All I can say is that this is completely disturbing and deeply saddens me, that we have come this far. But this is just another step deeper bellow the line of despair. And as we move further away from God it can only get worse. :’(
For senior, abortion a medium for art, political discourse
–Mit The Destroyer
3 Years ago today, I had only gotten 3 hours of sleep the night before due to my current job. That afternoon I had an interview in San Louis Obispo, as I was looking for a new job that wouldn’t take my entire life, as my current job was requiring me to work on average 7 days a week 12 hours a day (which didn’t mean I was working Saturday or Sunday). So I asked my mom if she would be willing to drive me up to the interview, as I felt I was in no condition to drive to San Louis Obispo and back, which was a 4 hour round trip from where I was living at the time. My mom obliged as she didn’t want any harm to come to me.
I arrived at the interview at about 2:30pm, with 30 minutes to spare, as my interview wasn’t until 3pm. The 45 minute interview went ok. I said my goodbyes to my interviewers, and promptly left, to merge with the rest of the Friday afternoon traffic, of the 101 freeway, to make our way home. Just as we left the city limits of San Louis Obispo I noticed that my mom began to veer off into the left soft shoulder of the 101 freeway. I softly spoke, “mom did you notice you just veered into the soft shoulder on your left.” Which startled her causing to over correct by yanking the steering wheel all the way to the right, causing her car to cross the entire 101 freeway and then to flip.
To do this day I still don’t know how many times the car flipped as we both blacked out for a minute, and when we awoke we where both upside down, faces smashed into the mud of the soft shoulder on the far right side of the 101 freeway. By The grace of God he directed our car so that no other car hit us as we traveled from one side of the freeway to the other side and then kept our car from flipping until we arrived on the soft shoulder that was muddy, due to the rain from the last week or so. Had we flipped while on the freeway or had it not been raining the week before so that the soft shoulder was hard ground we would have surely died or at the very least been paralyzed from the neck down. On top of that there was an EMT that had just gotten off duty that witnessed the accident and help me out of the car as we waited for the paramedics to arrive; to get my mom out of the car, who was still trapped under the car, and take us to the emergency room.
Here are some pictures of what my mom’s car looked like after the accident:
About 2 1/2 years ago my CRT monitor died (went up in a puff of smoke), and so I decided it was time to finally upgrade to a nice 19 inch LCD. Unfortunately, my video editing machine would no longer boot into windows 2000 (except safe mode), because the last g550 matrox driver release, for windows 2000, doesn’t support LCD monitors. Thus, my only option to get support was to upgrade to windows XP which I didn’t have the money to do.
So I figured I would research to see if GNU/Linux could be a viable video editing platform. But everything I read at the time said no. So I just let the machine sit there for the last two years. About a couple of weeks ago I finally decided to take the plunge and installed Ubuntu on it, so I could at least backup the data that was there and then start clean. Luckily in this time frame GNU/Linux has gain the ability to mount NTFS drives, so I didn’t have to reformat my drives and thus was able to use GNU/Linux to backup the data that was there.
While I was backing up my data I discovered a folder on one of the NTFS drives I had never seen before called “RECYLER”. So I started poking around in the newly discovered folder to see what was in there. And low and behold I found a gold mine. I found the master print of my Camp Attitude video (ogg) I did 5 years ago, which I thought I had forever lost due to me accidentally deleting the wrong file, and not noticing until a year later. I can’t tell you how jubilated I am, this is the find of the century, as I thought I would never be able to make a DVD of this video, so I can show the video to friends and family on a TV instead of a poorly encoded postage stamp QuickTime video on my computer. Which, up to this point was my last remaining copy. So in celebration I’ve made a copy of the master in ogg theora, so you can view the Camp Attitude video (in ogg), here on the website.
Even though I’ve switched my party affiliation to the Libertarian recently, I was put on the trail of 2008 Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul by a co-worker of mine, saying he ran a few years back as the Libertarian presidential candidate. As far as I can tell it seems he has always been a Republican except for the year he ran as a Libertarian president. Despite being a Republican from what I have gathered thus far he votes in line with libertarian ideals consistently. Anyways, the reason for this post is I was hoping someone out there knew where I can find the official voting records our Representatives, so I can confirm what I read so far at Wikipedia and his website.
But I was thinking you know what I should use that resource to look at every Representative, so I’m better informed on who is really telling the truth at campaign time. As words mean nothing my book. but actions do.
On the same token it would be nice to have the bills cross referenced with the bill it self so I can read and attempt to understand the implications and confirm that what the summary states, matches what is written in the bill.
While debugging some code on a site I work on. I discovered a new double class bug in IE7. The weird thing about it is the code that causes the double class bug to appear is not even related to it. Sample Test case:
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN”
“http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd”>
<html xmlns=”http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml” xml:lang=”en” lang=”en”>
<head>
<title>IE7 Uncle Double Class Selector Bug</title>
<meta http-equiv=”Content-Type” content=”text/html; charset=iso-8859-1″ />
<meta http-equiv=”Content-Style-Type” content=”text/css” />
<style type=”text/css” media=”screen”>
p {
color: red;
}
.class1.class2 p {
color: green;
}
.foo + p { }
</style>
</head>
<body>
<div class=”class1 class2″>
<p>I’m Green</p>
<p>I’m Green Too</p>
</div>
<p>I’m red</p>
</body>
</html>
I’ve set all paragraphs to default to the color red. However, due to the double class selector changing its children’s paragraphs to green, and also creating a select any element that has the class foo, whose siblings are paragraphs (doesn’t matter if you set styles or not in that selector, or if the .foo is changed to * or to an element selector that is the same element as the parent with the double class selector [e.g. * + p {}, or div + {}]) it will cause IE7 to create a symbiotic relationship between “.class1.class2 p:last-child” and “.class1.class2 + p:first-of-type”. Thus, if you set styles on “.class1.class2 + p:first-of-type” it will cause “.class1.class2 p:last-child” to get those same styles (and visa versa). Luckily there are a couple work a rounds (ordered by effectiveness).
The question remains can the technique I showed in Fix for IE’s lack of application/xhtml+xml mean we can now embed other XML based formats inside the XHTML, as XML promises? The answer is, absolutely!
Here is a XHTML, SVG, MathML example page, that shows MathML and SVG embedded right along side an XHTML document. To properly view the page you will need to download these MathML Fonts, and these SVG and MathML plugins if viewing in IE.
<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”utf-8″?>
<?xml-stylesheet type=”text/xsl” href=”svgMathMlXhtml.xsl”?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1 plus MathML 2.0 plus SVG 1.1//EN”
“http://www.w3.org/2002/04/xhtml-math-svg/xhtml-math-svg.dtd”[
<!ENTITY % MATHML.prefixed "INCLUDE" >
<!ENTITY % MATHML.prefix "math" >
<!ENTITY % SVG.prefixed "INCLUDE" >
<!ENTITY % SVG.prefix "svg" >
]>
<html
xmlns=”http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml”
xmlns:svg=”http://www.w3.org/2000/svg”
xmlns:math=”http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML”
xml:lang=”en”>
<head>
<title>Advanced Example</title>
<meta http-equiv=”Content-Type” content=”application/xhtml+xml; charset=UTF-8″ />
<object id=”AdobeSVG” classid=”clsid:78156a80-c6a1-4bbf-8e6a-3cd390eeb4e2″></object>
<?import namespace=”svg” implementation=”#AdobeSVG”?>
<object id=”MathPlayer” classid=”clsid:32F66A20-7614-11D4-BD11-00104BD3F987″></object>
<?import namespace=”math” implementation=”#MathPlayer”?>
</head>
<xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl=”http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform”
xmlns=”http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml”
xmlns:math=”http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML”
xmlns:svg=”http://www.w3.org/2000/svg”
version=”1.0″>
<xsl:output method=”xml” encoding=”utf-8″/>
<xsl:template match=”/”>
<xsl:copy-of select=”node()”/>
</xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>
Have you ever tried sending a 100% strictly compliant xhtml to IE, so that IE would use It’s xml engine to render the page? If so, you know that IE borks on it and forces you to download the xhtml file. I’m here to tell you that I’ve found a work around, that is standards compliant and gets around that limitation and forces IE to use the XML rendering engine. Two steps are required for it to work:
<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”utf-8″?>
<?xml-stylesheet type=”text/xsl” href=”fixMe.xsl”?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN”
“http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd”>
<html xmlns=”http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml” xml:lang=”en”>
<head>
<meta http-equiv=”Content-Type” content=”application/xhtml+xml; charset=UTF-8″ />
<title>Simple Example < /title>
</head>
<body>
<!– xhtml code here –>
<body>
</html>
<xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl=”http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform” xmlns=”http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml” version=”1.0″>
<xsl:output method=”xml” encoding=”utf-8″/>
<xsl:template match=”/”>
<xsl:copy-of select=”node()”/>
</xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>
As far as IE is concerned you sent it a XML file, with an XSLT sheet applied to it. It’s XML rendering engine then applies the XSLT sheet which converts the XML page into an XHTML page. Without the XSLT sheet applied IE would have just showed us the source code to the page.
I discovered this when I was developing this website, to teach myself XSLT. And knowing what I know about mime-types I figured it should work if I just changed the mime-type for XHTML from application/xhtml+xml to it’s alternate compliant mime-type of application/xml1, seeing as IE wasn’t having any issues displaying XML files sent as application/xml.
Update: To see an example with SVG and MathML mixed in with the XHTML read So now that IE unerstands pure XHTML…
Here are a couple of links to parodies of the I’m a Mac I’m and I’m a PC Mac commercials:
If you haven’t yet seen the original Mac commercials, get off your lazy but and head over to the apple site and watch them.
The New York Times is running a piece entiteld Darwin’s God. Which analyzes why throughout human history mankind has universally had some sort of belief in a god and or the supernatural. The article summarizes the work DR Scott Atran, who has spent several years researching and hypothesizing the reason why anthropologists are constantly finding religious artifacts among dead and living civilizations. His argument boils down to the concept that the belief in a higher power is a side effect of our ability quickly asses our surroundings in order that we survive. The example given:
Agent detection evolved because assuming the presence of an agent — which is jargon for any creature with volitional, independent behavior — is more adaptive than assuming its absence. If you are a caveman on the savannah, you are better off presuming that the motion you detect out of the corner of your eye is an agent and something to run from, even if you are wrong. If it turns out to have been just the rustling of leaves, you are still alive; if what you took to be leaves rustling was really a hyena about to pounce, you are dead.
The problem with his argument is that he doesn’t take it to its logical conclusion. If you did take the argument to the logical conclusion you would arrive at the fact that nothing exists at all unless there was a primary first cause, out side the natural system, a higher power if you will. Don’t take my word for it as Alvin Plantinga has argued it much more eloquently.
