Comments should be working again. I was overrun with automated spammers on Saturday.
Blog
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Lucky snake!
Alternative Title: Is that a tentacle growing out of my wife’s chest?!
Incase you’ve forgotten the baseball metaphors for sex they are explained at student.com and teenwire.com.
Thank you xkcd!
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Networking Madness
Last night our wireless networking seemed to quit working. The wired network seemed fine. So I attempted to log into my favorite router, my D-Link DIR-615, only to find it would not accept my administrator password. A wave of panic washed over me. Didn’t I change that password so Cathy could block the children’s Internet access when they needed a little guidance? If I did, I certainly don’t recall telling her how to access the router’s management software. I searched for a way to hack my own equipment hoping there was a reset option that would reset the password without losing the logs, security settings, etc. I efforts turned up nothing. All I could do was hold down that reset switch to return the router to factory defaults. On the positive side, it kept the firmware updates in place. I’ve dorked with the router settings enough that this exercise was probably necessary anyway. So how did it happen? The only thing I can figure is that when I tripped breakers for the water heater repair this past weekend the router probably got borked.
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Knoxify’s Friday Five
Knoxify is an excellent example of hyperlocal group blogging. The site has a beautiful design with a pleasant balance of photos and words with easy navigation to relevant information. The topic matter is Knoxville, TN and the articles always well written. To make Knoxify even better, they’ve introduced First Friday Five to feature the wonderful non-profits in Knoxville and encourage the Knoxify readers to donate $5 to the organization.
For their first First Friday Five, Knoxify choose one of my favorite non-profits, FISH Hospitality Pantries. FISH provides food and basic staples to any person or family in Knoxville who needs it with no questions asked. People of all economic backgrounds can find themselves in tight economic positions and FISH exists to make sure that no one goes hungry. Well chosen Knoxify!
Chattanooga also has First Friday Five.
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I don’t understand tea bagging.
Apparently on April 15 from 3pm-6pm, Republicans and Conservatives alike (perhaps Democrats and other parties) will be meeting at the World’s Fair Park for some tea bagging. As much as I enjoy a good protest, this just doesn’t sound like my kind of thing:
Teabagging is … an erotic activity used within the context of BDSM and male dominance, with a dominant man teabagging his submissive partner, either a woman or a man, as one variation of facesitting and/or as a means of inflicting erotic humiliation. [Source, Wikipedia, Teabagging]
Just sounds like someone’s going to get themselves arrested.
See also: Teabagging Congress.
Update 12April2009: Seen on The Huffington Post- “Tea Bagging” Rallies Ruthlessly Mocked On Maddow Show
Update: From Paul Krugman:
the G.O.P. looked as crazy 10 or 15 years ago as it does now. That didn’t stop Republicans from taking control of both Congress and the White House. [Source, The New York Times, Tea Parties Forever ]
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Let’s talk about breasts
I have 5 finicky eaters and 3 pounds of thawed chicken breasts. I could go with my old fallback Cheat’s Coronation Chicken but really that doesn’t thrill 3 of the 7 of our clan. I’ve marinated bite sized pieces in olive oil and seasonings then cooked it over oil in a skillet and mixed it with flavored rice for a chicken and rice dish that goes over okay. Simply slathering it in BBQ sauce and grilling it with sides of vegetables gets eaten but seems boring to me. Maybe I need to shred it and make BBQ chicken sandwiches. What’s your favorite child friendly chicken dish?
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From today’s Breaking News
I follow Breaking News on Twitter:
AP: A Cal. chopper pilot, who let a porn actress perform oral sex on him while flying, says he learned his lesson and wants his license back [Source, Twitter, @breakingnews]
I want to know how he got busted! um, I mean caught. Like, was there a 9-1-1 call? "Hello? 9-1-1? I have a hobby of watching helicopters with my telescope and I think you need to call this one into the FAA." or perhaps this was one of those bizarre Google Map/Google Earth things, "Now go to this longitude and latitude. See the helicopter? Right. Zoom in. That’s right! You’re seeing what you think you’re seeing. Now how is he supposed to safely land that thing with the inside of the windscreen like that?!"
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Knox County Schools – Your lack of creativity astounds me
Yesterday my middle schooler came home with a permission slip for a school field trip to Dollywood with a catch: The price is $43 and only the first 75 students to return a check and signed permission slip get to go. That’s not right! Additionally, the field trip will not allow the students on the water rides because Knox County Schools got all trippy after the death of a student at the waterfall 6 years ago. Yes that was a tragedy but we should have learned from the failings of supervision at that trip and continued water related activities but instead Knox County Schools decided bubble wrapping the children will protect them. Guess what? That won’t protect them either. I suppose Knox County Schools is assuming that of the 2.5 million visitors to Dollywood, our trip will be the one where highly inspected, super safety protected, engineered to simulate danger in the most cautionary way, equipment will fail at the same time all the trained and licensed lifeguards happen to be taking smoke breaks. It could happen! Denying water rides at a theme park? That’s not right! Can we make it better? What about not allowing digital cameras? Yes! Let’s prevent our children from the memorializing their time with their friends by not allowing them to take pictures. Granted, the school is afraid of being responsible for loss, theft or damage to a digital camera. Well guess what Sherlock! If I send a digital camera to school with my child and he loses it, that’s between him and me. I have an old digital camera sitting on my desk wasting away. If it got lost I’m out nothing. Of course, you want me to go buy an antique point and shoot disposable camera that is limited to 24 shots and cost an arm and a leg to print some thumbs over lenses. Brilliant! No wonder our children lag behind. Banning cameras? That’s not right! Eventually we will ban, regulated, lock up, and overprotect ourselves to being scared to death. What will you deny then? Don’t be scared or we’ll suspend you! Well guess what? That’s not right!
Oh, and today, my son brought home a permission slip for the band field trip. Guess where they’re going? Dollywood! (different day) That’s not right! For all the wonderful things we have in East TN, can our schools find nothing fun and mind expanding for our children? Oh, no, of course not; Knox County Schools is too worried about my digital camera. That’s not right!
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Links of Interest
The stuff that I’ve been working with today:
- jQuery Plugin: Validation See also: demos
- metadata plugin
- form plugin for AJAX submit
- Mastering Ajax, Part 10: Using JSON for data transfer
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From the mouths of babes
Evan, 3.5 years: "I want a cookie."
Dad: "Eat two more bites of meat and I will give you a cookie."
Evan: "Close your eyes and I eat my food." -
ShareThis WordPress Plugin Broken – Easy Fix!
I recently added a ShareThis link
to each of my posts. I chose ShareThis.com because it seems to be very robust while leaving a relatively small footprint on the blog and appears relatively unintrusiveness and benign. Of course, some folks will be quick to point out that the tracking features and having the icon linked back to sharethis.com is very intrusive and anything but benign. In this instance, I don’t see it as that big a deal. One of the attractions to ShareThis.com was its WordPress plugin making setup as easy as going to the website to generate the widget code, then inserting that code in the settings box on the admin screen in your WordPress blog. But it didn’t work.At ShareThis.com, a publisher generates a script that looks like this:
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://w.sharethis.com/button/sharethis.js#publisher=abcdefgh-ijkl-mnop-qrst-uvwxyz012345&type=wordpress&embeds=true&post_services=facebook%2Cdigg%2Cdelicious%2Cybuzz%2Ctwitter%2Cstumbleupon%2Creddit%2Ctechnorati%2Cmixx%2Cblogger%2Ctypepad%2Cwordpress%2Cgoogle_bmarks%2Cwindows_live%2Cmyspace%2Cfark%2Cbus_exchange%2Cpropeller%2Cnewsvine%2Clinkedin%2Cfriendfeed&headerTitle=Thank%20you%20for%20sharing!"></script>After updating, the code will have a 2nd publisher id appended to the end. With two publisher ids, ShareThis will not register your site nor collect statistics.
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://w.sharethis.com/button/sharethis.js#publisher=abcdefgh-ijkl-mnop-qrst-uvwxyz012345&type=wordpress&embeds=true&post_services=facebook%2Cdigg%2Cdelicious%2Cybuzz%2Ctwitter%2Cstumbleupon%2Creddit%2Ctechnorati%2Cmixx%2Cblogger%2Ctypepad%2Cwordpress%2Cgoogle_bmarks%2Cwindows_live%2Cmyspace%2Cfark%2Cbus_exchange%2Cpropeller%2Cnewsvine%2Clinkedin%2Cfriendfeed&headerTitle=Thank%20you%20for%20sharing!&publisher=a1b2c3d4-ijkl-mnop-qrst-u4w2y10a2r4d"></script>After reviewing the plugin code, I realized the way ShareThis generates the script must have changed overtime. Crowd Favorite wrote a great plug-in but it expects the publisher=xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx to be at very end and if it does not find a publisher id at the end, it puts one there which is why you will end up with two publisher ids. To fix this, simply move the publisher id to the end of the script before pasting the code into the ShareThis settings box in the WordPress admin:
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://w.sharethis.com/button/sharethis.js#type=wordpress&embeds=true&post_services=facebook%2Cdigg%2Cdelicious%2Cybuzz%2Ctwitter%2Cstumbleupon%2Creddit%2Ctechnorati%2Cmixx%2Cblogger%2Ctypepad%2Cwordpress%2Cgoogle_bmarks%2Cwindows_live%2Cmyspace%2Cfark%2Cbus_exchange%2Cpropeller%2Cnewsvine%2Clinkedin%2Cfriendfeed&headerTitle=Thank%20you%20for%20sharing!&publisher=abcdefgh-ijkl-mnop-qrst-uvwxyz012345"></script>Note: In the settings box, the & will be converted to just & but the code correctly uses & with the post. Your code will still be xhtml compliant.
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Questions from a wanna be Buddhist
When the day is spinning out of control, would stopping for 15 minutes of Daimoku help or make you feel 15 minutes more behind?
Buddhism is about revitalizing humanity, and transforming the world we live in from one dominated by greed, anger, and stupidity into one of peace and happiness. [Source, Jason Jarrett of A Buddhist Podcast, A Buddhist Podcast – Bodhisattvas of the Earth, 2:46-2:58]
