The Written Peace:
Open Forum of June 30, 2005
A formal welcome goes out to our newest commentator, Chris Meyers. Perhaps some of you didn't notice, but we had another new commentator, GT, post on a thread further down. This gentleman runs the blog GT's Market Rant, a veritable pig heaven for those of us who devour financial data.
And on the subject of blogs, several of our regular and worthy commentators here now have blogs of their own. SB Gypsy now blogs at The Gypsy's Caravan, while DuWayne Brayton—the blogger formerly known around these parts as Treban L—has emerged with the blog Traumatized by Truth. Both of these blogs are worth visiting on a regular basis, so they are now listed in the Dark Wraith BlogRing in the sidebar.
As long as the subject of good blogs is on deck, that massive thread below reminded me to take note of another blog I might have mentioned before, but which I should mention again. If you haven't been to zencomix lately, go there to see a political cartoonist whose work is becoming mainstream publication quality.
Finally from that last thread, if I haven't recently given thanks lately to OddJob, My Pet Goat, Peter of Lone Tree from BlondeSense, Auntie Roo, Lenin's Ghost, LindiBee, Dread Pirate Roberts of Dharma Bums, and Old White Lady of It's Morning Somewhere, consider it given now.
Enough with the schmaltz. That thread nearly put the Dark Wraith in his grave... which, when you think about it, is where a ghost is supposed to be, I suppose.
On to other matters.
Providing a bit of coding advice to Old White Lady a few days ago gave me an inspiration. Starting next week, I'll be publishing occasional articles in a series called "Coding for Bloggers," where I'll be offering tricks and tips on HTML, cascading style sheets, and javascripts. None of the coding advice will be particularly intense or complicated; and pretty much everything will be for blog types of environments. The intention of this series is to offer some of the old, backroom material that I've learned over the years (usually the hard way) to make things easier to do, better looking in final mark-up display, or more interesting to end users.
And as I noted perhaps cryptically in a previous thread, several new features are in the offing for The Dark Wraith Forums. Whether or not they'll be wildly appreciated, I don't know. We shall see.
Say something here on this open thread. Make it intellectual, funny, strange, or downright unacceptable in mixed company (that's normal people with neo-cons in the crowd); but I must ask that rowdiness be kept to a minimum. That last thread was so huge that some of the floorboards over by the jukebox are creaking. If that thing drops into the basement, we'll have no entertainment at all except for the cat dancing again; and the last time, that got out of hand when that alley cat crashed the party and started doing Blues Brothers impersonations after getting sloshed on catnip cappuccinos. That whole scene just wasn't natural. This place could have ended up getting shut down by the Blog Decorum Police.
The Dark Wraith turns on the dance floor lights.
Published 7/01/2005 12:46:00 AM
<< 80 Comments Total
Good evening, ♠Dark Wraith♠.
What's this about "Blog Decorum Police"? I didn't know there was such a thing. Thanks for mentioning my blog, but now, I wonder if that was the best thing to do? I don't want those police types coming over to shut mine down. The cats would be pretty upset. They've gotten used to Friday Cat Blogging and would be downright nasty if something like that happened.
When you have an angry cat around, it's no fun. With three, I might as well move!
Now, as far as the "cryptically" mentioned other possible features, I'm still upset about the calendar idea possibly being cancelled.
Cool dance floor lights! Care to dance?
Blog decorum? What the fvck is that?
Good evening, Old White Lady.
The last time I danced, I was nearly a cripple for the next week. (I didn't even know a person could tear an ass muscle.)
Now, concerning the question you posed about the "Find" command in the browser and why it causes a crash on this blog. It has to do with the way the comments work, here: the threads are buried unless the toggle is clicked to open them. What happens with the find command is that the browser begins its search, and it manages to go down into those comments, but it can't find its way back out. That means it gets trapped down there and starts spinning around, and the browser essentially becomes non-operational because it can't finish doing its text string search. This same problem happens with a number of other blogs where the comments are part of the blog but are buried. Most blogs that use HaloScan don't have this problem because a HaloScan comments screen is a completely different Webpage, whereas on a blog like The Dark Wraith Forums, the comments are really part of the main Webpage, but they're not revealed except by a manual click command.
What that means is that the "Find" feature of a browser isn't going to work on a blog like this one.
Not to worry, though. Some time next week, I'll have an internal search engine set up and available in the sidebar. It'll be a lot better, anyway, because a customized engine built for this blog will be able to run through everything that has ever been posted as an article or a comment here and find every occurrence of the requested search string.
Truth be told, I've been needing that myself because this blog has so much archival material now that I cannot for the life of me remember who said what, when, and where, anymore.
The internal search engine is one minor feature on which I am working, right now. I've been getting back into my annoying obsessive/compulsive mode of late, and I'm fixated on writing code. The trick for me is to do things I can actually accomplish and not step into something that's either impossible or beyond my skill. Unfortunately, several of the features I'm developing look to me like they are either impossible or beyond my reach (or both).
Well, shoot.
The Dark Wraith should have quit while he was ahead.
I've been trying to practice my entertainment special of the evening which is my impersonation of George Bush's impersonation of Richard Nixon saying, "I am not a crook". But I'm having trouble. Everytime I begin I collapse helpless with laughter. Gawd, it's impolite to laugh at your own jokes.
1:09 a.m. CDT. Seeya in the morning. Er, it IS morning. Seeya when I awaken.
Good evening, Mr. Goat.
I have no idea what the new decorum rules are all about, but I do know that Mr. Bush's new American KGB is going to be a problem for a blog like this one. I know for a fact that there are "No Weirdness" rules that will get this joint in trouble sooner or later.
There are a couple of good blog articles about the new Gestapo our dear neo-cons have going: The Green Lantern has a good article on the topic that I'm running in the current blogScream news cycle, and Shakespeare's Sister has an article with a link to a full source explanation of the situation, as well.
But what's scaring me the most is our government's continuing violation of a commitment it made a long while back to turn over the major Internet root servers at the core of the backbone to the international committee called ICANN. That was supposed to have been done long ago, but the U.S. government just can't let go of the ultimate power it has by maintaining control of the root servers. Essentially, with those machines under its thumb, not only can the U.S. snoops monitor everything that happens on the Internet across the entire world, but they could also, if they ever wanted to, shut down the entire Internet. There's a reasonably informative, if somewhat simplified and misleading, article on CNN.com about the issue.
The only good news is that folks with strong technical skills and some serious hardware could survive a government shutdown of the Internet, but their accessibility to most people on Earth would be pretty much shot. Essentially, some Webmasters could effectively deploy a covert intranet to replace the Internet. The bad part is that there would be lots and lots of these things competing with each other, and there's no way any large-scale coordination could be put together in time to make something with a wide net if the Internet were shut down.
It all sounds like conspiracy theory stuff, right?
Right.
The Dark Wraith doesn't buy into conspiracy theories at all. Nope. Not at all.
Geez. Peter, it's only 1:09 a.m. your time, and you're heading off to bed?!
I can't imagine anyone finding anything in a bed as interesting as sharing thoughts on The Dark Wraith Forums.
Okay, I take that back: if the bed had a snack tray with three cheeseburgers and a pot of coffee, then the bed would have something worth spending awhile there.
The Dark Wraith has never, though, found a bed with three cheeseburgers and a pot of coffee in it waiting for him.
[The closest I've come is a bunch of cracker crumbs and half of a Payday candy bar.]
Well Drat! Dark Wraith.
You're lucky I talked myself out of typing what I wanted to write in response to what you wrote. Heh, in fact, heh heh:)
I'm looking forward to the internal search engine you'll have set up next week.
peteroflonetree seems to be having way too much fun.
It's bed time here, too. Cats are hanging out laying around on the floor wondering when mom will get off the computer. They'd better leave the computer alone, this time! Good night.
Essentially, some Webmasters could effectively deploy a covert intranet to replace the Internet.
Via some of the city wide wireless systems perhaps??
As far as the servers go, what else could they do other than to retain control? Unlease an EMP to shut it down?
Several years ago I thought this country would start subtly edging toward a "military" state. The whore on terra is, in my opinion, a red herring to hide the true purpose(s). That is, to establish the ability to control the populous in times of increasing chaos resulting from the manifestation of peak oil (along with controlling part of the oil itself).
And you boys from the National Security Service, if you're reading this, go fvck yourself and your big brother.
In case you're wondering, unlease means let go. In other words, unleash.
Well, I followed your link to Shakes Sis through to Bradblog, and then on to an article on BBC News that is appropriately named: Bush sets up domestic spy service.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4636117.stm
Which gives this pathetic quote:
The BBC's Adam Brookes in Washington says Americans have long resisted the growth of domestic intelligence agencies, believing they pose a threat to civil liberties.
But Mr Bush can ill-afford politically to see another intelligence failure like that in Iraq on his watch, he says.
WTF does the Iraq intel failure (ain't that a euphemism) have to do with spying on Murkans in the good ole USA?
Auntie Roo loves asking rhetorical questions...
Good Morning Dark Wraith,
The best, most creative writing is always done in the early hours of the morning.... and I surely have someone interesting in My bed!
Which is why the Gypsy values quality over quantity!
...and that's also why my blog is so short!
Well, Auntie Roo, I don't want to go overboard with an old-time conservative bit of political wisdom, but there was a time when a real conservative would have said, "Before you go and make a new law, enforce the ones that are already on the books."
Of course, this advice liberally angered liberals when it was used by opponents of new laws to control the proliferation of assault rifles and hand guns, and I shan't get into that argument here. I must, however, point out the general soundness of the advice and how this Administration is thundering evidence of why that advice is so sound: the government failed massively, systematically, and thoroughly to enforce existing laws in the months leading up to the tragedy of September 11, 2005. The failure to properly enforce existing immigration regulations alone allowed the terrorists all the operating room they needed to enter the country and go about their murderous plot. In one case, on the entry form one of the hijackers had filled out upon arrival in this country, in the section of the form where it required him to respond to the question "Destination," the sonuvabitch answered, simply, "No."
For God's sake, Auntie Roo.
Instead of cleaning up incompetence, laziness, stupidity, and lack of communication between field and central enforcement offices, how do our President and his lackeys in Congress respond: let's make more laws, and let's make 'em work to do our dream of eroding civil liberties. And while we're at it, let's make people think we're doing them a favor.
Of course, the American Electorate saw fit to give this cabal of stupidity another four years for its miserable failure in its first term.
I do need to stop, now.
The Dark Wraith is feeling that pain radiating down his left arm, again.
Good morning, Mr. Goat.
City-wide wireless networks are still connected to the backbone, but they don't have to be to function as intranets.
The problem is that these wireless networks are a spy's dream come true. Even using those courtesy wireless services available in coffee houses is a bad, bad idea unless the computer user knows a whole lot about configuring firewalls on the laptop that's going to be hooked into that network. Essentially, using those services is an open invitation to every snoop around to rummage through your computer and know just about everything about you (and a considerable amount about those with whom you communicate).
I'd best not go too far into this, though. It sounds like the rantings of some irrational, paranoid weirdo, doesn't it?
The Dark Wraith will keep his paranoia to himself, this morning.
Justice O'Connor has retired, effective upon the swearing in of her replacement.
It's going to be ugly, I fear.
- oddjob
Not only will it be ugly, OddJob, it will be destructive to the Republic.
Both her replacement and the confirmation of her replacement.
The Dark Wraith sees a grim road ahead.
Forgive the test comments, here.
I've installed buttons, as you can see, and I'm trying them out in different browsers to make sure they look right and function properly.
(Buttons like this aren't nearly as easy to get to work as it might seem.)
The Dark Wraith continues the tweaking of the blog.
An economist returns to visit his old school. He's interested in the current exam questions and asks his old professor to show some. To his surprise they are exactly the same ones to which he had answered 10 years ago! When he asks about this the professor answers: "the questions are always the same - only the answers change!"
[Just pushing your buttons to see if they work.]
:-)
- oddjob
Gr.
Our society, Country, and Government are in its last throes. Ejony each day while you can. The End is Near.
A confession...I've concluded that I must be some kind of maschochistic freak. Why?, you may ask? Well, our economy is soo peachy keen, and my mate is sooo good at money matters(Hey, how much is in the account. I don't know. But you just went to the bank this AM. I don't remember the balance. Give me a ballpark. I dunno. Is it less than $100? Oh. no, there's at least 150.) ARRRRGH!!!)that we are facing a financial crunch. A crunch that in reality we faced 6 or 8 months ago, but Peter was robbed to pay Paul, and I was being treated as a good little mushroom, and have now found out as reality catches up.
You may wonder why I do not have control of the common finances...a complex matter dealing with old psychological hang-ups and feelings of worthlessness/incompetence that the positive emotional aspects of giving her control outweighs the less than steller performance of our finances. But this is only background...she has even agreed to let me write out a buget and she swears to stick to it. Frightening. She just is going to have to give me actual numbers that go with our bills so I can do this :)
My maschochism is this. We have put in a bid at the older son's private school to take over the cleaning that is contracted out as opposed to parental tuition reductioncleaning(which we did last year.) This is going to involve an estimated 15 hours a week, split over 3 days (of course my estimate is based on me doing the cleaning, and I spent 10 years cleaning dormitories &/or supervising housekeepers). I already work 40 hours a week, carpool such that I am generally in town 2 1/2 hours before I need to be in order to get kiddies to daycare/school. To add true insanity to this, remember we have an 18 mo old with Down Syndrome, and a 5 1/2 yr old in kindergarten, 9 cats(one just diagnosed with diabetes), 2 dogs(one deaf, blind and elderly who has lost bladder/bowel control to an extent)4 hermit crabs and a goat. Despite all this, I asked a customer of mine(who calls me her favorite lady at the store) who manages an IHop if she would be interested in hiring me part time to maybe do fill-in for call-ins when I was available(since my schedule shifts weekly).
Though I've been on cloud 9 since I talked to her...she asked what I wanted to do, I said waitress. She said no, "I want you for prep. You can do prep anytime. We can schedule you around your regular job." She is going to bring me an application, said fill it out, she'll tell her bos, and boom, I'm hired. Catering season is coming, the Tech students are returning soon, and I have 12 years of food service-doing salads, desserts, prep, catering-from working in the dining halls.
You know, I'm kicking myself for even contemplating giving my middle-aged, fibromyalgia wracked bod a possible 70 hour workweek. But damn, after job hunting for 8 months before I got the cashier's job, having a nice lady thrilled at the idea of hiring me is such a trip. The cleaning gig is something that will pay enough to subcontract to a few other broke friends if we get that.
I still think I'm an idiot....
Dear God in Heaven, Wild Clover!
I want to say, "Oh, there's gotta be another way"; but then I realize that there probably isn't. Not, at least, without such a radical shift in your entire life that you probably wouldn't be psychologically able to sustain the shocks.
The best I can come up with is a small string of profanities about this blesséd American economic world of the 21st Century. And this is the "equilibrium" state of the Classical economists: as long as the economy is on a long-run growth path, the situation is just fine. No need for government intervention. The State has far more important matters to manage than mere lower-class citizens.
The State must attend to the important business of Empire.
Until, that is, those people explode like a powder keg and tear down the entire gulag of institutionalized, State-sanctioned misery.
I guess Keynes was right, after all: In the long run, we're all dead.
The Dark Wraith needs to finish that bunker he started building last year.
Good Afternoon Dark Wraith,
Wild Clover, I have just realized a profound thing. I am utterly spoiled! I work 40 hours, clean our house for 2 people, and make an occasional foray to the grocery store. And I complain about that! (well, not very much) and never have extra time for other things. I haven't had a schedule like that since my kids were in High School and I was in college and working to support them. All I can say is: For gosh sakes, take your vitamines!!!
Here's some fun to keep folks on their toes.
From the Unification Church, via its official media mouthpiece, The Washington Times, comes rather interesting rant masquerading as journalism.
Wait a minute, that was how The Dark Wraith Forums' articles were described, too.
The Dark Wraith does not rant.
['Foams at the mouth', occasionally, yes; but 'rants', certainly not!]
Good day ♠Dark Wraith♠
thanks for the plug.
you are a masochist for coding. i do my best not to get sucked in, and i'm still a newbie at html. i have, earlier in my life, spent untold hours, whole days and nights, getting a program or database code to work the way i want.
oh sure, put up some html tips. there goes 10 or 20 hours of my time playing with it.
(shaking fist at screen, using a bad imitation of jon stewart's voice) damn you, dark wraith.
Good afternon, Dread Pirate Roberts.
I swear, I have spent the better part of my life writing code. At least, it seems that way in retrospect. Right now, I'm working on a tiny little project for this blog, and I swear to Odin, I CAN'T GET THE STUPID THING TO WORK!
The Dark Wraith travels the down staircase into madness.
God(s) be thanked I lack the interest. My life has had enough heartache, thank you!
- oddjob
Thank you for the welcome Dark Wraith. I have been busy preparing my house for a visit from one of my best friends, from Slovakia, who comes here tomorrow. Later tonight I will make a final post for the week to wrap up my thoughts on tax reform etc. But to take advantage of the open forum, I have some questions for you.
Who are you, Dark Wraith? Where do you live? At what institution do you teach? What is your personal history? I must know these things!
Good evening, Chris Meyer.
You are obviously welcome here at The Dark Wraith Forums. Among the many, many blogs you visit, you will find that this place has a simply amazing depth of knowledge, experience, commitment, and raw courage flowing from the commentators. This is as much a running collegiate seminar as anything else. But it's better than what you would find in a typical college: the people writing here come from backgrounds more diverse, lives perhaps even more intense, and beliefs born from worlds many in the halls of power simply do not understand.
Now, about me. The Internet is a wonderful place for conveying not merely ideas and knowledge, but also visions and hopes. The Internet is also a fearsomely dangerous place; and I speak from personal experience in this matter. I cannot criticize those who choose to provide concrete evidence of their identities, but I must tell you that to do so is to put one's very life at risk.
I shan't go into the details of what happened to me in the years when I was sloppy, but suffice it to say that I am fortunate to be alive. Even now, with some of my former students who have found this blog and know me by name, I have already experienced a diminishment of my right to make a living as a college teacher. The neo-conservatives in academia, as well as a small handful of others who take umbrage at things with which they shouldn't concern themselves, have a way of exacting a toll these days in departments of business administration and economics. However, if those sorts imagine that they can silence or at least punish me, they are wrong: a good writer outlives his enemies because the product of his craft will outlive the vengeance of their spite.
If people see me as paranoid, so be it. If people choose not to believe my credentials and my claims of background and experience, that's a good thing; it means I have been inadequate in demonstrating through my writing that I am the learnéd scholar that I represent myself to be.
It would be nice if I were to be remember by my name for what I am writing here and elsewhere; it is enough, however, that what I am writing is read by others of intelligence and good will: it will be enough, then, that the words, if not the flesh from which the words drew life, mattered.
The Dark Wraith has spoken his peace on this subject.
Don't Cancel the Calender! I will send pictures asap. Come on DW guys! The women of the nerd world are counting on us. I mean really, this could be what is needed to save the world as we know it. It's not enough to use big words and say thiongs that scare teh hell out of everybody. Lets give em a little tush too! I just returned to my new home in Portland from a vacation in my old in MI. While there I did a photo shoot with the rythm player I used to play with. I expect them to be e-mailed any day. Who's with me? Dread Pirate Roberts, Peteroflonetree, My Pet Goat - come on - show your support for the Dark Wraith forums - just show it. . .
Uh-oh.
The Dark Wraith senses rebellion against the machinery oppression.
The calender? That's were we get to moon Laura Bush isn't it?
I haven't followed this story all that closely but this suggests an interesting twist.
MSNBC Analyst Says Cooper Documents Reveal Karl Rove as Source in Plame Case
Wild Clover - after reading your comment about your household and jobs, I just have to say that I really sypathize with you. Over at my blog, I was griping about having to work both jobs. When others explain what they have to go through, it makes me sit back and think.. "why the hell am I griping?" Thanks for helping me realize the difficulties others have.
Some years back, I worked at a health provider and one of the jobs I held there was as a financial rep. I had to look at incomes and outflows and try to help the debtor find a way to come up with the proposed (by my company) amount to pay monthly. Many times, a suggestion I was required to make was, "have you thought about getting a part-time job?" I hated asking that question. Especially when there were hardships in the households that by taking a second job could cause possible strain. Of course, finding a part-time job to fit the schedule is not so easy, either.
Yes, Mr. Goat, but the danger is that, were Laura to see actual man-ass, she would then realize that her spousal man-ass wasn't actually man-ass at all: it was just George being his usual butt-head self.
There was a point in there someplace.
Now, as far as Rove being the source of the leaks, the question boils down to this: why did Prosecutor Fitzgerald claim recently that he'd hit a "dead end" in the Valerie Plame scandal? He's cleaning up his work by ensuring that several journalists—none of whom actually published the name of a former CIA spy—head off to jail (although it is my impression that The New York Times is going to yield to the will of the prosecutor so their reporter, Judith Miller, doesn't have to bunk with Large Marge after all).
Mr. Novak gets off Scot free; a bunch of reporters get taught who's boss with Justice Department money; and the "high-level Administration" sources Novak used will never spend a day in jail.
The Dark Wraith does love the way the rule of law is interpreted these days.
Good morning, Dark Wraith.
After reading My Pet Goat and your comments, I remembered an excellent photo someone posted in the Rove comment thread at Eschaton. I wish, I wish, upon a star.
Holy smokes, ♠Dark Wraith♠,
that refresh button works great! How cool is that?
Wild Clover--
My mother has fibromyalgia, too. It's absolutely ruined her life. It takes all the willpower she has to work some 30 hours a week, working at home, and taking numerous breaks during that time. How could you possibly, possibly work 70 hours a week with it?
This is beyond my comprehension.
Dark Wraith--
I suppose you face higher risks with your job as a professor, and I most certainly would not want you to be fired for the sake of satisfying my curiousity!
I made the 82nd comment on the previous thread, and I expect the number will grow as people respond to it. I seem to be quite skilled at inciting people to make lots of comments--threads that I have significantly commented on have set the record for most comments generated on two other blogs.
Unfortunately that's my last post on that thread because I'm about to go pick up Katarina in a couple hours. See you guys next week.
Oh, how did I forget this?
"I must, however, point out the general soundness of the advice and how this Administration is thundering evidence of why that advice is so sound: the government failed massively, systematically, and thoroughly to enforce existing laws in the months leading up to the tragedy of September 11, 2005."
Oh no! Dark Wraith, the prophet, knows something that we mere mortals do not! Tell us, oh mighty one, tell us!
Good morning, Chris Meyer.
Typos are a bane of every writer's existence. No matter how many times I review before publishing an article or comment, something always seems to slip through. It just drives me crazy. It could be worse: so far, twice I've caught myself addressing a response to Peter of Lone Tree by starting with, "Good morning, Peter of Loine Tree."
Anyway, I surely hope to high Heaven our enemies don't decide to make the fourth anniversary of their last successful attack the occasion to try another. I doubt that they will.
That having been said, we probably will see some fireworks this year, even if the traditional Fourth of July spectaculars are canceled in the Midwest because of the drought. If nothing else, the way people are talking about these gasoline prices, I wouldn't be surprised to see the pitchforks and torches being brought out.
...which, when you think about it, wouldn't be such a good idea, what with the drought and all.
The Dark Wraith fans the flames.
Good morning, Old White Lady.
One thing I had noticed about blog architecture is that, no matter how many ways I code to keep browsers from cacheing, they manage to do it. In the old way the comments worked here, when you wanted to make a post, clicking on the old "POST A COMMENT" text link moved you from the blog to the "BLOGGER: LEAVE YOUR COMMENT" page. Once you'd made your post, you had to manually move the browser back from the commenting page to the blog page; but when you went back there, you probably didn't see your comment posted, and this was because the browser had cached the page in its state before your comment had been made.
What this new system does is simply allow the user to force the refresh with a single click that blows the cache and forces the blog the show the new comment. It's really not much that couldn't be done by a user manually, but it does make the blog a tiny bit more functional.
The goal of this work is to incorporate the best features of some of the pop-up commenting systems like HaloScan without the downsides like comment length limits and plain-vanilla commenting screens.
I have several more conveniences on which I'm still working. One of them will be quite noticeable and nice, especially on long threads; but I'll be hanged if I can get my coding architecture to work. GAWD, but this one's driving me absolutely crazy! So far, four different ideas I've had for making the trick work have all failed to get the effect.
I'm about at the end of my rope, and I'll be hanged if I'm going to ask any of my coding jockey friends for help on this. It's one of those nerd-machismo pride things, you see.
The Dark Wraith goes it alone.
Good morning, ♠Dark Wraith♠.
i have to suppose i'm not the first to tell you that in safari the comment buttton reads "commen"
i like perseverance in the face of coding problems. never mind those who call you stubborn. is one of your improvements perhaps locating the page at the new comments when the commen button is "pushed?"
i am shocked, shocked i tell you to hear that bus ad and econ depts are conservative. is that really a picture of you we see here.
duwayne--someone wants to see my tush? on a calendar? i am so out of it.
Good morning, Dread Pirate Roberts.
I just made an adjustment to the buttons. Does the word "Comment" show completely now on the left button? I haven't been able to look at the changes in Safari yet, so you're doing me a favor by telling me what you're seeing. All I can do until I get a chance to see all of this in Safari is make educated guesses. I should've realized that the fonts render at slightly larger pixels-to-points ratio in that browser, but it just didn't occur to me.
Now, about your buttocks. Although it might seem to you that there is no market for visual depictions thereof, you must let the market itself make that judgment. We as mere suppliers can do only so much before we must commit our products to the will of consumers, who will make the final and lasting determination of what goods and services are worthy of their hard-earned dollars. Many are the entrepreneurs who believed their wares would be highly sought after, only to find that demand just wasn't there; but untold are the legions of entrepreneurs whose caution prevented them from delivering to the market what would have turned out to be an extraordinary success.
You sir, must consider this in your calculus of product availability.
The Dark Wraith has addressed the matter of entrepreneurial directions.
still "commen"
tho there is the merest hint of a "t"
while it is fun in a slightly kinky way to suppose there might be a market for images of my tush, sober reflection and an imaginary survey of the competition leaves me glad that i have already arranged for my modest retirement.
i could be persuaded to moon the executive branch and most of congress.
testing, testing, 1 2 3
sez "comments" over here in firefox. still on a mac.
Dread Pirate Roberts: How about now?
The Dark Wraith seeks closure.
sadly, no
still "commen"
ARRRGH! Dread Pirate Roberts, is the "t" being cut off because the word is too big for the button, or is the word fitting in okay, but the "t" just isn't there?
The Dark Wraith is definitely having Information Technology Age issues, this afternoon.
i would say that the "t" is cut off because the button isn't wide enough.
i'm reading the source to see if i can find the button text.
check your e-mail. i sent a screen shot of the button. tiff format.
i did find "value=comment" in the source code, possibly even in the right place. i mean, maybe i found the right place, not that you didn't put it in the proper place.
Good Afternoon
♠Dark Wraith♠,
I have published a recepie in your honor: Spam Frittatta. It was delicious!
Good afternoon, once again, Dread Pirate Rogers.
What you found was just the label attribute in the HTML form tag. That doesn't affect the size, color, and all of the other visual attributes. Those are done through the cascading style sheet by defining a style class for all buttons, both as they look in initial state, and as they look in other states like mouseovers and onclicks.
However, the picture you sent me by e-mail explained everything. I simply forgot that buttons in Safari have a different default shape! They're rounded on the edges, whereas in all Windows browsers, they're rectangular or nearly so. The "t" is being cut off because it's in the part of the button where the height it may occupy is less. Had the so-called "x-height" of the last letter in "Comment" been like that of most lower-case letters, there wouldn't have been any problem; but because the x-height of the letter "t" is about half-again as large as a normal, lower-case letter, that rounding Safari does to render buttons caused the cut-off.
It's easy enough to fix now that I can see what's happening.
The Dark Wraith will get it done before he goes back to class.
yes!!! now i can comment instead of commen.
All the comiseraters out there... I'm being importuned by fussy kids and so am not looking back to see who said what...
My fibro isn't too bad, considering the shape I know others can get in, luckily my flares seem to not come at the same time as my mate's(she's got it too), and when I remember to take my meds, I do purty good. Unfortunately, I don't think about meds unless I feel sick/in-pain, so I forget a fair bit.
The cleaning gig, if we get it, will pay nearly as much for 3 days work as I am getting for 40- so I can drop down to 35 hours or possibly even 32 if I care to lose my vacation hours...I need an average of 30 to maintain insurance. My 15 hour estimate is for bad weeks where I would have to do it all.... we do have several friends that need cash who will probably do about 50% of it...we basically need to make up about $300/month after taxes. If our bid is accepted, that's us doing 5 nights in a month out of 12-make it 6 to cover miscellaneous costs-like dinner and disinfectant. So it is doable even with my health-which is actually really good, I just hurt a lot.
There was something else....oh yes, I had to LOL at DW's post about putting one's wares out there in front of the consumers...I had the household asking what I was rolling on the floor about.
Hey, if I do end up with 3 jobs, do you think I could get Chimpy to ask me about when I sleep?
Mr. Pet Goat, et.al.
An interesting article on the Rove, Plame, Wilson, Cooper, Miller, Novak, Downing Street Minutes(how did that get in there) situation can be found at
http://tinyurl.com/ch599
(Quote): "Fitzgerald needs the reporters to contradict whatever whitewash the WH has come up with for this mess. Its not just the identity of the source, it is what the WH was saying and when that will show that they lied to Fitzgerald and the Grand Jury to cover up their manipulation of and lying about prewar intelligence".
Caution: The author identifies himself as "Economaniac" which perhaps betrays an inclination to look at situations from an economist's point of view and regular readers of this blog are probably only too aware of how maddeningly simple-minded those chaps can be...with the exception of the Dark Wraith of course who is the epitome of wit, wisdom, and understanding. (Whew! Good thing I preview these comments before posting.)
And then there are conspiracies of an "ancient" nature:
From the Counterpunch article--Tom Crumpacker: Who Has What to Hide About Luis Posada Carriles?:
http://tinyurl.com/ccxb9
"In his Staff Chief H. R. Haldeman's book on Watergate, he says when Nixon spoke in several places on tape about the risk that a Watergate probe could "blow the whole Bay of Pigs thing," he was actually referring to the JFK murder, not the invasion of Cuba".
PoLT's subtitle for Mr Crumpacker's article would be, "What do Luis Carriles, JFK, Geo Bush I, Richard Nixon, and the CIA have in common"?
Good evening, ♠Dark Wraith♠.
I guess perseverance won on that "commen" vs "comment" button! Good show:)
Dread Pirate Roberts - I know you and RD bought that fancy new camera. Obviously, you were just waiting for that wonderful opportunity to use it for the right thing... Dark Forums Calendar... yeah, baby!
Is anyone else experiancing the comment count-new vs/read-remaining as all unread or even functioning exactly correctly on one thread yet not functioning on others? Or even better, working fine, then suddenly not working and all the comments are unread again? I've seen the occasional glitch, but the past couple days it has been every thread practically. Maybe the coding doesn't like counting above 40?
I would love it if it was possible to number the comments, then if you knew there were x comments, y new, you could scroll to x-y without fearing you'd gone too far and missed something wondrous.
.....of course this would only be helpful if the comment count were working....
Good Evening DW,
Well, what are the odds that the Security Risk level will rise sometime next week with all the Plame news running amuck..or maybe the administration will order the major networks to focus on the tragedy in Idaho.."film at ten"..with little to no comment on the Plame Game..since "everybody already knew it, why bother rehashing old news".
The WSJ did an article on Fitzgerald Friday, nothing but praise..so not sure if I should think the guy can really do his job or not..all I know is this Administration has no honor and no sense of duty to this country.
I started a notebook of events when 9/11 occurred..and the first thing that seemed really strange was the U.S. turning down NATO's offer to patrol the coast..and then other little things like how quickly they knew who the hijackers were..I mean within hours..how they stalled for time to address Afghanistan..in hindsight seems to me like they really didn't give a crap about finding OBL..that and they didn't have a proper response in readiness..and this after all the time they had spent trying to get the guy before...
what the hell is the military gonna do if/when China goes after Taiwan? And anyone else notice how WSJ is pushing for them to get the ok to buy Unocal?
But I don't think the Washington Times is for it LOL!
I remember sending info on the Neocons to my brother a couple years back and him scoffing at it all..Talk about flashback..these guys all seem to have revenge for the sixties..maybe they had a bad hit or something.
Which reminds me, I miss Harry Nielsen..
Well, thanks for the stream of conciousness vent and to all a Good Night!
wild clover---glad to amuse. we go for the cheap joke every time here at chez bums.
OWL---about that calendar---only in your dreams.
Good evening, Dread Pirate Roberts.
We'll just have to have a talk with Rexroth's Daughter to see if some rather candid shots can be acquired without your knowledge. I am certain that, once the accolades start to come in from what will inevitably be a fan club for you (or, more precisely, yours), you will be glad that you surrendered your life to being a BeefMuffin for the greater good of the world and its artistically appreciative peoples.
The Dark Wraith sees a calendar starting to take shape.
Good evening, elf. I was wondering what had become of you the last couple of days.
First, it's pretty grim to me that I am terribly nostalgic for some of the musicians of decades now long gone, considering that, at the time, I was imagining the future would surely offer more talent.
Sadly, it has not fulfilled that hope of mine, at least not in anything remotely approaching full measure. Cripe, elf, The Fifth Dimension had more harmony in one stanza than...
I need to knock it off with that nonsense. It does no good; and I shouldn't be so harsh, anyway. There's some really good stuff out there right now. It's just mixed in with a whole lot of awful stuff.
Come to think about it, that's the way it's always been.
It was a bad sign that one of the last consulting gigs I did was to try to pull together some capital for a group that had done some of the most wretchéd music from the '60s you'd ever want to hear. And the sad part was that two songs in the cesspool of their repertoire from that era had been at the top of the charts. Mercifully, they had lost all rights to their music years ago; and as it turned out, they had even lost the right to use the original name of their group.
Needless to say, there wasn't a prayer of putting together any money for them to get a new album released. Perhaps, in retrospect, my inability to serve as a successful rainmaker for them was one of the greatest contributions I will have made to the future of the world.
Anyway, if you've read my unfinished series, "The Valerie Plame Scandal," you'll know that I don't believe Rove will get in any serious trouble for what he is alleged to have done. He might very well face a federal indictment for perjury before the grand jury, but we have no idea what he even told the grand jury, so there's no certainty that he'll be burned by that route.
Also, recall that George W. Bush refused to appear before the grand jury; instead, Fitzgerald interviewed him "informally" (if at some length) in the Oval Office, with legal counsel present. That means Mr. Bush could have lied through his teeth to the prosecutor, and little will be done.
At the same time, though, remember that Martha Stewart was sent to prison not because she lied, but rather because she failed to meet the standards of answering questions completely enough, as those standards are now being enforced under relatively new statutory language concerning non-custodial prosecutorial inquiries and responses thereto.
And the Wall Street Journal is going to do everything in its power to defend this Administration, possibly eroding what little credibility its editorial page has remaining, even among rather conservative business people.
And to think that rag sends me its solicitations every month telling me that, for every 10 students I get to sign up for the paper, Dow Jones will give me a free subscription for a certain period of time. (I know professors who've been doing that crap for years, and they have subscriptions that are going to last until Jesus returns.) I never did that unethical stuff, anyway; and now, I'm about to the point where, despite the paper's very good investigative journalism, I need to stop referencing their rag so often as a source for financial information.
Sooner or later, just as loyalty should be rewarded when it is to the end of protecting the righteous, loyalty should also be punished when it is to the end of protecting the mendacious.
The Dark Wraith thinks the Wall Street Journal should re-assess its loyalties.
Good evening, Wild Clover.
One way or the other, with that work schedule of yours, you're going to wear yourself down to a frazzle.
It troubles me so much that your story is not at all uncommon. I know so many people who are cobbling together several jobs just to make ends meet. It's like some story from the 18th Century the way a lot of people are breaking their backs to get by. And then we have these twisted neo-cons bleating about overhauling Social Security, with Bush himself warning people that their defined benefits will be substantially lower in the future.
Oh, and I love the part about how everyone will have to work more years, with the justification that rising life expectancies mean people can remain in the workforce longer. I wonder how you would respond to that when, by the age of 65, you've been busting your hump for so many years that you don't even have a hump to bust anymore.
God, it's all so simple and obvious to them.
Now, about the comment counter. The problem might be that, when I do changes to the internal machinery of how comments work, sometimes that can confuse the comment counting cookie that updates every time you click on a thread to expand it. I've seen that happen before; and obviously, for the past few days, I have been working on the engine that drives the threads and the way they work.
Alternately, the comment counting system won't work if a browser or some add-on is installed that stops cookies from being installed or loaded. A few of the anti-spyware packages do their work not by stopping spyware cookies, but by stopping or trying to "fix" every cookie that comes in to a computer.
Let me know if this problem persists.
Now, concerning your suggestion about a comment numbering system. The most frustrating project on which I am now working is a coding structure that will allow people to expand the comments, and then immediately jump to the first comment that has been posted since their last visit. In theory, it shouldn't be that hard, since that cookie I was talking about above carries the information about what comment was the last one read for every thread. In practice, however, it's turning out to be one of the harder coding tricks I've done in years.
Fortunately, I've been writing code long enough to know that it's only a matter of time before a magical trick will just suddenly hit me out of the blue, and I'll be able to get it done in a matter of a few hours.
The problem with this epiphany-driven coding ingenuity is that it only works after I've banged my head on the wall of failed efforts for weeks.
I just hate that part of real epiphany: it doesn't come cheaply, nor does it come just because I want it to.
Funny how that works.
The Dark Wraith sees a broader lesson for life in that.
Another real estate news report, this time from "The North Shore" of Metro. Boston.
BTW, it will help you to better understand what's being said if I mention that the towns cited run the gamut from very high end to low end, roughly like this:
Marblehead
Swampscott
Beverly
Peabody
Salem
Lynn
("Lynn, Lynn,
The City of Sin.
You never come out the way you went in.") There is nice real estate in Lynn, and one of its zip codes had one of Metro. Boston's highest appreciation rates of increase during this last run up in home prices, but nonetheless Lynn has a reputation for being a place you don't want to live. I've been happy here, however.
- oddjob
RATS! You'll have to scroll down & click on the "Lifestyles" section since it's not linking directly there like it ought to!
Apologies.
- oddjob
Yet another real estate report, this one national, and from CNN Money (& it spotlights another interesting facet of inverted yield curves, to boot).
- oddjob
Good morning DW and others. I've been consumed by my job at my university of doom lately. So I haven't gotten to post much.
The Sandra Day O'Connor thing got me real shaken up on Friday. In the past month or so I have seem to have started wandering about my office telling all those who will listen for a few minutes what trouble we as a nation are in. I end up sounding something like an Old testament prophet preaching about the end times.
The thing that I have noticed is that I read and put together more and more. People want to listen to me less and less. Heck I even used some things I have learned here at the Dark Wraith Forums to save someone from the peril and evil of an Interest Only home loan but only just barely.
But telling them about the Supreme Court and Downing Street and all that other stuff they just look at me like they could care less and are just concerned with their own lives. There are a few that listen but not too many. They all think I'm patently crazy for wanting to move as soon as I can.
Speaking of moving, since I found I would have to work for a year before I can run off to Grad school to pay down some debt. Does anyone around here have a nice Canadian business they can hire me on to. I'm a professional computer guy and I can teach some mean Karate too. That way even if I have to work at least I can be out of this crazy place (that being my little small southern town) and maybe even feel a bit safe again.
Also I know I've rambled but the Blog Decorm police live on DailyKos is you write a diary that sounds too conspriacy theoryish they might heckle you. Also they live on AmericaBlog if you say something mean about Andy Sullivan.
Anyway, have a great 4th everyone.
-Gary A
You sound a little like Cassandra (& we know how that turned out).
If you are still in the South, you are probably talking to people who approve of Shrub, so I'm not surprised they tune you out. My guess is they will continue to do so until they realize how they themselves are being damaged and conclude that whatever benefit they thought they were getting (or going to get) is no longer worth the damage they are receiving.
That's how that quote of Rev. Martin Niemöller's came to be, I think.
- oddjob
Oddjob, what's interesting is that while there are a few that are pro-Bush lots of them are anti-Bush but still somehow believe that we as a nation can recover from the disasterous things we are doing to ourselves as a nation. I have gotten to the point where I don't know if we can without serious and miraculous changes in our current Govt.
It's very true what your saying about they don't see the need to worry about it because it isn't happening to them.
I've also been reading Milton Mayers "They thought they were free" book about 10 Germans who lived through the Nazi years in Germany and talk about what life was like on the inside. This morning I think I finally understood something about why people get all riled up about comparing the US now to 1930's Germany.
It made sense to me that people all still caught up in thinking that unless we do the exact same thing as they did we can't be going down that road. What they fail to see is that the Plot of the Story our nation is acting out is distinctly American as opposed to distinctly German. What's happening here is happening for an entirely different set of reasons than what happened there in the 30s. For the Germans it was their to me their seemingly collective self-esteem problem after 2 lost wars and economic hardships and Hilter made them proud of themselves again.
For us it's our delusions of grandeur and our tremendous national ego that will do us in. We really have too much esteem for ourselves. And I would be remiss if I didn't point out that for us Ultra-nationalism also is firmly tied in with evangelical religion that shows our nation as ordained by God himself to do what we are doing. Which trying to bloster our own national ego at the cost of turning into everything that we desipise and wish to fight against.
Unless we as a nation wake up to the fact that we are not God's gift to the planet nor do we have to bring "Democracy and Freedom" to people that don't have it we are going to end up a tattered torn shadow of our former selves.
-Gary A
RawStory is reporting that the Governor of California is about to deliver an environmental bitch slap to ShrubCo.
- oddjob
Good Afternoon,
♠Dark Wraith♠.
Hi Gary A.
they just look at me like they could care less and are just concerned with their own lives.
Buck Up: people are beginning to wake up!
My sister, the queen of "I don't want to think about that" just woke up. She came to me with the news about the eminent domain decision, and now can't stop talking about the govt.
'Course I told her about the lawyer who is after Souter. She laughed & laughed....
DW, do you know of this Simmons fellow? Is he often correct, or simply often controversial? This is a Guardian article, and I realize the Guardian sometimes publishes stuff that could be better researched.
- oddjob
Good evening, Dark Wraith.. and everyone else. I know I've stopped by several times this afternoon.. anything to keep from applying myself to a COBOL program that needs fixing.
Oddjob's article is fairly hair-raising. Too bad we backed off on the "less gas consumption" technology for our vehicles. Sure, there are a few out there, but they're pretty pricy.
What was it I read? Something like "We learn history by repeating it?" and where did I read it? I guess it had something to do with the Iraq conflict.