I have nothing to add to this.
Year: 2006
Categories
Foley’s follies
Foley’s Alleged Priest Molester Named
So… I suppose this makes it… okay now?
Just like a Republican to turn around when he’s being accused of some heinous act and suddenly point the finger at somebody else. Poor priest probably never even touched the bastard. Maybe.
I can hear his voice, lo, across the great digital expanse:
“Well, yeah, I guess I did sort of do the wrong thing, kind of. But he’s the one who really did it! He made me! If it wasn’t for him, I wouldn’t have done anything wrong at all, ever! It’s all his fault! I didn’t really do anything, really!”
Marijuana May Slow Alzheimer’s
THC, the key compound in marijuana… blocks the formation of brain-clogging Alzheimer‘s plaques better than current Alzheimer’s drugs.
Janda’s team found that THC blocks an enzyme called acetylcholinesterase, which speeds the formation of amyloid plaque in the brains of people with Alzheimer’s disease.
The Alzheimer’s drugs Aricept and Cognex work by blocking acetylcholinesterase. When tested at double the concentration of THC, Aricept blocked plaque formation only 22% as well as THC, and Cognex blocked plaque formation only 7% as well as THC.
I’m not a marijuana smoker, but I do believe that it is just plain stupid to maintain its currently illegal status. We smoke cigarettes, which do nothing for us but kill us in the end, or at least reduce our life span; we drink alcohol, which makes us stupid and often violent, impairs our reflexes, and causes cirrhosis of the liver. Cannabis has shown time and time again that it is a valuable plant which should absolutely be legalized. Having had a great grandfather who had Alzheimer’s, I’ve seen first-hand what a truly horrifying thing that disease is (note: not “can be,” it simply “is”). If there’s a better-than-with-current-drugs chance that I may be able to stave off the potential onslaught of a slow, mind-reducing, soul-killing, life-crushing disease like that, I may just start toking myself. Better yet, I may start eating the stuff. Trust me, there are very few things worse than dying over a period of several years from a disease which eventually completely eradicates all memory and personality from a human being’s life.
Screw glaucoma (which I may one day develop as well), I want to see more research on this!
Categories
color layout chart
This is the color chart I made for orchestrating and managing the background images/colors when using both a style switcher and a browser sniffer to determine which background, exactly, to display for each area of the page. You might even find it useful for your own layouts. The key is below.
Note that the header isn’t really used, and that the content and sidebars (sometimes), and the drop-downs, post meta-data, and my-own-comments boxes (always) use the same background CSS (once for each subtheme).
In all there are 6 × 3 = 18 different CSS inserts for what ended up being one of 4 types of user agents (1. browsers that cannot handle PNG transparency, 2. browsers that can and receive special message A, 3. browsers that can and receive special message B, and 4) all other user agents).
So, yeah, you can tell that this is becoming a bit of a logistical nightmare for me! Nevertheless, I’m pretty confident that once I’ve got the thing done, it’ll be easy to extend.
I’m trying to make the learning curve for anyone else as shallow as I can. Here’s how it breaks down for anyone wishing to add their own subtheme:
- Create CSS for layout and color
- Add style to
styles.inc - Add any needed sniffer-generated CSS to
sniffer.inc- This is really for generating either translucent PNG or GIF, depending on browser
- Obviously, this also entails creating both a PNG and GIF version for each translucent background
- Edit
header.phpso that cookies don’t retain old style names (there must be an easier way to do this; maybe someone will come along and improve this step so it’s automated; nevertheless, it currently only requires inserting the style names into two lines of existing code, towards the top of the page) - Upload and enjoy!
Not too terribly bad, I think, all things considered.
Key:
| (A) | header |
| E | navbar |
| B (+C+D) | content |
| (C+D) | sidebar |
| F+G+H+I | contrast |
| J | comment1 |
| K | comment2 (alternating) |
Categories
Your history.
May I just take a moment of your time to point out that:
Every white (and non-American Indian) person living in the United States today is a descendant of debatably illegal immigrants? And that, while we’re on the topic, the non-white immigrants to this country were nearly exclusively brought here in chains by whites?
So just exactly what god damn right does anyone have to say that any human being is illegal or that they are trespassers?
The New Colossus
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
-Emma Lazarus
Categories
Video: evolution
Dove video, Evolution: “No wonder our perception of beauty is distorted.”
Cheers to that! Above link is a video of a beautiful but freckled model being made up beyond recognition, then photomanipulated to look like… well, to look like the image that we hold up as the standard for beauty for women. The bar is a little on the high side, don’t we think? I absolutely applaud this campaign. The industry in which I currently find myself laboring within could certainly use a little dose of reality. Ok, a whole hell of a lot.
Every day, I see the signs of a scarred self-image in the clients with whom I do business, and I am unnerved by it by much more than a little bit.
Women! Stop doing this to yourselves! You already ARE beautiful! It is necessary to eat healthy; it is unnecessary to starve and try to uphold yourself to a standard which is literally impossible to meet. Who do you fool but yourselves? Who will love you less, who deserves your love in return?
ProTV Video, a Romanian private TV station, has a video of soldiers of the People’s Republic of China actually killing unarmed, harmless Tibetan refugees trekking through the snow on a pilgrimmage to see the Dalai Lama.
Who will stand up to this brutality? Who will make the PRC pay for their numerous despicable crimes against humanity?
YouTube has an amazing video of RuBot II – The Rubik’s cube solving robot. I so want one. My birthday’s coming up, but the creator’s website isn’t, so I have no idea if they have a Wishlist feature. [UPDATE] I was typing in the wrong address; it’s http://mechatrons.com/.
This is the new version of RuBot by Pete Redmond from Dublin, Ireland. It’s very different to the prototype but it has to be the coolest looking robot solver ever. There are cameras in the eyes of the head that scan the cube before the pneumatic arms solve it. It usually solves the Cube in a max of about 50 seconds (not including the scan) no matter how much it is mixed up.
The solving algorithm is taken care of by Herbert Kociemba’s Cube Explorer software and usually solves the cube in a maximum of about 20 moves. In this video, the cube wasn’t mixed up too hard so RuBot was able to find the optimum solution.
Thanks to all of those who think it is too good to be true. That is a real compliment!
Sometimes I look at all the wonderful and good things that mere people have done throughout the vast, untold millennia of history, and I feel such an upwelling of pride for my fellow human beings, and the accomplishments of this incredible civilization that we have created, that I believe I just might explode.
And sometimes I just want to stab my fucking eyes out. O, how cruelly naive I can be!
Also at work today, i received an e-mail that gave me an idea for a new micro-podcast (which i’ve christened a nanocast; get it?), and the following, unrelated, e-mail (spacing, spelling, and complete and total obliteration of conventional rules of syntax and grammar intentionally left intact for humiliation):
Two thing return . 29.99 and 14.99 just one return no . Just two things back to you . Still owe me 14.99 that is correct and miss one don’t say 14.99 I bet that you forget put on it . Thanks !
[sic]
(Translation: I also returned another item which I noticed you do not have listed on the return confirmation e-mail which I have received but failed to include for your reference. Can you provide further information on this issue? Is it possible that it could have somehow been lost?
)
Q: What was the customer’s name?
| first name | last name |
|---|---|
| Tonto | Nahasapeemapetilon |
| Tumak | Rogers |
| Sharon | , The Ape Man |
| Ayla | Bartokomous |
| Tuong | Souphanousinphone |
A: If you guessed “Sharon Rogers,” you’d be sadly correct. Not only that, but she was from Arizona.
Bonus: If you can guess to whom those other names belong, you are not only smarter than “Sharon Rogers,” you are indeed worthy of being enshrined as a Thinking Person.
NOTE: names and places have been changed to protect the imbecile’s privacy.
Categories
IE7 on the horizon?
Today at work, two co-workers told me that they had Windows Updates, which made mention of or reference to IE7, ready to install on their home PCs.
Anyone know what this is about?
Categories
Grooves
Here’s one thing that I actually miss about vinyl records: you could actually look at the record itself and know instantly* which tracks were the interludes and which were the opuses. When will files on a computer be able to do that?
* yes, I know you can see it on CD, but you have to look really hard and close and squint a lot. That’s no fun!
Categories
Know Where You Laid Each Part
One thing about PHP is that it can get pretty complicated. CSS can get complicated enough on its own, with one class referencing any element on the page, pointing here and there. But when you combine the two… you’ve got something pointing to something which points to something that’s pointing at a thing which references anything you choose. See how crazy this stuff can get?
What I’ve been doing the past couple of days is turning my CSS files into dynamic style sheets, renaming them with .php extensions and serving them up, after preprocessing, as CSS. Doing this allows me to use a thing called a sniffer which looks at the User Agent string browsers send when doing HTTP requests to servers, which allows me to see to what I’m delivering content, $Browser on $Platform (e.g., Safari browser on Mac OS X), so that I can send either PNG images or GIFs. The only real reason for doing this is just because PNGs can be semi-transparent, except that all but the very latest Internet Explorer beta have serious problems reading semi-transparency (called “alpha” transparency).
This is something of a specialty of mine. For those who know me online, my old site was one of the first wave of sites to use semi-transparent backgrounds.
Like I said, this is complicated stuff. So now I’ve got a sniffer going “if $browser equals ‘IE’ on Win, set $imgExt to ‘.gif’, otherwise set $imgExt to ‘.png'”. And then I’m making a PNG and a GIF for every background that I want to see through. Meanwhile, all three subthemes have got several places where they reference $imgFileXX.$imgExt for different backgrounds.
So I’m pointing, and I’m pointing, and I’m pointing, referencing this variable to get to that variable to get to an image file to put in an element. Up until this very moment, I was doing all this without a particularly coherent strategy. That changes. Now. Because I only just now realized that I had been rearranging things trying to come up with reasonable alternative GIF images to send to Infernal Exploiter versions less than 7, and I’ve turned around at noticed that I have left one hell of a wreck in my wake. I now have way too many unused background images (failed experiments), and have tossed the variables standing in for the filenames like so much salad, resulting in a chaotic mess for all the good browsers out there who actually know how to deal with PNG images!
Guess you’d have to be there.
So tomorrow, I’m going to sit and think and make a god damned chart, so I can have a set pattern across all subthemes (e.g., Image5 is for alternate comments, Image10 is for the post background).
As they say, hindsight is 20/20.
Oh, btw, I’ve named the first three subthemes “Leather” (brown and tan spaceship interior), “Saturn” (white, black, and dark teal; very clean and high-contrast), and “transmothra 3.0” (black, smoky indigo, and blue) (this last being a bit of an homage to the final version of my very nicely done old site, thankyouverymuch).
Now that I’ve said all that… it’s probably going to be another week before this thing is actually ready enough to be unveiled. It’ll be worth the wait, I promise.
Sigh.
Massive props to Karina Garcia, Political Chair of the Chicano Caucus at Columbia University, where she is a senior, for taking on that racist, slimey, pig-fucker Jim Gilchrist (founder of the anti-Mexican Minuteman Project, a vigilante group which patrols the US-Mexican border, taking the law into its own shotgun-carrying hands).
Recently, he was at Columbia University, where his lap dogs kicked a student, who was passing in front of the stage, in the face. The resulting chaos, in which students waved banners and protested peacefully, was labeled by his hatemonger group (and, go figure, by FOXNews) as a “riot” by “thugs”! You can see a clip of this happening at the link below. Hopefully someone will post this to YouTube soon…
Check out the RealPlayer video of Gilchrist on the progressive syndicated program “Democracy Now!” (128k stream, 256k stream) where he abruptly cuts off a barely-begun debate as soon as he is asked a question. What a coward.
Categories
Issues
Having CSS issues with IE (even IE7). Still trying to figure out why. So far, Big Urgent Wish works absolutely perfectly in Firefox and Opera, but in IE7 there’s irrational whitespace to the right (about the width of one of the sidebars), causing a horizontal scrollbar, while IE6 isn’t applying the opacity filter to the center div or footer (a width issue is my first guess on that one).
Once I get these issues ironed out, I’ll upload the thing and see what happens then.
[UPDATE] Just got back from Grog‘s (picking up CDs to review for the Chickenfish Speaks) and groceries. To make a crap day off crappier, on the way there, the “low tire pressure” light came on. Fearing an impending flat, I bolted, stopping at the gas station to pay 50 cents for three minutes of standing in the wind and rain, wishing I had a tire gauge and a flashlight. One tire was missing a stem cap, so that’s probably all it was, since all of the tires seemed reasonably inflated to me.Did anyone see Bush’s press conference today? Scary, creepy, and pathetic. I’ll blog more about that later.
Do you ever get to the last steps of the first major phase of a project, only to freeze up? Don’t get me wrong. This particular freeze will only last, at most, a couple of hours. I’ve just realized that I will be done enough to upload and try out my new WordPress theme, Big Urgent Wish, once I create a few insanely simple GIF backgrounds. The only thing left for this phase is to install plugins and create stylesheets for print and small screen formats. Which I don’t even actually need to do at all at this stage. But then comes the daunting task of backing everything up, taking a deep breath, and hitting “transfer” on my FTP client.
Maybe if I create a safety checklist it will help me to feel a little better.
But I wonder if i just don’t want the initial design phase to end? I do so love the process of creation. There’s nothing more thrilling or exhilarating than starting nearly from scratch and making something cool, whether it be a work of prose, visual art, music, or merely a little theme for your blog.
And I don’t care quite as much for the next processes: final testing, installation, distribution, etc. Imagine spending countless hours putting your heart and soul and everything you’ve learned into creating a work of visual art, and then having to drive it to the gallery and install it yourself, then standing around waiting for someone to awkwardly tell you that they liked or didn’t like it, finally having to make arrangements to send it home with someone else.*
*Nearly unrelated: Incidentally, I’ve never been able to let myself sell or give away any of my visual artworks, either – thank “Bob” for digital distribution channels for my other creative ventures like music and web design, thusly letting me keep the originals!
Categories
BAM!!!
Welcome back, The Future of Rock and Roll!
I really only have one thing left to do before I upload and activate the preview of the Big Urgent Wish WordPress theme. It’s a bit of a killer. It’s actually quite easy, but the logistics are making me swoon a bit just now. Mind you, once I have it all down, the installation will be a breeze for anyone familiar with the mind-bogglingly super-easy process of downloading and using a new WordPress theme. (The basic gist is this: download a theme, upload it to your Themes directory, and then activate it. That’s all there is.)
Here’s what I gotta do: because my theme uses semi-transparent PNG graphics for backgrounds in some places, any version of IE under 7 will not display them properly. Therefore, I have a browser sniffing PHP routine to determine what, exactly, the platform/browser are… and, hence, what the User Agent is capable of supporting (assuming UA string spoofing is not taking place).
Thus, by renaming *.css files as *.css.php (the “.css” bit is unnecessary but useful), and by parsing those files as CSS (after, of course, being processed as PHP), I can substitute GIF images instead for the crippled masses.
However, this entails a bit more typing and rearranging than I care to stomache today, so I will put it off until tomorrow (a day off from work).
Incidentally, the name “Big Urgent Wish” came to me one day as I was at my day (read: night) job (answering e-mails for a big-name online fashion retailer), extrapolating on some of the strangely translated phrases we sometimes get from non-English speaking customers abroad. This is not a phrase that was directly written out by anyone, it’s just something I thought up while trying to come up with something to top a goofy phrase I once read. As an aside, I embrace non-English speaking peoples… and, equally, the unusual and poetic, evocative turns of phrase that they can sometimes be capable of producing. Isn’t language even more wonderful from alternate angles?
Categories
Why I don’t write here very much
There’s a good reason why I don’t write here very often these days. Time! Why write the same thing three times for three wholly unique groups of readers? Same thing for MySpace.
I have my own feature-rich WordPress blog, on a server I pay for. Because I pay for it, I write there about ten or twenty times more than I do here.
Why am I complaining about blogging here, then? Simple. Really Simple. Syndication.
RSS.
Yes, it really does stand for “Really Simple Syndication”.
What does it mean? And why am I being so whiffish about it?
It means that anything I publish online at my site can be read anywhere in the world at any time and without YOU ever having to remember how to spell my name or even bookmarking the damn page. In fact, YOU can get all the content you want, from (these days) almost any regularly-updated source online (including newspapers, blogs, and whatever else all that stuff that’s not a newspaper or a blog is). Without even touching your browser.
Here’s what you do. Get a newsreader (here’s some for Windows – a better list here – a comparison here – online news aggregators like My Yahoo! here – a Firefox extension here (get Firefox)). I use Thunderbird (also a great e-mail app that beats Outlook with a goofy bat, and then calls it up and carefully explains what happened in either Esperanto, English, or both simultaneously).
Then, whenever you go to a website that you really like, look for the icon:
or 
or 
…or even just the word “Feed” or the acronyms “RSS” “XML” or the word “Atom”. Click on it to get the URL and paste it into whatever application you use. Some sites even let you add their feed to My Yahoo! or NewsGator or Bloglines or My MSN or NewsIsFree or Google or Feedster automagically, just by clicking on the link.
Lather, rinse, repeat. Gather your content from all over the web. Then, you can read whatever you want, all in one cozy, comfy place, without ever having to remember bothersome, pesky URLS (you don’t even have to remember to check, as new content is supplied continuously).
And if you really want to know what’s actually going on in jeremy-land…
[EDIT] P.S.- I hope nobody takes this post the wrong way; on the contrary, I read as much of your blogs as time will allow (actually, I read you more than I comment). But why should you have to check my page or click on links in notification e-mails just to read the crap that I write? I’m just trying to make things easier for everyone.
With so little time to get things done in this modern world, it’s just easier to write for all, rather than write five times for five different and unique segments.
Like I said, I write here very little, but I still read. That’s why I’m here!
Big Urgent Wish 3.0 is nearing readiness! The third subtheme has been completed.
Done:
- Organized CSS into sections
- Organized images into sections
- Where possible, used same image format for images of similar functions
- Conditional support (using
if (function_exists())orif (class_exists())loops) for several useful plugins, including Browser Sniff, CustomComments, Gravatars, Landing sites, Link Indication, Now Reading, Now Watching, Popularity Contest, Related Posts, Sociable, ThickBox Plugin, Ultimate Tag Warrior, Viper’s Plugins Used, WP Random Title, WP-EMail, WP-Print, iTunesSpy, muTunes - More cool
:hoverandbackground: fixedtricks
To do:
- Set CSS as PHP so can sniff browser/platform and deliver either semi-transparent PNG or GIF format backgrounds as User Agent supports
- Download, install and support additional plugins
- Test for bugs
- Figure out which additional files are needed outside the normal Themes folder
- Make sure I’m conforming to WordPress standards as much as possible!
- Upload to server, test more
- Fresh install on fresh, live WordPress test installation
- Fix any and all bugs!
- Write installation notes
- Create ZIP archive of necessary files
- Upload and tell folks!
Additionally, I’ve decided that it’ll probably launch with just three subthemes, due to time constraints; however, more subthemes will be available later.
Screenshots:
Categories
Brainlessness at Reuters
Joe Maguire lost his job at Reuters for writing a book about Ann Coulter. The book is called Brainless: The Lies and Lunacy of Ann Coulter.
Reuters confirmed that Mr. Maguire was granted conditional approval to write his book on Ms. Coulter… When asked what changed once the book was ready, a company statement pointed to Reuters’ principles of “integrity, independence and freedom from bias.â€
So what is all this talk about Liberal media? And before you point out that Mr. Maguire’s book may or may not be left of the dial, a book is one thing, but news is another thing entirely. By firing a guy for pointing out that Ann Coulter is – duh! – a mindless raving lunatic (and doing so in a perfectly legitimate venue), they are effectively supporting biased journalism of a far worse kind than that which could have ever conceivably come from Mr. Maguire himself.
And anyway, if pointing out that the Emperor* is wearing no clothes** makes you a traitor, then does that make unbiased journalists insurgents?
* 1 Coulter; or, 2 mainstream media in general
** 1 is a blathering idiot; or, 2 has no business presenting a blathering idiot’s foolish, inane lies as the truth