…can’t quite remember, but now I’m forced to repost this…
http://www.flickr.com/photos/pollywogs/sets/72157602783010702/
One day, I’ll sit down and write an actual blog post about an actual something…
I am not sure if this is temporary or permanent, I’ll see what kind of feedback I get. The old theme had a couple depreciated WordPress tags that I didn’t realize needed updated until I did a little digging yesterday. Once in a while I’d get a “Not Found” message on my homepage, but I didn’t realize that it was occurring for other people and had no way around until yesterday. I updated the offending tags (that I could find with my poor coding skills) but it didn’t seem to fix the problem on the various machines we have around here. So, I threw on a different theme (called Foliage) in case the old one had problems I couldn’t find. This also did not seem to fix the problem, but I ran out of time and motivation, work had caught back up with me at that point…
Anyway, I like this theme a lot, but it has a few issues. It does something weird with the CSS that I can’t figure out that scales the entire page rather than just sets the font sizes. I increased the font size, and it widens the body? Why not just define them both independently? Anyway, I can’t figure out how to change it yet. You can hold down the Ctrl key and scroll up/down with your middle mouse button to change font size. I adjusted the default font size from 62.5% to 75% after editing the .css, and it now renders pretty nice on 800 pixel width monitors, although on my Firefox/Ubuntu setup the images don’t render very nicely with the font size adjusting the entire width. This does not seem to cause a problem with browsers on Windows platforms. Also, note that there is a number to the right of the post title and post date that if you click shows you the comments for an entry. I do like the way it displays comments along side…
Finally, all of my blog-bling is gone. I don’t know what to do about that. I may stick it all on it’s own page. For a long time now I’ve wanted to completely re-vamp the way all of this shit worked. I want garrettsocling.com to be a personal landing page for me, and my domain pollywogsblog.com to be my personal blog (only loosely associated, so that you actually have to dig a little before you equate a baseball bat up John McCain’s ass with Garrett Socling). Perhaps this will be motivation for me to get my butt in gear. This theme would be idea for my personal page, and the Painted Desert theme would be ideal for my Pollywogs. We’ll see if I ever find the motivation…
I rethemed my laptop as well. I had been using a custom theme I composed out of Clearlooks-DarkLime, Buff icons and a few other choices, but I recently switched to this Dust Ubuntu theme, which I like a lot (primarily because now I can read the popup menu when using ThunderBird!). I went with Rodent icons as they are very clean and modern looking, as well as some background I found somewhere. Here’s a before and after:
Old:
New:
Got one a few days ago. This is one of those ‘forwarded a million times’ emails, and it came to me unattributed. I may still kiss someone’s feet for sending it my way, even though they did not craft this piece. Usually I’m less than impressed with the drivel that gets bounced around. This one, however, struck me and gave me pause. I liked it, and recognized something in the writer within myself. Perhaps you’ll find it rises your ire as well.
—
Once again, just providing info. I’m a little confused. Let me see if I have this straight.
If you grow up in Hawaii, raised by your grandparents, you’re ‘exotic, different.’ Grow up in Alaska eating moose burgers, a quintessential an American story.
If your name is Barack you’re a radical, unpatriotic Muslim. Name your kids Willow, Trig and Track, you’re a maverick.
Graduate from Harvard law School and you are unstable. Attend 5 different small colleges before graduating, you’re well grounded.
If you spend 3 years as a brilliant community organizer, become the first black President of the Harvard Law Review, create a voter registration drive that registers 150,000 new voters, spend 12 years as a Constitutional Law professor, spend 8 years as a State Senator representing a district with over 750,000 people, become chairman of the state Senate’s Health and Human Services committee, spend 4 years in the United States Senate representing a state of 13 million people while sponsoring 131 bills and serving on the Foreign Affairs, Environment and Public Works and Veteran’s Affairs committees, you don’t have any real leadership experience.
If your total resume is: local weather girl, 4 years on the city council and 6 years as the mayor of a town with less than 7,000 people, 20 months as the governor of a state with only 650,000 people, then you’re qualified to become the country’s second highest ranking executive.
If you have been married to the same woman for 19 years while raising 2 beautiful daughters, all within Protestant churches, you’re not a real Christian.
If you cheated on your first wife with a rich heiress, and left your disfigured wife and married the heiress the next month, you’re a Christian. If you teach responsible, age appropriate sex education, including the proper use of birth control, you are eroding the fiber of society.
If, while governor, you staunchly advocate abstinence only, with no other option in sex education in your state’s school system while your unwed teen daughter ends up pregnant, you’re very responsible.
If your wife is a Harvard graduate lawyer who gave up a position in a prestigious law firm to work for the betterment of her inner city community, then gave that up to raise a family, your family’s values don’t represent America’s.
If you’re husband is nicknamed ‘First Dude’, with at least one DWI conviction and no college education, who didn’t register to vote until age 25 and once was a member of a group that advocated the secession of Alaska from the USA, your family is extremely admirable. OK, much clearer now.
—
Pretty concise, don’t you think?
When viewing such a creature, you’d be hard pressed to describe it. In fact, you may exclaim “Hell, there ain’t no such animal“. I can’t say what political party I belong to because no political party represents me.
There is nothing wrong with conservatives in general, I myself have conservative leanings. It is pretending that they all stand under one big tent that causes problems, as they all then move in lockstep behind some very poor leaders.
Republicans have historically been very good at keeping everyone reigned in by pandering heavily on a few core issues that are knee jerk issues for some people (gays, guns and god), but the past eight years prove that just because you say you love baby jesus and guns, and hate a-hrabs and queers, doesn’t mean you are competent to run a country:
Deep down inside, I am have conservative leanings, I guess you could call them Libertarian. I believe in a strong limit on the federal government’s powers. I think people have the right to be free to do whatever they like in the privacy of their own homes (including owning fully automatic AK-47s, worshiping whatever they choose, and homosexual oral sodomy), and the government needs to quit pretending that they are our mommy or our nanny, that they can legislate “what is Right” with law after law after law.
I think national governments in general are a joke, a structure that exists simply to perpetuate themselves and defend themselves against other national governments…while providing very little in return. Local and state government, those give you services you can see and use every day. The federal government…just what the hell ARE they doing with all of my money???
That said, I am COMPLETELY disillusioned with the conservative movement of the past forty plus years, and would never call myself a Republican as I can’t abide by Reaganomics, a standing army geared towards fighting a third World War, war-hawks in general who think that military force is a diplomatic tool, fear and disgust towards gays, Muslims, atheists and people of ethnicity, and all the other platforms that Republicans have stood upon for the past thirty years.
The debate is framed so that only these knee-jerk issues matter, while defense spending spirals out of control, our media is owned by international mega-conglomerations which get orders to promote or bury stories based on profits, our national infrastructure decays, our educational systems costs increase and yet continue to churn out mediocre students, our health care costs spiral up at the same time our infant mortality rate increases to the second worst in the industrialized world…damn I’m riled up…
I just watched the most horrible movie ever…An American Crime. Fuck. Sometimes I think “burn it all down”, Jesus I hate humanity, we’re too broken to ever survive long enough to become anything as a people, as a society, as a culture, as a species…and if we do survive long enough, what we’ll eventually become will be to horrific to mention…a degenerate, unjust, and cutthroat mess much like today, but codified into a way of life…we’ll eventually know no other way of being…
This movie was worse than that fucking “Funny Games”. Just as vile, but based on a true story.
—
So my bookmarks have gotten out of hand, and I’ve taken some blog Ex-Lax to help relieve some of the pressure. I have a couple more blog posts in waiting as well, but they’re going to have to wait. The next one is a blog post about installing Ubuntu over a netboot connection, a John McCain extravaganza (not the good kind), and the one after that is a really weird one, the kind which ought to be read at 2am in an altered state (if I get the guts to post that one). If I ever get through all of these links that is…
Without further ado, things I’ve come across that I’ve felt compelled to share…
—
Shouldn’t our money be “actually worth something”? Doesn’t that sound like a good idea? You may even think “isn’t our money actually worth something”. You’d be deluded if you thought such a thing, our money is only worth what the government claims it to be worth, and has been for about five decades now. In case you haven’t noticed, over the past eight years the rest of the world has had less and less faith that our government 1) is telling the truth and 2) knows anything other than how to lie and invade other sovereign nations.
—
The US IS in need of a rebellion. Howard Zinn told this to Al Jazeera:
It] lies in American people becoming resentful enough and indignant enough over what has happened to their country, over the loss of dignity in the world, over the starving of human resources in the United States, the starving of education and health, the takeover of the political mechanism by corporate power and the result this has on the everyday lives of the American people.
[There is also] the higher and higher food prices, the more and more insecurity, the sending of the young people to war.
I think all of this may very well build up into a movement of rebellion.
We have seen movements of rebellion in the past: The labour movement, the civil rights movement, the movement against the war in Vietnam.
I think we may well see, if the United States keeps heading in the same direction, a new popular movement. That is the only hope for the United States.
Let me be the first to tell you: If the god damn ass clowns who are currently in power are banking on electing John “Mr. Flip Flop” “Bush” “baseball bat up the anus until it sticks out his mouth” “sold my soul to the devil” McCain and having him croak after a year so they can get Sarah “George W” Palin in power…well, I’m personally going to lead whomever I can muster in support of anyone interested in defending the Constitution against all enemies, foreign AND domestic…
—
2010 is going to be an awesome time for fuel efficiency. It is a shame this didn’t start 20 years ago. Remember, car companies whinged to Congress about how they could not improve efficiency, so on and so on…
There’s been talk about the VW 1L concept for years. Since VW built the original, fuel economy, safety, price, and release date has been speculated upon and argued about, and I’d finally stopped thinking it was ever going to happen. However, according to VW’s CEO, it should hit the market in 2010.
The VW 1L is so named because, in theory, it only consumes one liter of fuel per 100 kilometers traveled. For those of us in the US, this translates into about 235 MPG. Definitely far and above anything on the market currently. The concept, developed in 2002, actually got better fuel economy, scoring a sweet .89L/100km in VW testing. It’s likely to use more fuel in real world use, but with that kind of mileage in testing it’s unlikely that anyone would complain about an “unsatisfactory 200 MPG.”
The Concept Chevy Volt, with its revolutionary E-Flex Propulsion System, will be different than any previous
electric vehicle because it will use a lithium-ion battery
with a variety of range-extending onboard power
sources, including gas and, in some vehicles, E85
ethanol(1) to recharge the battery while driving.When it comes to plugging in, the Volt will be designed to use a common 110–volt household plug. For someone who drives less than 40 miles a day, Chevy Volt will use zero gasoline and produce zero emissions.(2) For longer trips, Chevy Volt’s range-extending power source kicks in to recharge the lithium-ion battery pack as required.
In electric mode, the Prius gets 99.9 miles a gallon, according to a gauge on a screen in the middle of the dashboard.
But it cannot go very far: the plug-in hybrid’s two batteries hold enough power for only seven miles, said Saúl Ibarra, a product specialist with Toyota who worked on developing the Prius.
By contrast, G.M. claims that the Volt will be able to hold a charge equal to 40 miles, after a six-hour charge.
Still, the electric mode of the Toyota plug-in is enough to start the car and run it until the engine reaches the point where it needs to tap the gasoline engine. The plug-in Prius can stay in electric mode until 62 miles per hour, versus around 30 miles per hour for the conventional Prius, Mr. Iba- rra said.
And my favorite, Better Place (seriously read this article it is awesome):
Once Agassi had $200 million to fund the grid and a government serious about tax breaks, Renault began developing an electric car that would be ready for the market by 2011. Agassi promises that 50 Renault prototypes will be on Israeli roads this winter—and 1,000 stations will be there to recharge them. He’s not talking about some three-wheeled, pimped-out golf carts, either, but blend-in-at-the-school-parking-lot cars and SUVs. The sedan will be mid-size, similar to Renault’s popular Laguna and Mégane models and able to go from 0 to 60 in a respectable 7.5 seconds. Better Place expects to have close to 100,000 vehicles by the end of 2011. And while these might show up in Israel first, Renault plans for them eventually to be on roads worldwide. “We wouldn’t have invested if we thought this was a onetime, one-place story,” says Patrick Pélata, Renault’s product manager and Ghosn’s number two.
—
You know what a shitty Presidential candidate John Kerry was? The silly cunt was soft on Terror! Just like those hippy pinko fags over at the Rand Corporation:
“Terrorists should be perceived and described as criminals, not holy warriors, and our analysis suggests there is no battlefield solution to terrorism,” said Seth Jones, the lead author of the study and a Rand political scientist.
—
Perchlorate is everywhere. It is not something you want to be everywhere, but you’re probably drinking it right now:
It has also been found in the drinking water for at least 22 states at extremely alarming levels. Perhaps the scariest statistic is that perchlorate has been found in the breast milk of 97% of the mothers who were tested.
…
To illustrate the severity of the problem, a CDC study demonstrated that in the 36% of women in the U.S. with low iodine intake, just about any exposure to perchlorate at all was associated with a substantial change in levels of thyroid hormone.
—
Speaking of how depressing our food supply situation is, did you know that eating wild-caught seafood ought to be a crime? If you absolutely must eat some seafood (much in the way you absolutely must beat a defenseless baby with a mallet), please refer to this chart. Even though New Zealand takes their fishery management very seriously, it is painfully obvious that they are still not doing enough. No more Orange Roughy for me.
—
You ever need to share a file (other than a photo: tinypic.com ftmfw!!!) and didn’t want to have to wait for the other person to accept your pipebytes.com link? http://www.filedropper.com/ Instopresto, you can share your file anywhere, easily, perfectly. Hell, screw yousendit.com and all the other pretenders, as long as filedropper.com doesn’t run out of VC, it is the supreme bomb-bizzle of sharing a file with someone else.
—
An amusing little distraction between being randomly formed out of DNA and the inevitable snuffing out of your personal existence.
—
Oh wow…only 88 more items. And these are just the ones on my home computer, I have a ton more on my work laptop. I gotta get my act together…or just dump all of the links here for you to sort out…ahh, the hard way, the easy way, or to put it off…hmm…
« Previous Entries Next Entries »
