We have a long-running dispute with the *stupidly noisy* residents of the apartment below our bedrooms. They have no sense of day and night. We have asked them nicely to be quiet, we pound on our floor and we have had screaming matches with them about it at three a.m. on the stairs of the building. They don't get it.
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Well, happy holidays people!
Edit: Note the quality difference between the first and the second image. Although I uploaded both of them from the same large source jpg file using IMCE, the Image Toolkit settings are different. It turns out that Drupal's out of the box, standard compression quality setting (using php's GD2 image toolkit) is 75%.
The first one was scaled using the 75% setting and it gave me a bunch of ugly jpeg artifacts (especially in the red area), yuck!
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If you don't know this piece, take the time to watch the video. If you know the piece, well, I don't have to encourage you, do I? This is the last movement, including the "shrill rejoicing" part that Shostakovich wrote in part as a response to potentially life threatening criticism leveled at him by the government.
There is a feeling of rejoicing, but it is one of forced rejoicing. It is as if someone is beating you with a stick and telling you 'You're celebrating!' over and over again. Eventually, you walk away muttering 'Yes, I'm celebrating.'
Source: wikipedia
Look at Bernstein's face at the end of the movement. He, the whole orchestra, and the entire audience, have invested their complete emotional energy into these minutes. The result is spectacular.
On January 7th, 2008, I will be hand delivering my absentee ballot to the Napoleon County clerk in Napoleon, Michigan. This is one week before the Michigan presidential primary. I am inviting Ron Paul supporters to join me for a rally in support of Ron Paul. Please check out the meetup.com site for details:
I'm ordering one for myself for Christmas (and maybe one for you too!)
On Rogier van Bekel's blog I found this post about a poster commissioned and paid for by the London Metropolitan Police ... also a related post about a similar poster done by the design-impaired, but equally moronic Chicago Police Force.
This stuff upsets me so much ... but we don't need my take on this today. Rogier sums it up better than I ever could:
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This is a support march in Austin, Texas, on December 17, 2007, the anniversary of the Boston Tea Party, and the day when Ron Paul's campaign raised over $6 million from individual donations.
So I wanted one of those nice "tag clouds" of key words from my site. No problem! Drupal has the Tagadelic module. Once downloaded and unzipped to my /sites/all/modules folder, module activated, I was ready to go! ... Right? Well, no. This thing is so simple, no one seems to have documented the on switch ... I found a lot of code samples for various interesting implementations. I found its settings in my Drupal installation, but no how-to.
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This is the level of dedication that Ron Paul has inspired:
Architect and environmentalist Colin Oglesbay (Colin is my cousin) shows off his latest renovation project on Blueprint for Green. The house is going to feature a solar garage that will charge the car that drives Colin and his wife Erin to work, a "living" wall that is comprised of living biomass (chia wall, says Colin), special thermal and recycled building materials, and a big slab of black concrete to store solar energy. You have to click episode 12, segment 2 to see Colin, and it's unclear how long episode 12 will be on the front page [1], but it is really exciting to see the great initiatives that are happening to find sustainable ways of living. You rock, Colin!
"Nur wer nichts tut macht keine Fehler."
"Only those who do nothing make no mistakes."
— [If you know the source of this quote please let me know. Thanks!]
So having gone from Drupal 5.2 to 5.3 only last week, Drupal 5.4 came out this week and I thought I had better streamline my update process, putting some stuff in place to make the process smooth, quick, easy and *reversible* ... just in case. Since Drupal 5.5 came out while I was sleeping last night, I can now test my own instructions and time the entire update process ... see below for the results.
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"Dear Sally,
I'm 13 years old now, and many of my friends have already got their periods. Some of them have been having them for 2 years!
I feel stupid asking this, but is there anything wrong with me?
Yours sincerely,
Micheal"
Well ... this hovered near the top of my inbox for couple of days waiting for my bi-weekly routine skim/delete process. When I scanned it, something seems awry:
"Dear customer!
Other customers who purchased or reviewed Getting Things Done, the Art of Stress-Free Productivity also bought Eclipse by Stephenie Meyer. So we are certain you will be thrilled to know that Eclipse is now available. Order your copy today!"
So far so good ... then I read the synopsis under the cover illustration. Have a look:
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I just read an article on the Daily Kos where the author, "One Pissed Off Liberal", asserts that we are in a downward slide towards fascism. In summary, these signs are apparent:
The US has fallen to a fascist coup.
The American military/political establishment has long been guilty of the most heinous crimes imaginable.
The war in Iraq was always about oil and empire and was planned far in advance of 9/11/2001.
The elections of 2000 and 2004 were stolen.
The so-called ‘War on Terrorism’ is bogus.
Failure to impeach will ensure the end of our democracy.
The Democrats have sold us out.
Bush and his cronies and everyone who supports them or enables them are all war criminals and traitors.
We are never leaving Iraq.
We are NOT a democracy.
We are not free.
