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wordpress theme update

if you WordPress, which you probably don’t, and you’re looking to try out a new theme that’s a little bit different (but really, when you get down to it – or even if you don’t, looks like it was designed in 1999 by an inept retard with a brand new AOL account), which you probably aren’t (looking for a new theme, that is), then you might possibly be interested (though you probably still aren’t)…

otherwise, move along. nothing interesting to see here.

latest version of Big Urgent Wish. a little tweaked: post metadata cleaned up (that section where the comments link is, or other data related to the post), related posts moved to sidebar, bizarre phrases moved to header, lots of other small improvements made. index page’s code theoretically validates, at least last i checked (XHTML 1.0 strict + CSS level 3 spec), though other pages certainly need improving, especially with regard to input tags.

please, if you see something unpleasant (i already know about the terrible quality of the content itself), let me know. thanks!

i hope to have a public version soon, when i get time to validate other pages and sterilize it of my terrible stink.

some notes:

  1. no, i’m too tired to link to anything else just now. just take my word for everything that i tell you. i am a liar. < -- (a lie?)
  2. and yes, i realize that i don’t have fans who follow every move i make, or even real-life friends who read my stupid blog. i’m just sayin’ that it’s updated, should anyone want to see it. this is merely an update; the most interesting possible thing i could think of to tell you about how i’ve been spending my rapidly-shrinking free time.
  3. sorry if i seem a little sour, but it’s slowly sinking in that i’ve spent literally countless hours doing something entirely useless, without any value to anyone whatsoever, for no reason at all. if i should go down in history as anything, it will be as the most miserable fool with the most ridiculously unmerited perseverance. my entry will read: “wasted untold hundreds of weeks foolishly believing that his work was ever going to matter to anyone other than himself.” when this is done, i will bow my head finally, and let the soul drain from my body forever, submitting myself to mindless corporate zombie slavedom until the end of my days, which will hopefully come sooner rather than later, should a nonexistent god suddenly decide to deliver mercy upon the rest of humanity.
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bug hunt

check out jeremyjarratt.com and let me know what you think of the new layout. I’m especially looking for bugs. I’ve found a few already (dropdowns from the top navbar look awful at the moment) and will work on them later tonight.

tip: switch styles on the top of the right sidebar!

Thanks for your help!

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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 Windowsa better list herea comparison hereonline news aggregators like My Yahoo! herea 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).

More info?

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!

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Experience necessary

It’s the oldest catch-22 in history: Experience necessary. How do people with experience obtain that experience? Presumably, every human starts life as infants, with little or no experience within the field in which they will eventually earn their keep. So why is it that every interview always ends with a polite summation of my lack of experience?

It’s hard for me to articulate the fact that I can do absolutely anything thrown at me, other than by awkwardly blurting out “I can do absolutely anything thrown at me!” while a horrified interviewer looks on, aghast. But my lack of experience equates roughly to lack of proof.

Joseph Heller explained the Catch-22:
Catch 22Catch-22If you’re insane, then you can’t request to be reassigned from flight combat, because it would prove that you’re sane. If you request to be reassigned from flight combat, then you’re not insane, because only a sane, rational person would make such a request. Therefore, you can never leave.

Ergo, if you do not have experience, then you cannot gain experience. If you have experience, then you must have started with experience.

The thing is, I am experienced. But, because on previous projects I was the designer, the information architect, the developer, and the entire MIS department, all by myself, I therefore cannot prove that I can work as a specialist in one area, working from specs from another specialist in one of those other areas.

What I cannot deal with is the fact that I am stuck forever as a lackey at low-rent jobs that I hate with all of my passion because I am a lackey at low-rent jobs, even though I am 1000% smarter than 90% of the other people around me and am capable of doing so much more – but am relegated to mopping up other people’s messes for the rest of my fucking life.

When I pulled into the apartment parking lot after my miserable interview, Lou Reed’s “Perfect Day” came on.

You’re going to reap just what you sow.

I am overqualified, but underexperienced. I am, therefore, a failure.

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weird shit

today’s link roundup: weird, entertaining, and enlightening links found (as usual) via Slashdot, BoingBoing, and others.

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the ubiquitous tag cloud

here’s the tag cloud for my site.

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what’s yer URI?

what’s your URI? if you have your own site, please give me your web address so i can link to it on www.jeremyjarratt.com. friends only, please… and it has to be your site, not some stupid site you found that you like to laugh at. don’t bother with your LJ or MySpace address. i’ll get to those at some point.

thanks, and yer welcome!

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jeremy will be absent today as he has the blogsy.
signed,
my mom

i’ve been posting a bit more frequently at my own site lately. i still plan on using LJ for more community-oriented posts and my ruder moments; but for now, the cleanish and more or less presentable version of my life is there. there are various feeds (such as for i-swear-it’s-upcoming podcasts and work-related stuff) if you really want to keep track of me that freaking badly. (if you need help understanding syndication and feeds…)

and yes, i know the layout is horrible. i’m working on it.

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now powered by WordPress

www.jeremyjarratt.com

latest adventure: digging up an old blues song i did on 4-track at the ripe old age of 18. Robert Johnson ain’t worried.

feed available w/ podcasts

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DNS

my domain transfer for transmothra.com is complete. it’s now pointing to my new host’s nameservers. nothing to see as of yet*, but at least i’m heading the right way. all of my [empty] domains should now be pointing to HostGator.

so right now i’m killing time trying to think of ways to avoid making excuses for not working on transmothra.com 5.0. or something like that. HEY! did you know there’s a Homestar Runner Wiki?

*sort of

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dot com

i went with HostGator. they’re fucking brilliant.

got a new domain, for those of you who know my full name, and transferred transmothra.com over to GoDaddy.

if i’m slightly absent, it’s because i work 50 hours a week, third shift, and spent the rest either coding or hanging out with Holly & Speck, or i’m at my Grandfather’s house.

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success!

got my old site fully working locally! my last data dump was in March of ’04, so i don’t have the last few blog entries, but who cares? i have my entire old website out of mothballs!

i just need to copy it and tweak it for the new blog system, add in some of the tweaks i did for the (sadly, now defunct) VAT magazine website, do other things i’ve had my mind on, and test the hell out of it (since i don’t have hosting yet, i’ll need to make sure it runs with register_globals either on or off, and on either PHP4.x or PHP5).

i think i’m going to go for another redesign, while i’m at it. that way, i can finally include some of those kooky sci-fi skins from the old Mars STS project (a barebones content management system i wrote, which featured a theme switcher, loads of translucent backgrounds, and best of all, automatic file detection, which let you upload the file and forget it – no more making links on every page!).

this is going to take time i simply don’t have, though. i will probably have to puke out something quick just to put stuff on for a time while i revamp the site engine yet a-damn-gain.

this time, i promise it will look cool as shit and have better content. i’ll probably also post public bookmarks via XML (and run a linkchecker this time, cronjobs willing), so if you have the Firefox extension you can sync, see and surf the best of the ‘net right along with me.

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The BEAST 50 Most Loathsome People in America, 2005

The BEAST 50 Most Loathsome People in America, 2005

a few of my favorites:

48. Larry the Cable Guy

Charges: The absolute nadir of the American South’s baffling cultural hegemony. A middle-class Nebraskan, raised in Palm Beach, whose parents sent him to private school, masquerading as an Appalachian mutant and making millions off the nine-toed cyclopes in his audience by calling his material “blue collar,” when it’s really just a celebration of proud ignorance. The latest in a long line of “entertainers” propagating the lie that real talent is elitist. The South has risen again—just long enough to grab the rest of the nation by the legs and pull it back down to its Lovecraftian depths. Isn’t even “bad funny.” Makes Jeff Foxworthy look like Chris Rock.

Exhibit A: Ostensibly humorous catchphrase translates into “complete the task.”

Sentence: Sent back in time for the sole purpose of having Mark Twain’s cigars extinguished on his face.

42. Nancy Grace

Charges: Revenges herself nightly for the murder of her fiancée on every criminal suspect and defendant; facts be damned. Despite her viscous, Gump-like hyper-drawl, her brain can barely keep pace. Looks like a camel in drag. Her crude vindictiveness is to the myth of the southern belle what Roots was to the myth of the genteel South.

Exhibit A: Repeatedly utters a snarling “You know what?” at guests who question her-not as a rhetorical device, but as a declarative sentence.

Sentence: Wrongly convicted and summarily executed by intrauterine electrocution on national television, so horrifying the nation that capital punishment is thenceforth outlawed.

27. Ann Coulter

Charges: The fact that Coulter is considered desirable by Republicans betrays their sick and masochistic nature. We saw Coulter in person this year, and she is a revolting skeleton with a boob job and a grotesquely oversized head, who feeds only on the hatred of her target audience, liberals. Sole redeeming quality is that she is impossible to take seriously–she’s really more of a shock comic than a political commentator, whether she knows it or not.

Exhibit A: “I’m getting a little fed up with hearing about, oh, civilian casualties.”

Sentence: Confined to Mississippi; forever banned from interacting with the lefty intellectuals she lives to antagonize.

25. Paris Hilton

Charges: Won’t go away. A head so empty, the rails of coke that sustain her must dissipate in clouds around her ears; this residual high the only explanation anyone would come within five feet of her. Brainless, her spinal cord defies physics, like an Indian rope trick. Her Carl’s Jr. commercial, while an uninspired approximation of eroticism, was still hotter than her actual “sex” tape, in which she only made noise when she wasn’t screwing—that’s not hot. Squints inexplicably for photo ops, suggesting even minimal focus is beyond her. Her continued success as a celebrity famous for nothing, despite the eerie resemblance she bears to the inbred banjoist from Deliverance and a lack of talent so profound that others become duller as they approach her, indicates that something is fundamentally wrong with humanity.

Exhibit A: Somehow, everybody in America knew that this completely pointless person had lost her dog, and we are all diminished by the experience.

Sentence: Locked in a room with a high steel ceiling which lowers a centimeter per hour, until she either solves a Rubik’s cube or is crushed; whichever comes first.

18. Tommy Hilfiger

Charges: Egomaniacal designer of drab, ironically patriot-hued clothing, manufactured by Chinese migrants who overcrowd the equally drab Pacific Rim factories of the United States Commonwealth of Saipan, favorite illegal vacation spot of Jack Abramoff and Tom Delay. Workers slave for pennies, are administered forced abortions, and still can slap a “Made in the USA” sticker on their products.

Exhibit A: Publicly raising a spoiled cunt on MTV’s post-apocalyptic “Rich Girls,” and hosting a primetime CBS reality infomercial while peddling overpriced trash made by slaves.

Sentence: Receives gift from Ralph Lauren—a Sicilian necktie.

15. Karl Rove

Charges: A greasy pig whose only distinction in life is his total lack of decency. Rove is decidedly not a genius; he is simply missing the part of his soul that prevents the rest of us from kicking elderly women in the face. His admirers have elevated fanatical, amoral ambition to the status of a virtue, along with lying, cheating, and negligent homicide, all in the name of “values.” Quite possibly the worst person in the worst White House in American history.

Exhibit A: “As people do better, they start voting like Republicans – unless they have too much education and vote Democratic, which proves there can be too much of a good thing.”

Sentence: Lowered head first into oil refinery smokestack.

13. God

Charges: If your answer to the age-old question of God’s existence is “yes,” your next question should be, “Why is he such a dick?” After three major natural disasters, not to mention the eternal constants of famine, war and disease, to believe in God is to believe either that He enjoys fucking with us, or at best has totally lost interest in the whole “people” thing. Never calls anymore.

Exhibit A: Mosquitoes, Ralph Reed.

Sentence: Forever listening to an unending stream of idiotic, mundane prayers uttered by the dumbest, most inarticulate people in His creation.

12. Barbara Bush

Charges: Her polluted womb nurtured the seed of American decadence. The root of America’s decay; the poison tree from whence the fruit loop George W. Bush sprang. This unfeeling, unthinking patrician hag spawned America’s most notorious welfare child, whose every glaring deficiency has been excused or underwritten by undeserved wealth. Chuckling, she remarked of poor people displaced by Hurricane Katrina, “And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this is working very well for them.” Of their plans for permanent relocation, she speculated: “What I’m hearing, which is sort of scary, is they all want to stay in Texas.” A true aristocrat, she sees poor people as another species.

Exhibit A: George H.W., George W., Jeb, Neil, Jenna, Barbara, Noelle, succeeding generations.

Sentence: Hysterectomy on principle. Bound and thrown into Lake Pontchartrain. If she floats, burned at the stake. If she drowns, even better.

10. Bill O’Reilly

Charges: Even Limbaugh must bow before O’Reilly’s unparalleled bullying skills and ability to deliver undiluted bullshit with an air of brusque authority. O’Reilly is so comfortable with his astounding hypocrisy that he didn’t skip a beat when he was publicly revealed to be a comically perverse sexual harasser, continuing to sanctimoniously moralize about the corrosive effects of rap music and intellectualism on American society. Main tactic against his critics, whose jobs rank among the easiest in the world, is to accuse them of his own methods: arbitrary smears, selective quotation, partisan motivation, and intellectual cowardice. Infuriatingly claims to be a political “independent” who just happens to parrot virtually every Republican talking point and equate mainstream liberals with Nazis and Stalinists. Claimed his call for abandoning San Francisco to al Qaeda bombing was “satirical,” which is itself the funniest thing he’s ever said. An honest to goodness list-making Joe McCarthy wannabe, with the ACLU standing in for the Communist Party.

Exhibit A: O’Reilly’s novel, Those Who Trespass, which reads like an eighth grade writing assignment, is about a blustery news correspondent, demoted from foreign correspondence to less prestigious work (as O’Reilly was when he moved from ABC News to Inside Edition), who murders a string of colleagues he feels have hindered his career. “I kill you on page six,” he told Charlie Gibson on Good Morning America.

Sentence: After O’Reilly’s influence fundamentally changes the nature of jurisprudence, he is tortured and jailed for life when it is discovered that he once leafed through a copy of the Communist Manifesto as a teen.

5. Tom Delay

Charges: A politician so horrible, his prior career as an exterminator constitutes fratricide. Smiled for his mug shot like it was a campaign poster. Asked three young Katrina evacuees, “Now tell me the truth, boys, is this kind of fun?” One of an elite handful of white Americans still engaged in the time-honored tradition of screwing over Indians. Responding to a request he extinguish his cigar in a restaurant in accordance with federal regulations, Delay replied, “I AM the federal government.” Claimed that there was “no fat left to cut” from the federal budget to offset New Orleans reconstruction costs. So arrogant in abuse of power that he doesn’t even take time to construct plausible lies.

Exhibit A: Explaining his failure to enlist during Vietnam: “So many minority youths had volunteered…that there was literally no room for patriotic folks like myself.”

Sentence: Bashed to death with hammer.


4. You

Charges: Silently enabling and contributing to the irreversible destruction of your planet. Absolving yourself of your responsibility to do anything about it that your immediate neighbors don’t. Assuming that it’s normal behavior to spend several hours each day totally inert and staring into a cathode ray tube. Substituting antidepressants for physical motion. Caring more about the personal relationships of people you will never meet than your own. Shrugging your shoulders at the knowledge that your government is populated by criminal liars intent on fooling you into impoverished, helpless submission. Cheering this process on.

Exhibit A: You don’t even know who your congressman is.

Sentence: Deathbed realization that your entire life was an unending series of stupid mistakes and wasted opportunities, a priceless gift of potential extravagantly squandered, for which you deserve nothing but scorn or, at best, indifference, and a cold, meaningless demise.


3. George W. Bush

Charges: Simply put, the stupidest man ever to lead this country. Bush’s lobotomized Will Rogers routine is a satirist’s dream, a European intellectual’s caricature of the dipshit cowboy American, all balls and no brains. Often responds to questions by attempting to define the word he finds the most challenging in them. Thinks press reports of his various crimes are responsible for his waning popularity, rather than the deeds themselves. Interprets the constitution like a Unitarian interprets the bible; for maximum convenience and with no regard to the actual text. Foreign policy vision is less serious and more simplistic than an issue of Captain America.

Exhibit A: “I want to thank the President and the CEO of Constellation Energy, Mayo Shattuck. That’s a pretty cool first name, isn’t it? Mayo. Pass the Mayo.”

Sentence: Trapped for eternity under shoddily manufactured Diebold voting machine, unable to reach nearby refrigerator full of hot dogs and bourbon.


2. Dick Cheney

Charges: At the forefront of nearly every administration effort to anihillate the constitution. A true psychopath with only one motivating force; insatiable greed. Insists that we can only remain “free” through torture, spying and secrecy. Bears the crooked ugliness of a man whose entire life has been devoted to a senseless pursuit of power, and whose most effective weapon is a total lack of ethics, or even decorum. So cartoonishly evil he defies parody.

Exhibit A: “I think they’re in the last throes, if you will, of the insurgency.”

Sentence: Strapped to chair; eyes removed with melon baller. Nursed back to health. Lips sewn to a rubber hose connecting him to a 500 gallon nutrition shake. Nursed back to health. Fingers, hands, toes, feet, nose and genitals devoured by hungry pigs. Nursed back to health. Legs and arms ground to stubs with belt sander. Nursed back to health. Fitted with earphones that play only Christina Aguilera songs, and left alone to think about what he has done.


1. Pat Robertson

Charges: If Pat Robertson’s local Starbucks caught fire, he would claim that God was punishing them for giving him a caramel latte when he ordered vanilla. Robertson has always been a demonic charlatan with the credibility of Miss Cleo and a lust for Armageddon in his vile, rat-toad heart, but this was really his year to shine. In 2005, Robertson called on God to vacate seats in the Supreme Court (the almighty obliged, killing Rehnquist), advocated assassinating Hugo Chavez, said ‘judicial activists’ were a more serious threat to America than terrorists, called criticism of the war treason, said John Roberts should be thankful for Hurricane Katrina, which he implied was “connected” to Roe v. Wade, attributed Ariel Sharon’s stroke to divine retribution for the Gaza pullout, said “the Antichrist is probably a Jew alive in Israel today,” and implied that God would wipe the residents of Dover, PA off the map for rejecting Creationism. Not to mention raising huge sums of cash from his zombie army, much of which is diverted from his charity operations to his business interests, including African diamond mines. Has long advocated that America simply ignore the Supreme Court. Robertson’s God is an insecure, misogynistic, homicidal fanatic—just like Pat.

Exhibit A: Vehemently opposed to voluntary abortion in America, but okay with forced abortion in China, where his cable investments depend on the good graces of the government.

Sentence: Repeatedly struck by lightning.

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best text editor

1st Page 2006.

whoo fucking hooooooOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!

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random update

well, i got my server running again, and i found a whole lot of my old sites and SQL backups. finding time to riffle through them all will be a bitch, though. i can’t wait to get my own site back again.

i am wired like a motherfucker. got every app i could possibly need, and it’s mostly open-source or freeware. fucquenet.

on my last legs at work, due to poor stats and even worse attendance. the stats aren’t all my fault, what with crappy systems and completely inaccurate metrics. the attendance really isn’t either, but i guess i did fuck up here and there.

recently found out that one of my recent ex-GFs was recently seeing a co-worker (along with her dork BF), and it didn’t bother me a bit, which was nice. poor bastard. he’s a real nice guy (though a hackish writer), so i hope he didn’t lose too much there.

need to get crackin’ on MySQL. see ya!

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got my local test server running again finally!

got my local server running finally. i had to figure out where to go to disable toe IIS service. once it was off, XAMPP worked just fine.

and i never had no stinkin virus. my monitor is just so lousy that i couldn’t see the “i” in “inetinfo.exe.”

in a few weeks i’ll be ready to roll again!

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need a host

been scouting around for a new host so i can revive transmothra.com and possibly a couple other sites. here’s my picks:

Dreamhost.com
hostgator
BlueHost
PowWeb
(other?)

looking for:

  • PHP/MySQL
  • multiple domains + subs
  • 100Mb+ (at the very least)
  • decent bandwidth
  • cron jobs a plus
  • FTP access
  • no file limits (content*, type, size, etc.)
  • control panel, emphasis on control
  • great uptime
  • good support
  • good price ($50-150/yr USD)
  • good street cred (proven stability/reliability)

*not looking to host cracks or porn, just Free Thought

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Strong Bad DVD+CD

my baby got me all the Homestar Runner DVDs and the Strong Bad Sings CD.

there. i am insane now.

WHEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!

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i hate computers

why should it be SO FUCKING DIFFICULT simply to run a WAMP server on XP?!!

i’ve opened all necessary ports, i’ve gone as far as disabling all firewalls and antivirus apps. this is driving me fucking crazy.

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webserver help?

i’m running [either] UniformServer or Virtrigo Server (latest of each). i can’t access localhost. i get:

error ‘8002801c’

Error accessing the OLE registry.

/iisHelp/common/500-100.asp, line 17

i’ve tried outright disabling XP’s and McAfee’s firewalls, and have set both to allow both programs. i tried opening port 80. i’m making sure only one server is running at a time. nothing works. suggestions?