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I just finished reading Paul Fussell’s The Boy’s Crusade: The American Infantry in Northwestern Europe, 1944-1945. Paul Fussell was an American who served in WW2 before coming back and becoming an author and university professor. He passed away last month. I was first exposed to his writings through the article The Real War that appeared in The Atlantic.

Crusades breaks from the convention set by other history books, whereby events are explained on a macroscopic level and the participants reduced to movements and statistics. This title instead looks at specific chapters of the Second World War from the perspective the infantrymen who experienced its consequences first hand. As Fussell notes, romanticism and such notions as that of a “good war” quickly break down when it is seen for oneself.

Fussell’s work brings balance to the clean black-and-white characterizations of WW2 demonstrated in Hollywood films. He talks of the Allied bombing of villages as a diversion, bombers knocking out entire divisions of their own ground forces, platoon leaders who sent the newest replacements ahead so they could die instead of their longer-serving comrades, intestines littering trees like Christmas decorations, etc. It would be a disservice to characterize the knowledge of these darker chapters as being anti-American or whatnot. These aren’t fictitious happenings, they are a real component of war. Bias does not emanate from learning more, but of ignoring that knowledge when it presents itself.

We filter, to this day, reports from war zones. So complete is our censorship that it distorts our perceptions of war itself, a fact not lost on John Steinbeck when he wrote of his reporting days “I don’t mean that the correspondents were liars. . . . It is in the things not mentioned that the untruth lies.” When the negative aspects do filter through, they are mistaken for an aberration. It is this kind of one-sidedness that allows for the young to seek out war to prove themselves, and the old to be so willing to grant them that wish.

This is a short book, and it made me want to read another of Fussell’s work, Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War.

I’ve just finished making the digital edition of Diets Suck.

It’s released in the ePUB format, which is an open standard that works on virtually every eBook reader out there, with the notable exception of Amazon’s Kindle. I can only assume that there was some strategic motivations for the omission from the popular eReader.

It took me about a week or so to put the book’s digital edition together using the excellent open-source Sigil and Calibre. The most time consuming part was redoing the formatting from scratch. While I could copy and paste text, all the special little things like how the paragraphs set on a page, how the tables look, how the images fit – all had to be defined anew. Fortunately, ePUB is essentially a zipped up website, so it wasn’t all that hard for me to get things to look the way I wanted. I’ve included some screenshots of what the editing process looked like below.

There were a few quirks I couldn’t get around. Centering tables, for instance. On some devices, the tables were centered. On others such as my last-generation Sony eReader, they were aligned to the left-hand side of the page. Searching online revealed that this was a sore point with many of these readers.

I’ve updated the website as to include links to both the paperback and digital versions. I’ve set the price point to $3.99. The paperback copy, by comparison, is sold for $9.99.

Does this website feel snappier?

I just finished migrating all of my web hosting away from GoDaddy and onto HostGator. For those of you who didn’t understand what that last sentence meant:  this webpage you’re reading needs to be stored on a computer somewhere, so that you can then come along and see it. For the last eight years or so, my websites have been living on machines owned by this company called GoDaddy. This weekend, I moved everything over to a different company.

I have much good to say about GoDaddy. I’ve had no perceptible downtime even after being slashdotted/dugg/reddited, they never lost my data, I had positive experiences dealing with their customer service, and they were cheap.

On the negative side, dealing with their website to manage my account meant being assaulted with endless ads. They spared no opportunity to present you with yet another way to give them your money. The interface to manage my web hosting was mediocre. Their logs were pretty poor, unless you paid them more. Most importantly, it was slow at rendering the pages for this blog.

I looked online, and the consensus seemed to be that HostGator or BlueHost was the way to go. I signed up with HostGator, and started backing up all my databases and content to make the jump. My computer downloaded approximately 13,000 files in the process. I uploaded 7,000 back to HostGator, doing some spring cleaning in the process. Then this morning, I completed the switch by editing the name servers with my registrar.

I’ve stored the original website and all its 13,000 files in a special spot, because it’s become a bit of a time capsule. I’ve found traces of my life from my teenage years onwards; files that were deleted from my computers eons ago but lived on in a server in cyberspace.

It’s been awesome to stumble on this stuff.

Anywho, so far so good with HostGator. Managing my website with them is very straight forward and responsive. I don’t have to do a bunch of google searches to figure out how to carry out basic tasks, such as figuring out name servers. There are logs galore. Most importantly, I’ve noticed a significant decrease in the time it takes for my web pages to load.

In other news, I’ve used this opportunity to consolidate my registrars (another important cog in making websites work) so that one company manages my .ca’s and .com’s.  I’ve also terminated a number of websites I had operated, such as the parody (Get) Down With Jesus, pictured above. Finally, I locked down the different components to make it harder to compromise.