About

You have found the personal blog and web site of Nat Meysenburg. I am a technologist currently living in Baltimore and working in DC. In addition to tech I'm interested in bicycles, guitars and the odd bits of science and politics. I'm a member of support team of Mayfirst/ People Link, helping to keep the infrastructure running. By day, I work with the Open Technology Institute.

On this site you will find various writings on tech and software, as well as other things, as the mood strikes me.

Pleonasm?

Pleonasm, it sure is fun to say, but I suspect not part of your active vocabulary. What does it mean?

From The Collaborative International Dictionary of English v.0.48:

Pleonasm \Ple"o*nasm\,, n. [L. pleonasmus, Gr. ?, fr. ? to be more than enough, to abound, fr.?, neut. of ?, more, compar. of ? much. See {Full}, a., and cf. {Poly-}, {Plus}.] (Rhet.) Redundancy of language in speaking or writing; the use of more words than are necessary to express the idea; as, I saw it with my own eyes. [1913 Webster]

From WordNet (r) 3.0 (2006):

pleonasm n 1: using more words than necessary; "a tiny little child"

From The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (26 July 2010):

pleonasm

Redundancy of expression; tautology.

(1995-03-25)

From The Devil's Dictionary (1881-1906):

PLEONASM, n. An army of words escorting a corporal of thought.

Online Identities

The internet has a habit of proliferating "single ids for everything." I have several of those.You can find me around the Internet using these various names keys and identities.

OpenID:   https://id.mayfirst.org/nat

GnuPG

I use, and encourage the use of, the OpenPGP public web of trust and the Monkeysphere. Here are some public bits associated with my primary key.

User ID:   Nat Meysenburg <nat@stealthisemail.com>

Fingerprint:   0ADA 1A85 619A 5D0E 5A41 4F84 FFD9 13B7 CB2D 0500

See the public-keys page for more information, and the lazy copy/paste methods of getting my key, as well my SSH RSA public key.

IRC

irc.indymedia.org: nat
Freenode: gnat_x
oftc: natm

Software projects

Software that I have published with git, are all using the same User ID listed above that I use for GPG.

I've been working with Drupal for years, and have written or contributed to a few modules. There I am gnat.

The site

This site is run using the wonderful IkiWiki, which is developed by Joey Hess, with contributions from many others. IkiWiki is GPL v2 (or later).

The look is based on the blueview theme, which is distributed with IkiWiki. I customized a couple of templates a bit, and wrote the CSS myself. The bicycle drivetrain image is a derivative of work originally done by Keithonearth, found on the wikimedia commons page. The original image is licensed CC-BY-SA, as is my derivative.

The only other piece of non-standard code, is a bit of JavaScript that uses jQuery to pop code blocks out into overlays. Once I'm happier with how that works, I will work on turning it into an Ikiwiki plugin.

And of course none of this would be possible without Debian Linux, which is the OS on which all this was written, and also what is running on the host server.