Burnin’

Don Miguel Ruiz in his book The Four Agreements advises us to make impeccable use of The Word. He explains that impeccable actually means without sin. Therefore, when we humans form words, he asks that we do so without sin, for our own benefit and mankind’s. In particular, he points to gossip as an evil we can clearly do without.

I can not help but reflect on the world I inhabit, specifically during my workday, and how saturated it is with misuse of The Word. Ruiz claims that we perform black magic when we use hurtful words. He points out that we even do this to the one’s we love most. That we are conditioned to do so by our environment, and that only a concentrated effort can turn things around.

Once impeccable use of The Word becomes habitual, suggests Ruiz, positive life changes become the norm, not the exception. Given that I am a writer, a.k.a. “wordsmith,” Ruiz’s insight means a great deal to me. It’s not only my responsibility as a human being to form my words in a responsible manner, but as a writer it is also a professional obligation, and one I hope to someday soon master.

I just spent the past two days fully engaged on the task of importing RSS feeds into this site. RSS stands for Real Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary, depending on where one looks or whom one consults. This site has an RSS feed auto-generated by the pMachine blogware. See the sidebar, then click on XML to view Burnin’s rich site summary.

Fundamentally, RSS is a two way street. Other sites can absorb my content, and I can absorb theirs. See the left sidebar once more, then click on “Boing Boing” or “The Daily Report” under RSS Feeds. The resulting outputs are the result of much learning on the subject, at least for me, a non-geek fast on the way to geekdom.

The breakthrough came when I found Magpie RSS, a free RSS parser that works like a charm. Even then, I still spent several hours configuring the setup. The one thing missing from Magpie’s otherwise flawless manual is the step where one must create a new php file and place it in the Magpie directory for it all to work. They do provide the code, but it took some doing to know where and how to successfully place it.

Bottom line, I’m extremely pleased to clear this high hurdle and excited by what it means. Importing RSS adds more than headlines to a site, it adds value.

I heard the term “Radotude” the other day and it’s now embedded in my personal lexicon. It was actually pronounced “Raditude,” but I prefer the former option, as it conforms to the state’s actual spelling. Either way, it’s a fitting moniker for the “hipper than thou” mentality that permeates Colorado. Clearly, there are a number of factors that have led to this sad state, but I believe we can first thank the omnipresent gear-heads–athletic young men and women who sport this season’s hottest shades, polypro garments (to wick away the moisture…duh!), and of course the requisite “I’m about to go running thru the back county” sandals, a fashion oxymoron, if there ever was one.

A more commonly used term that goes well with this new linguistic discovery is “Rado dude!” As in, “Everything’s kinder in Rado, dude.” And there is some truth in that sentiment, as the mountains are bigger, the rivers do run wilder, and the kids tend to only smoke dank. Dank is the polar opposite of schwag (a brown, seed-riddled, import).

db.vg is a literary Web works, so it’s fitting that I finally managed to locate some blogging software that I could understand, load to my server, and use. Thanks Rick Ellis, lead developer at pMachine–u rock.