When Working is Slacking

August 21, 2005 - 9:50pm

This weekend, I made a promise to myself. I was going to force myself to slack off and stop my work. In some ways, the plan worked out well, I put off a variety of telephone calls, and was largely unresponsive to e-mail. In addition, I made absolutely no progress on some contracts -- but unfortunately, my plan went to crap by friday evening. I began a full redesign on a site intended to connect public opinion with FCC policy makers. It uses drupal -- of course. The end result was one of the best designs I've ever pulled off -- though the site hasn't even left the "alpha stage". The site's organization and functionality that would make even the biggest drupal snob say, "a truly fine implementation -- robust, yet delicate and refined -- playful, and grave -- funky, yet institutional. A truly rich blend for the consuire with a taste for elegence." Yes, that is exactly how imagine them saying it.

Death of a Rattlesnake

August 19, 2005 - 5:43pm

About twice a week, I drive 45 minutes out of town and into the Texas boondocks. My destination, the central compound of Gene Crick and Main.org , is deep within bat country. Upon arrival at the compound, the wind wispers, "You ain't from 'round here, are ya' boy?" Basdrop is one place where I can't help but feel that the abnormally close together eyes of Texas bumpkinism upon me -- it must be my shaggy hair, and urban hipster look..

That said, Gene's compound is a wonderful hideout that is in a truly beautiful part of the country. However, as we are forward thinking, pragmatic types dedicated towards protecting and advancing democracy through the internet(that's what we keep telling ourselves, at least), the great spirit of Bush country constantly keeps us on our toes. For example, today, upon exiting my car, I suddenly found myself involuntarily jumping 5 feet in the air. Upon landing, I looked at the curious blur that had spurred my reflexive action. It was nothing less than an adolescent western diamond-back rattlesnake.

The Law of Blogging and Work

August 18, 2005 - 11:20pm

A geek's daily number of blog posts is inversely proportional to the amount of real work they have to get done.

That's my excuse, and I'm sticking to it. And to paraphrase Mark Twain, all generalizations are false, including the one I just made.

Poorman's Carpal Tunnel Syndrome Remedy

August 15, 2005 - 10:27am

Now, I'm not a doctor, don't pretend to be, and my opinion is not "medical advice". I am not any sort of trained medical practioner or professional. For all legal purposes, don't listen to me, because I don't know what I'm talking about. See a doctor. He is a brilliant man, and will declare, "you have carpal tunnel, stop doing whatever you did to cause this, and see this more expensive specialist.. but first pay me". And you will say, "thanks for the tip, doc."

On a less cynical note, be careful, failure to treat carpal tunnel properly can result in permanent damage. In certain cases, we're talking about losing the majority of sensation and use of an entire hand.

Regarding my Left Wrist's Poor Work Ethic

August 14, 2005 - 6:10pm
Last night, I went through my e-mail boxes, blogs, and instant messenger conversations to figure out my daily word count. To my horror, I found that I was hovering around a 5000-6000 words-a-day range. How this has happened, I do not know. What I do know, is that I've begun to feel the consequences. On the bottom of my left wrist, there is a quarter-sized area of purple, and blue discoloration that indicate high amounts of blood flow to -- er -- the carpal tunnel. This is not the first time this has happened. Long story short, over the last 6 months I've literally worked, coded, and typed my left hand into disrepair.

A Renaissance of the Commons

August 13, 2005 - 8:04pm

How the New Sciences and Internet Are Framing A New Global Identity and Order

By John Clippinger and David Bollier (transcribed from full PDF)

Cultures, like people, can run out of ideas. They can exhaust themselves in the face of events and ideas they can no longer predict, explain or control. When they do, they revert to the repetitive assertion of the simplest and most soothing of their founding ideas. These attempts to ward off the unknown through the ritualized assertion of familiar core beliefs are what anthropologists call a "ghost dance." The name is taken from a Sioux Indian ritual dance designed to resurrect ancestors. Sioux warriors believed the dance made them impervious to the bullets of the U.S. Calvary in the 1870s. What may seem to be a bizarre ritual is in fact a well-documented practice of all cultures, traditional and modern. Many events in contemporary American life can be understood as a ghost dance of denial: ritualistic behavior that people hope will ward off unpleasant social and economic realities, ecological perils and new global interdependencies that are profoundly threatening to established cultural norms. The ghost dance desperately repeats unexamined, unquestioned "truths" despite contrary evidence.

James Burnham and the Managerial Revolution

August 9, 2005 - 10:00pm

By GEORGE ORWELL

James Burnham’s book, The Managerial Revolution, made a considerable stir both in the United States and in this country at the time when it was published, and its main thesis has been so much discussed that a detailed exposition of it is hardly necessary. As shortly as I can summarize it, the thesis is this:

Capitalism is disappearing, but Socialism is not replacing it. What is now arising is a new kind of planned, centralized society which will be neither capitalist nor, in any accepted sense of the word, democratic. The rulers of this new society will be the people who effectively control the means of production: that is, business executives, technicians, bureaucrats and soldiers, lumped together by Burnham under the name of ‘managers’. These people will eliminate the old capitalist class, crush the working class, and so organize society that all power and economic privilege remain in their own hands. Private property rights will be abolished, but common ownership will not be established. The new ‘managerial’ societies will not consist of a patchwork of small, independent states, but of great super-states grouped round the main industrial centres in Europe, Asia, and America. These super-states will fight among themselves for possession of the remaining uncaptured portions of the earth, but will probably be unable to conquer one another completely. Internally, each society will be hierarchical, with an aristocracy of talent at the top and a mass of semi-slaves at the bottom.

The Steve Balmer Vibe: Turn on, tune in, and drop out

August 9, 2005 - 4:48pm
Steve Balmer

This is by far the most twisted, and disturbing film I have ever watched. Not recommended for the emotional disturbed or those taking recreational psychotrophic substances for the first time.

Steve Balmer: The Remix

Priceless...

August 8, 2005 - 10:29pm
whack

A friend named Jessica brought this to my attention. She scans the local online personal ads every day hoping to stumble across this sort of gem. Now, making fun of people is not normally my thing, but jesus -- sometimes people are just asking for it. Now as though this picture wasn't priceless enough in itself, the boy who posted this personal (he calls himself "Icy"... god this is like a satire...) is also aspiring rapper. Below I've reposted his ballad from the street so that it can be preserved for eternity:

Horizontal Navigation Menus in Drupal Using CSS (Part Deux)

August 8, 2005 - 3:46pm

In our last episode, we learned how use the "float" and "display:inline" css-sledge hammers to knock drupal's nested vertical lists into displaying horizontally. Moreover we acheived this feet using three simple css rules that apply to all lists in our top-nav div to infinity. We rejoiced at the simplicity of our solution, and for a short while we believed that everything was okay in our world.

Today, the complexities of CSS will smack our rosey cheeks, burst our bubbles of optimisim, and send us hurdling back to reality. This tutorial offers nothing but blood, sweat, and tears. You will expect things to make sense -- and IE Explorer will make you look like a fool for it. However, it is a timeless truth that anything worth attaining requires sacrafice; and those who sacrafice their sanity to learning these bits of obscure knowledge will be one day kings of drupal theming, and standards based design -- they may even trick the entire drupal community into thinking they are "experts" ;-)

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