I switched my hosting today from BlueHost over to WestHost. So my hosting has apparently changed color and moved out west. To Arizona it would appear. I opted for the "big 10" package which, for 10 dollars a month for 12 months, gives me 150 GB of storage and 1000 GB of transfer. I will use paltry fractions of this capacity.

The process was pretty painless, thanks in a large part to the excellent import/export database tools in phpMyAdmin. WestHost offers VPS, Virtual Private Server, which allows you to have a virtual machine on a shared host. Because of this, they give you GCC (a popular source code compiler, for the non-programmers) and you can do whatever you want from there. I installed Ruby and Rails from scratch (because I wanted Rails 2.1 for no other reason than it's the most current version), then proceeded to configure my rails app to be the document root via a virtual host, before configuring FastCGI.

Honestly, I didn't really expect any of this information to be of particular interest to anyone. I more wanted to post as a marker for me when I look back, so I can say "Oh, this is where I changed hosts".

My old hosting was supposed to go offline at Midnight, so we're past the point of no return, baby!

I watched Barack Obama become the 44th President of the United States last night.

And I must admit, I cried.

It was to be expected, seeing as I cried during the Democratic National Convention (multiple times) and cried after casting my vote on the walk home. I feel so inspired by this man! I am an optimist; I believe that people are inherently good and want to do the right thing. The fact that we might finally be getting away from all of the fear and division of the past 8 years is exciting. The fact that we might be able to help the millions of people around America who are having a difficult time economically or with their health care is uplifting. And the fact that we have a new leader who truly believes in himself and more importantly in us is enough to, quite frankly, make me cry.

Besides, who wouldn't be taken in by that puppy comment. I mean come'on!

The next two things I want to blog about both come directly from things I saw on Facebook.

First, everyone knows that Sarah Palin has mediocre intellect and extremely poor public speaking skills. These facts are made more apparent by her statement that media criticism of her amounts to a violation of her First Amendment rights. We are left to wonder, has she read the First Amendment. It starts with "Congress shall make no law..." (I didn't look it up, but will be mighty embarrassed if I was wrong) and goes on to list a whole bunch of things Congress can't make laws about, like freedom of speech, the press, religion and assembly. I would reallly hope that intellectually mature and especially educated individuals are past the point of thinking that freedom of speech means the right to say whatever one wants whenever and wherever one wants. The governor clearly doesn't know any better. In fact, I would offer that the kind of media criticism she has come under for her 'Obama?=?Terrorist' comments is EXACTLY the discussion of public political figures that the First Amendment was put in place to engender.

Also, there seems to be a problem at Halloween parties this year.

Wired is telling me to ditch my blog. Their argument is that Facebook and Flickr make it easier to do what I'm doing with my blog anyways. Now, I was never on the cutting edge of blogging. I didn't even have my livejournal until my junior year of college, which was 2002...about the middle of the bell curve for blogging 'taking off' and ancient history if I was really trying to be emo about things.

Now I'm not even the top result for "travis briggs" in Google, a statistic I prided myself on forever.

And why should I bother watching the World Series? I love watching the Red Sox, but I loathe watching other teams play. Especially when one of the teams is from the National League, a league that I spend the entire regular season ignoring. I'm simply not familiar with the players....not to mention that Fox coverage of baseball is only slightly above TBS's. Nothing beats the local broadcasters for local coverage of a baseball game.

But I'm probably just bitter because I don't have any friends to go to a bar and watch the game with...

There was a day in August, around the time of the 2008 Democratic National Convention, when I was approached by a man while we were both riding Boston's blue line. At the moment he approached me, I had been casually yet enthusiastically discussing some of the things about the convention- and, of course, Barack Obama's candidacy- that had me particularly excited.

The man had a worn face, and was wearing work clothes - a dirty hoody and scuffed jeans. It was clear he was a hard working man, presumably a member of the 'working class' that I keep hearing about. He approached me courteously yet assertively and asked simply "Do you think Obama can win it?"

I was secretly delighted to have a soapbox thus thrust underneath me. I first answered a resounding "YES!" to the man's leading question. The follow-up was the expected: "Why?" For that answer, I recall briefly and enthusiastically talking about minimum wage and health care, and how Barack Obama not only supports raising the levels of both, but has specific, well thought-out plans for doing so.

I hurriedly left the train at my stop, shaking the man's hand, surrounded by the grunts of approval and some disapproval of the patrons around me. It was an altogether electrifying moment, and it made me think "Yes, I could be a part of politics" and "Yes, I could do canvassing".

Since then I've lost a lot of enthusiasm for the campaign. It seems the television ads and the debates have boiled the Obama campaign, for me, down to a bunch of 'talking points'. And although I can recite many of them, I don't feel passionate about any of them. Obama is still my candidate, and I'm still going to vote for him if at all possible. But I'm not considering joining the Democratic party as much as I was a couple months ago. <sad_face/>