Walter Hutchens’ Blog

I just tried Google’s feature for getting a satellite view of a U.S. address. Amazing. Here is the University of Maryland:

I am researching how to segregate my posts on PRC securities regulation from my posts on, well, everything else.

I am aware that many people who might care, slightly, about what I have to say about PRC securities regulations do not care at all about what I have to say on the topic of Pocket PCs and other technology matters.

Not everybody loves technology. For those who do, there are many great IT industry sources. My blog will never become one. Sometimes it will chronicle my personal experiences with IT products, but I realize that is not of general interest.

I further realize that not everyone will be as mesmerized by pictures of my four-year-old as I am.

My blog started with a clear focus on PRC securities law. That focus became diluted over the last six months as I veered off into my technology binge. I’ve written a few posts about my technology adventures, but mostly I’ve ignored my blog because what I was mainly spending my time on wasn’t the blog’s principal focus.

My technology binge seems to be receding. After trying in succession a Tablet PC, Pocket PC and Sony U, I’ve now settled down with a pair of conventional notebook computers that I’m quite happy with. With the fever to try new gadgets broken, China returns to the forefront of my attention.

Two blog posts I wrote this week evidence that my attention is reattaching to China. One post is about proposed amendments to the PRC Securities Law. Another is about a CSRC notice released Friday that lays the groundwork for experiments with the complete liquidity of shares in some PRC listed companies.

But even as my attention returns to the main, original topic of my blog, I am still certain that I will, from time to time, write in my blog about things other than China’s stock markets. For almost twenty years, an enthusiasm for computing technology has been a part of my life. (My China obsession has endured even longer than my technology interest, although it has had its ups and downs like most long-term passions). I don’t want to exclude my technology interest from my blog. First of all, it is my blog. I am under no real obligation to please anyone other than myself, and I simply like gizmos. I like trying new hardware and software. If I try to keep things that I am intellectually passionate about out of my blog, the blog is likely to become stilted and artificial–or be, as it has been lately, neglected. I don’t expect that on a long-term basis my technology enthusiasm will dominate my mind, but when at intervals I plunge into it I will want to post things to my blog about what I’m working on.

Beside occasionally writing about my technology interest, I sometimes like using my blog as on-line personal journal. For one thing, paper journals don’t have pictures. Blogs do. Furthermore, not everything I write in my “personal” journals needs to be private. Some of it, I hope, merits the light of day. Thus I think I will want to keep occasionally posting some “personal” items to my blog.

Which brings me to the question: how can I keep both myself and my readers (both of them, including you, Mom) happy with my blog? How can I accommodate both the impulse to have a tightly-focused blog on PRC securities regulations and the impulse to blog promiscuously about other matters?

What I want to do is (1) keep a single blog for myself that holds everything that I write but (2) publish a separate blog that is a subset of that main one, a blog containing just my posts on PRC stock market regulation (and maybe other posts related to China). This approach should satisfy both me and my reader(s).

It seems a first step will be to create categories for my posts. After that’s done, I’ll have to engineer a way for the posts categorized as “PRC Securities Markets” to be sent to an additional blog maintained at some other domain. This could be very easy. Or, like many technical issues, it could be devilishly hard. But in any case it’s what I want to do.

So for those of you who have admonished me to stick to my core competency: yeah, I hear ya, and I’m working on it.

Recently Chinese officials have been signaling that they plan to take action soon with respect to the problem of different classification of shares in listed companies (股权分置问题 the guquan fenzhi wenti). This is also knows as the share overhang problem. This problem has been haunting China’s securities markets for years. It is a consequence of the decision made almost 15 years ago to allow development in ostensibly socialist China of something called securities markets but to make them not a tool for privatization but rather a tool for raising capital for the reform of some state-owned enterprises.

The basic issue is that most listed companies in China have the following capital structure: only about a third of a listed firm’s shares are actually listed and tradeable on a stock exchange; the remaining two-thirds are classified into illiquid categories such as “state-owned shares” (guoyou gu) or “legal person shares” (faren gu)–collectively “illiquid shares” (fei liutong gu).

This capital structure has allowed the PRC government to keep control of firms after IPOs. The buyers of shares in the primary issuance “market” essentially contribute capital to state-owned firms. Thereafter there is a secondary market for those shares, but that secondary market doesn’t really discipline of the listed firm because there’s no meaningful takeover market. Nor, historically, could the holders of listed shares, as a minority of all shares, out-vote the holders of unlisted shares. (The holders of unlisted shares are generally government entities, even with respect to legal person shares).

Besides these negative corporate governance implications, the overhang problem has also had purely economic implications for the trading that does go on in the secondary markets. The overhang has tended to make the markets skittish because investors fear that current P/Es which are predicated on the current “supply” of shares will be undermined (i.e., will collapse) if and when a meaningful portion of the illiquid shares become liquid. Whenever the CSRC has moved, or been rumored to move, towards solving the overhang problem the markets drop.

This has led to a kind of stasis. China’s securities markets are in decline while the overall economy surges. This suggests the markets need to be reformed, but any fundamental changes could harm those already invested in the status quo.

But that stasis may be ending. The CSRC has announced that it plans to start experimenting with making all shares liquid (quan liutong) in some firms. The full text of the CSRC’s Notice is here. A Q&A released by the CSRC about the Notice is here.

Perhaps the CSRC and its Party overlords have determined that now is the to do so because the market is simply already so low that they don’t have much to lose at this point.

Personally, I am for fundamental reform in PRC securities markets. Making more shares liquid will be a step in the right direction. But before concluding that this heralds an earthquake, we must remember a few things. First, the CSRC or some other PRC government entity still picks who gets to list. Now the government will also choose who becomes completely liquid. Excessive government direction of the markets is something else to solve, along with the overhang problem. Second, creating a platform for experimentation doesn’t mean we’ll get a lot of actual experiments. Rules allowing foreign-invested firms to list on domestic stock markets have been around a long time, but few actual “experiments” have been carried out.

An overhaul of the Securities Law was handed to the NPCSC for review this week, but that may be unrelated since the current law doesn’t address these share types anyway.

The PRC press is reporting that an amended version of the PRC Securities Law (证券法, Zhengquan fa) has been submitted to the National People’s Congress Standing Committee for review.

The English language China Daily reports on the proposed revision to the Securities Law here. Sample Chinese articles are here, here and here. The Chinese language portal Sina has created a site devoted to revision of the Security Law here.

Reports indicate the proposed revision is quite substantial.

Below I note some key changes that PRC press reports indicate are in the proposed law.

According to the China Daily, the law will make explicit that investors have private rights of action for insider trading or market manipulation cases:

[T]he amended law stipulates that companies or people involved in such fraudulent activities as insider trading or market rigging should shoulder compensation responsibilities.

“This is very significant because it allows stock investors to file lawsuit in courts and claim compensation,” said Xu.

The existing PRC securities law does not prohibit such private enforcement actions, but the current Supreme People’s Court rules on private securities litigation do restrict such cases to only those involving disclosure fraud, as I have written about elsewhere.

The amended law will command the creation of an investor protection fund (证券投资者保护基金, zhengquan touzizhe baohu jijin). The State Council is to make specific rules about the fund’s capitalization and operation.

It is not clear what scope of protection the fund will actually give investors. Insider trading? Bad disclosure? Economic downturns? The only thing specifically hinted at is protection from malfeasance by securities companies with respect to the capital investors have deposited with them.

There is an interesting “takings” issue here. According to these reports, the the CSRC has previously indicated that the interest on funds deposited for the purchase of new securities (申购冻结资金, shengou dongjie zijin) will be one source of capital for the investor protection fund. For a U.S. lawyer, there is an obvious irony in taking without compensation capital appreciation that would seem to belong to innocent investors in order to capitalize a fund for the protection of other investors who may be defrauded by others.

Zhou Zhengqing, a former head of the CSRC, vice head of the NPC Finance and economics Committee and head of the “leadership group” (lingdao xiaozu) for amending the securities law, “explained” in press reports that strengthening the protection of small investors has been a guiding principle (zhidao sixiang) for this revision.

Another issue in the revision is whether to retain the current PRC Security Law’s requirement that banking, trusts and insurance businesses be separated. Reports acknowledge that this has been a controversial point. The draft simply provides that the separations will be maintained “unless otherwise provided.” This compromise defers decision on the issue, but does leave the door open for possible further integration in the PRC financial sector.

Another reported aim of the law is to strengthen the oversight over securities companies. Reports acknowledge there have been problems with some of them ripping off clients, using client assets for themselves. While fighting such crimes makes sense as a policy matter, I am now sure why they need to revise the Securities Law to do so. The current legal regime prohibits such such acts; I don’t see how additional exhortations alone will curb abuses.

Consensus was reportedly reached that the current prohibition on SOEs trading shares will, if it is to be retained at all, best be placed in the rules on the management of state-owned assets. Thus the amended Securities Law will open the door for SOEs to play the market legally, unless other laws prevent it.

A similar approach will be taken with regard to the prohibition on bank capital entering the stock market. Citing Party directives that encourage legal capital to enter the markets, Zhou Zhengqing said such a prohibition need not be in the Securities Law itself but could be in the Commercial Banking Law or other laws.

Citing the State Council’s “9 Articles” endorsement of diversification of securities products, including derivatives, these press reports indicate the new law will allow the State Council to approve more elaborate kinds of securities. This will apparently allow room for the development of short selling, financial futures and index-based products.

Margin trading will also be allowed under the proposed new law, again subject to other regulations to be enacted.

Besides these highlights, these press reports, in typical PRC style, provide some precise but basically meaningless details about the draft law but do not make the draft public (even though the press reports brag that it has been widely circulated and discussed).

The draft was given to the NPCSC on April 24 and discussed by a “small group” on April 26. The draft has 229 articles including 29 wholly new articles and 95 amended ones. Fourteen articles in the current law have been proposed for deletion.

Xu Jian, the head of the the drafting group for the amended law and a vice head of the NPC Finance and Economics Committee’s research department, said the amendment aims to foresee future problems and “traps” for PRC securities markets.

The current PRC Securities Law was formally adopted in 1998 and came into force on July 1, 1999. The new law may be enacted by the end of 2005. Normally, the NPCSC will review it three times before final enactment.

Now that my technology binge is receding, I am enjoying reconnecting to some other enthusiasms, such as promiscuous reading. Right now one item I’m reading is Blog: Understanding the Information Revolution that’s Changing Your World by Hugh Hewitt.

I bought this book in Penn Station in New York the other weekend. I got it simply because I am interested in blogging and this book is about blogs (as the cover design screams). I then had no idea who Hugh Hewitt is. Turns out, he is a “center right” political commentator based in L.A.

Hewitt is witty and has a talent for turning a phrase. He also has a wide-ranging intellect. Although this book is about new media, it has a nice chapter on how the “new media” of printing helped enable the protestant reformation.

I enjoyed some of Hewitt’s inveighing on behalf of blogs, and I agree with his general point that blogs are important. He urges leaders in business, religion, old media, politics and other sectors to get a clue and take action to respond to “the most important communications development in the new century.”

Hewitt cites several examples of the influence of blogs, including:

1. the toppling of Dan Rather after bloggers demolished the credibility of memos allegedly revealing George Bush had been AWOL from some national guard duties;

2. the toppling of former US Senate majority leader Trent Lott after he went overboard praising Strom Thurmond;

3. the toppling of New York Times editor Howell Raines after the deceptions of reporter Jason Blair were revealed

4. the retreat John Kerry made from statements about being in Cambodia on a Christmas eve during the Vietnam war.

Hewitt’s enthusiasm for blogs seems wed to his disdain for main stream media, or “MSM” in Hewitt’s lexicon. Like many conservatives, Hewitt thinks MSM is left-leaning, out of touch and deservedly losing creditability and audience attention.

I’m not entirely aligned with Hewitt’s politics. My own views tend to be economically conservative (very pro-market), but not socially conservative. I am closer to a social libertarian. These tendencies may be clear from my commentary about PRC capital markets, and I have no desire to plunge headlong into the political realm. My problem with what Hewitt argues isn’t ideological. Rather, I think Hewitt’s view of blogging is flawed, or at least incomplete, because it lacks an appreciation for the power of institutions.

Blogging is indeed powerful, and blogs sometimes can correct, counter, influence and surpass the speed of MSM. But MSM retains some important advantages. No single blog can compete with MSM’s 1) scope or 2) sustainability. Both of these facts arise because blogs are driven by one or a few individuals, whereas MSM can be a huge team effort carried on in an institutional context. A blogger in Baghdad may give me info that CNN doesn’t, but that same blogger isn’t also covering Paris (or even multiple cities in Iraq). Maybe I could patch together a list of foreign blogger correspondents, but I think I’d want help with that–want something like an MSM editor to assemble and filter all the blogs for me.

And what happens to a blog when the blogger dies or gets sick? If the brand name of a blog outlives the blogger, is that blog not then something other than a blog? Isn’t it a masthead which people perceive to be informative or authoritative? Isn’t such a “blog,” in that eventuality, more like MSM?

I didn’t find one sentence in Hewitt’s book that addresses this issue about how blogs lack some powerful attributes of institutions. It seems to me you shouldn’t froth at the mouth about the world-changing power of blogs without acknowledging that the world is likely to go on longer than any single blogger.

My Sony U750P, a computer I bought in December with great hope and enthusiasm, has now been sold on eBay. I got $2,900 for the computer, CD/DVD drive, extended battery, leather case and assorted software. I spent about $4,000 on my Sony U: $2,000 for the computer, $400 for the DVD burner (Sony extortion), $400 for the battery (Sony extortion), $70 for the case and an astounding $700 for a Microsoft Developer’s Network subscription which allowed me to obtain the Tablet OS edition of Windows.

The auction got a good bit of attention. More than 1,000 visitors (or unique IP addresses) clicked on the eBay offering.

I feel some pangs of melancholy about the sale of the U. I’d like to keep it, but I just don’t use it enough. It doesn’t make financial sense to keep an expensive tool that I will use rarely, even an exquisite one like the U. I anticipated that after I installed the Tablet OS (a modification not endorsed by Microsoft or Sony) I’d use the U for heavy-duty text input . I further imagined that the U’s ultra-portability, combined with the extraordinary handwriting recognition available through the Tablet OS, would help me write. Writing more for publication is an imperative for me to get tenure in my current job as a research university professor. I love my job, so I easily rationalized spending a lot for a tool that could help me secure a lifetime “iron rice bowl.”

But after thorough experimentation (the U was my main computer for December and January), I have concluded that I am more productive with a keyboard. I have also determined that I want my computer to have all its parts in one box, not available as peripherals that I have to remember to pack.

After the U, I bought a “normal” computer, a Toshiba M45-S351. Aside from a few special attributes, it’s quite conventional.

I was ready for a “normal” laptop. Since October 2004 I have bought, in succession, an HP iPAQ 4700 Pocket PC, a slate Tablet PC in the form of an NEC Versa LitePad, and then the tiny Sony U. I had great hopes for each device, imagining it could unleash surges of writing. Each product is a marvel in some respects, but none did exactly what I wanted. I became disillusioned, to some degree, with each device.

The Toshiba is a conventional clamshell design, similar to many “commodity” business laptops. Its technical specs are respectable but not extraordinary (1.73 GHz Pentium M 740, 100 GB HD, 1 GB of RAM). However, after the succession of small devices, the Toshiba feels luxurious. The keyboard is big and comfortable. A DVD player/burner is built-in. I adore its screen. Dubbed by Toshiba an “X-brite” screen, it has lush colors and deep, glossy blacks. The Toshiba also has a built-in SD card reader, which makes it easy for me to move images from my camera to the hard drive (and then on to the web or to others through email).

I now use the Toshiba as my primary home computer. It provides nearly everything I want. Except for one function: portability. The Toshiba is a bit too heavy and its battery life is too short. For these reasons it is not the perfect mobile writing tool. I want something I can walk around with, stopping in cafes and pulling it out of a “day pack” when a moment to write presents itself.

That’s what led me to buy a Sony Vaio T250P. The T weighs just 3.04 pounds (compared to the Toshiba’s 6.2), and its battery life is a good six hours (at least double what I got with the M45).

The T series is not as small as the U series, but the T has a built-in keyboard and CD/DVD drive (both external on the U).

Much as I liked the U and the capabilities of the Tablet OS, trading the U in for the T is the best move for me now, given the imperative that I write more for publication.

The combination of the Toshiba M45 and the Sony T suits me. I have one device optimized for portability, another that is comfortable when I’m on my own couch at home. Having both is the best way to cope with the trade-offs between screen size, weight, portability and battery life.

Together the two computers actually cost about what I invested in the diminutive Sony U. And, sadly, the cost of the U is only a part of what I’ve spent in the last six months in the search of the optimal tool. My wife points out that either my Toshiba or Sony T is a “$10,000 notebook” if we calculate all that I’ve spent during this personal technology binge. She notes I’ve spent hundreds of dollars on computer magazines alone. That’s all true, and I could have written a book with the amount of time I’ve blown on this technology binge. But overall I enjoyed the process. I learned a lot. And, importantly, I’ve sated my curiosity. There’s no lingering itch to buy some new gadget, no sense that there is some product out there that will transform my writing life. I have regained a sense of proportion, and I sense that selling the U will close this recent, intense flare-up of my technology fetish.

Like my interest in China, my interest in computer technology has persisted for most of my adult life. No doubt it will flare up again; I’ll be possessed by lust for some new gadget before too long. But, for now, the time has come to shift the balance of my attention. It’s time to use the very good tools I now have to get some other work done.

Tonight I participated in a discussion organized by the Maryland China Business Council on Investing in Chinese Equities. It was held near Dupont Circle in the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS).

The other panelists were Andrew C. Carpenter, CEO, Sotto Inc. & Editor, Asia Business & Investing and Joseph P. Duggan a financial advisor with Legg Mason Wood Walker.

After spending a lot of time and money experimenting with the “ultra-portable” Sony Vaio U750, I have reluctantly decided to sell it. It’s a great machine, but I’ve concluded that although I love the portability of the U series and find the Tablet PC platform wonderful in many respects, for me (1) I need a keyboard to really get into a writing trance and input a lot of text quickly and (2) I want that keyboard to be attached to the computer, not some peripheral that I have to remember to pack. On this basis, I’ve now got a Toshiba M45-351 as my primary home computer and a Sony Vaio T250P as my “travel” laptop. Thus I just don’t use the U enough to financially justify keeping it. It’s now listed on eBay. The auction is here.

A conference titled New Scholarship on Chinese Law: A Celebration in Honor of Stanley Lubman was held at Columbia University’s School of Law on Friday. Several leading PRC legal scholars were there, along with a few Europeans and most everyone in the U.S. Chinese legal studies field.

Walter Hutchens with He Weifang at Columbia Conference on PRC Legal Reform.

Jerome Cohen, one of the pioneers of the field, speaking at dinner.

Jim Feinerman, William Alford, Jerry Cohen, Pitman Potter and Randy Peerenboom with others on a panel. Later in the afternoon I was on a panel with Nico Howson, Don Clarke and Mike Dowdle.

It was an exciting day. I was fortunate and honored to participate. Ben Liebman was the main architect of the conference.

My tenth eBay auction just ended. The winning bid was $520 for my HP iPAQ 4700 and some accessories, specifically a Bluetooth (wireless) fold-able keyboard and a couple of memory cards.

I spent more than $900 to acquire these items (all within the prior 6 months), so while I’m happy to get the $520, it represents a steep hit for “depreciation.”

The next item I’ll probably sell is my Pocket PC phone. I bought it in Hong Kong in January but have determined I’d rather have a Palm Treo 650.

The BBC reports Man gets nine years for spamming. The sentencing court is a Virginia state court, applying a state law.

A photo of the convicted is here.

In about a month I’ve sold 9 items on eBay, grossing $3,308.

After the auction for my iPAQ ended, I offered a couple of accessories to the winning bidder. She took them at my asking price of another $120 (she got the extended battery and Sprint wireless data card). With that follow-on sale, I’ve grossed $3,428 in 5 weeks. After paying eBay, PayPal and the shipping companies I’ve probably recovered about $3,000.

I have another auction going on now. It is for an iPAQ just like the one I already sold. I owned two because I bought a replacement one while my original one was being repaired (sick, I realize). I had to send the original one back to HP three times, but finally they fixed it properly, and I sold it on eBay already. Now I am offering the other one with a Stowaway BlueTooth keyboard, a 1 Gig CF card and a 256 MB SD card. The bidding is up to $430 now. I hope it will go for $500 or more. I set $600 as the Buy-it-Now price.

I paid about $900 for the package–$650 for the iPAQ, $150 for the keyboard, $100 or so for the CF card (which I bought it in China). I can’t remember how much I paid for the SD card–it may have come with my camera.

I will lose money on this auction ($900 minus the $500-600 I expect to recover). That’s been true for each of my nine auctions, at least in a net sense. I paid more for every item than I sold it for (except the Tablet PC, which sold for a fuzz more than I paid for it, before listing and shipping costs).

But I am happy running this money-losing business. Before eBay my fetish for new technology was a complete black hole of costs. The Newton MessagePad for which I paid about $1,000 in 1997 is now gathering dust in a drawer. Before eBay all my gizmos ended up in storage like that.

But now I have other options. There is a secondary market. I can put stuff on eBay and recover something, often a significant amount. That reduces the cost of my technology addiciton. It may also let me feed my addiction with less inhibition, since I won’t be gambling with the entire cost of something–only that portion which I cannot recover in an eBay sale.

Once this iPAQ sale is complete I will have recovered $4,000 through eBay. That substantially mitigates the cost of the technology buying binge I plunged into back in October 2004.

I bought five computers in six months–an NEC Tablet PC, an HP iPAQ 4705 PocketPC (2, actually, plus later a phone that is a PocketPC), a Sony U750, the Toshiba M45-S351, and finally a Sony T250P.

I’ve sold the Tablet PC and Pocket PCs through eBay, along with some older stuff–two Sony laptops, a Nikon igital camera, a Palm organizer and the reamains of one other digital camera. Selling those items helps a lot with cash flow. I am a huge fan of eBay.

Once my Sony U is repaired I’ll sell that, too. With accessories it should go for about $3,000. That will boost my total gross recovery to $7,000–not bad for a part-time job which I will have held for only a couple of months.

I am sitting in a Silver Diner in Arlington, Virginia, piggybacking on the WI-FI access of someone who didn’t put any protection on his or her wireless router.

Lots of people don’t even change their default SSID. Nearly everywhere you can find a “linksys” connection in the air.

But even among those who name their network, it seems at least half don’t turn on password protection. I am thus able to rely on the kindness of strangers to check email and post a note to my WordPress blog.

I came to Arlington tonight to stop by a party at organized by Paul Saulski, a guy whom I have known since we were in grad. school together at Washington University in St. Louis. We were in the same class, both doing a joint-degree in law and East Asian Studies. Paul is now a lawyer with the SEC.

Paul just moved back from living in Japan for a couple of years, and a lot of people at the party were Japanese. Many of them had gone to the Tidal Basin earlier in the day to view the cherry blossoms. I’ve been for each of the last two years but wanted to avoid the crowds today, plus I’ve got to work on a paper for the conference I am supposed to attend on Friday.

One of the WordPress templates I ran across is the following one. I think it’s great, though perhaps too over-the-top for me. One nice thing about WordPress is that it lets you change templates very easily. It takes just a few clicks. So you could have a collection of templates and change them as you might change clothes, as your moods and circumstnaces vary.

Clicking on the thumbnail brings up a big version. I captured it with SnagIt, then exported it as a web page using Picasa, then put a simple tag in this post that tells the WP Picasa Gallery plug-in to insert the thumbnail and link it to the full-size version. The dimensions reflect the “wide-angle” shape of the screen on my Sony T, the little computer I’m using now.

I have read about a WordPress plug-in that lets visitors to a site change templates themselves. I may try that.

I’d like to develop my own template, too.

Spring is gradually coming to the Washington, D.C. area. Here are some pictures I’ve taken over the last few days.

I took these pictures with the Pentax 5si camera I got in December. I like that camera very much. Because it is tiny, I find that I keep it with me more often (and consequently take a lot more pictures).

I put these photos into this blog entry with WP Picasa Gallery, a plug-in for WordPress, the blogging software I’m now test driving.

It seems the combination of WordPress, SmrtFTP and this plug-in gives me a satisfactory way to post images from Picasa to my WordPress blog.

I am still experimenting with WordPress.

Friday I went into DC and had lunch with Irving Jones. He now works for the department of Health and Human Services in a division that helps with refugee resettlement. He’s a really, really nice guy. We got to know each other 15 years ago when we were both undergraduates at Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama.

Ok, the basic install of WordPress was bereft of tempates, but there are many WP templates out there. I found a good list here, a list generated through a competition to find somebody’s visions of the “best” WP themes.

Getting WordPress installed was more of a headache than I expected (or really should have spent time suffering with right now), but finally WordPress is up and running on professorhutchens.net, and I am test driving it.

Here are some very initial impressions.

I like:

I don’t like:

Edit image (reduce its size)

Upload it to server (via FTP)

Add HTML to post to link to image

Plug-ins may solve all these problems. I’ll have to check.

Since July 2003 I’ve been keeping–at times fitfully, at times obsessively–a blog.

I started with Blogger, then tried TypePad. Lately I’ve been restless. So now I am trying WordPress.

Overall, I really enjoyed Blogger.

The main reason I recently began experiementing with TypePad was that I stumbled into a problem with Blogger. When I tried to use it to keep my personal (as opposed to public) site, I found that one of the features I like best about Blogger wouldn’t work. Blogger is nicely integrated with the photo software Picasa (both Blogger and Picasa are Google products). A button in Picasa automates publishing a picture to a blog maintained with Blogger. I love that. Previously I had to go through several steps to get a picture into my blog. I had to edit it down to the right size, upload it to the server and put the right HTLM tags into my post in Blogger. Through something called the BloggerBot in Hello, Picasa automated all that.

I rarely put pictures in my public blog, but I thought I’d like to try keeping a private blog (an online version of my journal) and in it include images posted with that convenient Picasa button. But it didn’t work out. I registered professorhutchens.net, added password protection to the site and set Blogger to post to that domain. Everything seemed to be working until I tried posting a photo. Picasa couldn’t handle the password protection (which I need for a personal site, obviously). The pictures didn’t show up.

I got frustrated decided to explore TypePad. Creating a password-protected blog with TypePad was easy, and TypePad has an insert picture feature that is better than Blogger standing alone but not as good as the Picasa-Blogger combination. I have made some entires in a private journal using TypePad, but I am frustarted by a few things. First, I’d like to host my personal blog on my personal site, not on TypePad’s. Second the insert picture feature in TypePad requires me to hunt around my harddrive to find the photo, and it doesn’t include the Picasa edits. Plus, you can choose to align the pictutre left or right, but not center it. That annoys me.

So my search for a better blogging tool continues. Surfing around I came across WordPress. Lately I’ve been paying more and more attention to open-source software. I have recently installed OpenOffice. And I use SmartFTP. I have even been thinking about tring Linux–I bought a CD and book already. So I thought I’d give WordPress a try.

I had some trouble installing it. I had to upgrade my Yahoo hosting service from the “starter” package to the “standard” package ($12 to $20 per month). In the wp-config.php script, there is a value that WordPress says you are “99% likely” not to have to change. Well, I did have to change it. There were a couple of ambiguities in the instructions, too. But once it all was in place, in a snap I was brought to this page. Hence this, my first entry with WordPress.

Today the Chronicle of Higher Education reports here (subscription required) that Harvard University has elected to divest from PetroChina. The motivation reportedly concerns relation between PetroChina’s parent and the Sudanese government; human rights or environmental issues within China were not the driving force behind the decision.