August 2008 archives
Archive
August 20, 2008 by Cyrus Patell
Moby-Dick and Calvinism
T. Walter Herbert, Jr. begins his marvelously insightful study Moby-Dick and Calvinism (1977) with an apologia for producing yet another book about Herman Melville: It has been true for some time that by writing one reasonably intelligible book on Melville a man could secure a better living in America than Melville managed to win by [...]Archive
August 12, 2008 by Cyrus Patell
Moby-Dick and Me
When I was in graduate school, my advisor, Sacvan Bercovitch, used to say proudly that he counted among his students one from the oldest religion in the world (Zoroastrianism) and one from the newest (Mormonism) . Full disclosure: my father is a Parsi, and I had a navjote ceremony when I was in the third [...]Archive
August 10, 2008 by Cyrus Patell
The Fate of Black Politics
In my post on Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.’s critique of multiculturalism, The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society, I wondered what Schlesinger would have thought about the meaning of Barack’s candidacy. Is it possible, I asked, that the election of Barack would have a similar effect on the self-esteem of Africans Americans that the [...]Archive
August 10, 2008 by Cyrus Patell
Mystery Solved
With the help of Bill over at the LivingDot helpdesk, I have managed to fix the problem with the feed from ahistoryofnewyork.com. Bill reported that when he tried to access the feed, he received an error message: “An invalid character was found in text content.” At first, I didn’t know how to reproduce the error, [...]Archive
August 9, 2008 by Cyrus Patell
Movable Type Mystery
For reasons that remain mysterious, the listing of recent posts from “Patell and Waterman’s History of New York” (ahistoryofnewyork.com) disappeared from my sidebar after I republished some pages last night. The listing was created using the plugin Feeds.App Lite, which comes with installations of Movable Type 4. I’d been thinking of upgrading to a paid [...]Archive
August 8, 2008 by Cyrus Patell
Lego Computer DIY
Here is a project that brings together two of my hobbies: building computers and assembling Lego creations. Well, Lego assembly is really my sons’ interest, but I seem to spend an awful lot of time doing it with my older son and for my younger son. I found the project via Engadget.com. It’s a mini-ITX [...]Archive
August 5, 2008 by Cyrus Patell
Verizon DSL and Actiontec Modem/Router
My father has Verizon DSL service and an Actiontec GT704-WGV DSL Wireless Gateway, a modem/router customized for Verizon. The setup recently gave him some trouble. Read on if you have a similar setup and want to know how the problems were solved.Archive
August 3, 2008 by Cyrus Patell
