content/drupal-vs-plone

[strangedave.livejournal.com]

That is a very nice and succinct summary of a several good things about drupal that I wasn't really aware of (having only looked briefly at development a long time ago).

It still seems Plone probably still has some things in its favour for quite heavyweight development, but it seems as if Drupal might have significant advantages for modest customisation.

Though I admit I've never been that big a PHP fan, so that still weighs against it somewhat.

[madame-mage.livejournal.com]

yah astrologers do draw from a particular format, not always from the sun sign, but other planets come into play. Its fun, but does have a set format in which to determine personality characteristics.. but as for predicting? I couldn't tell you..I really don't know. Fiction? okay! *grins*

as for the Tarot..ehhh, sure its the symbols if someone interpets this and nothing more. BUT there is more to this, I can't account for the strange taste sensations in my mouth, or the visual flash in my head suddenly detailing the aspects of a person's life. or the squirrelly goosebumps I get and suddenly blurt out something I couldn't possibly know..So I guess you could say I read from the gut. I NEVER EVER ask questions OR obtain information from the one seeking a read. I've done phone reads, email reads WITHOUT ever meeting the person.
I've also met people and shook their hand, before they started to tell me everything, I'd just tell them NOT to say anything because I HAVE to read this cold..too much information and the feelings I get are just murky as hell.

Seems I do pretty well. Even made a living from this. I've been reading cards since I was 14, well over 30 years. the deck HAS to have imagery from at least the 17th century, I just dial right in. The Boi (My son) doesn't read cards, but has an unflinching sixth sense about people which will serve him well in law enforcement. Its damned uncanny how he pegs people.

so for what its worth, I have fun with this and try to raise the bar on my talent every chance I get.

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

I think there is value for many people to adopt a supposedly esoteric skill as it may allow them the opportunity to engage in structured thinking which can easily have its own intuitive value.

I remember once, many years ago one afternoon in some rather lovely natural surroundings, when I was having "relationship issues" and "work issues" and so forth, I conducted a tarot card reading. As each card fell into place I marvelled at how astoundingly accurate the reading I could derive from the placement of the cards. It was incredible, everything fell into place!

It was only after completing the reading that I realised that the Empress had been accidently left in the box.

A strong guest of wind came in from nowhere and blew over me, and I laughed out loud that ultimately the Tarot was still keeping secrets from me.

A profoundly mystical experience? Total coincidence?

The atheistic empiricist in me prefers the latter interpretation, the pagan aesthete prefers the former. (And the normative agnostic will make no judgement at all).

This sort of thing happens to me a lot

[strangedave.livejournal.com]

I personally sometimes like to use the symbol system of astrology in a variety of ways (more or less for creative inspiration or purely symbolic purposes), in a way this is not predictive and only barely tied to the actual sky. I think its a useful symbol system to relate to tarot, kaballah, etc (I'm a Thoth deck fan), but the actual constellations are just one more correspondence.

[mia76.livejournal.com]

How do you do it?

you always seem to have these interesting topics on your LJ (some of which i'm too cautious to be talking about in my own LJ), you even talk about work, they're all public, you're not exactly anonymous online when you write what you write. and yet you never complain about getting bullied offline for expressing your thoughts. or do you get into trouble offline and not talk about it? i seriously envy you...

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

It's not always wine and roses unfortunately.

Some people do object a great deal to my opinions and I have discovered that they prefer to attack me "behind the scenes" as it were, or with smears, rather than being upfront and debate the issues themselves.

I suspect because they ultimately lack the arguments or the conviction in their own opinions.

After all, there is a difference between deeply ingrained prejudice and deeply considered conviction. I like to think that I've made the effort to reach my opinions through the latter avenue. It requires a hell of a lot of doubt in oneself, and a certain intellectual humility to investigate a subject knowing all the time that the things you believe to be true might be completely wrong.

But once you start down that path, not only will you gain a great deal of confidence and happiness. Yes, happiness; as Virgil said "Happy the man who has been able to learn the causes of things."

One other side effect is that the people who end up being in your inner circle or invite you into theirs will be of a similar ilk. It does takes time.

An elderly member of the Labor Party, after listening to what I had to say, nodded sagely and tapped me on the head and the back. "Watch your head, and watch your back". It was sound advice. Keep your sense of humility, and remember that there will be those will will try to stab you in the back.

[mia76.livejournal.com]

Now that's a load of useful advice... Especially the one about being prejudiced and having no convictions. I know better to doubt myself at all times, sometimes people keep attacking me I have no time to rethink it and get defensive because... I don't know, people can get very snarky at times and I'm too busy being hurt. And I'll keep the "watch your head and your back" in mind. =)

Thanks. Keep blogging anyway. I love to read from you. I mean I could've just abandoned by LJ account, but i still use it to read my friends. =)

[mia76.livejournal.com]

hope you don't mind me putting this in my memories. i need to read it over and over.

thanks =)

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

Glad to provide a memory :-)

[odubtaig.livejournal.com]

Drupal has a very large community (and consequently a lot of indirect support and add-ons), low requirements and has proven to be good enough for Warner Music (http://drupal.org/node/162162) and Greenpeace (http://importantprojects.com/archives/000084.php). The Greenpeace decision was apparently very close run but maybe the spreadsheet should give you an overview as to how they felt the systems met their criteria.

Then again, for my own personal stuff I'm more interested in Joomla! (although another visit to the doctors' is a bit more pressing right at this moment) so I'm more on the outside looking in where this is councerned.

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

I've found that other the past twelve-eighteen months Drupal has really gone from strength to strength at a really surprising rate. Indeed I've even said on one occasion (twice now) that the Content Management wars are effectively over, and Drupal won.

[telarus.livejournal.com]

Mmmm. Nicely lulztastic astrology thread. Well done.

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

Thank you for the kind words. Have any favourite moments you care to share?

[telarus.livejournal.com]

What I liked seeing the most was the peeling away of the esoteric onion skins to reveal the jewel at the center. Many practitioners of this and other arts don't seem to realize the base mechanisms that allow the desired effects to happen, and it was refreshing to see the conversation actually go in that direction (ala Pooperman and your comments setting up a tension which Nefri then had to work out internally).

Namaste

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

Actually.... yes. I was very pleased with how the discussion went as well. After all, it started out with a "astrology has no predictive value vs that's not 'real' astrology" and reached a point of agreement.

Even as a "full and frank discussion", it stands in stark opposition to a lot of other online discussions, doesn't it?

[telarus.livejournal.com]

Agreed. Usually the participants get bored with the topic and the discussion ends, or they get bored trying to pick the discussion out of the surrounding drama. It helped that all of the participants were well 'spoken' and pushed towards a resolution.

[fabianwhig.livejournal.com]

Just letting you know I am reading.

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

I hope I can provide words of interest.:-)