The weekend before last my digital camera failed miserably during an attempted balancing trick on my handlebars: it fell and busted both the lens and the mechanism that opens and closes it. Luckily, it was only a point-and-click Canon PowerShot SD450 – I’ve never been able to afford or justify a dSLR with my infantile skill. (Somebody want to buy me a Nikon D80? I’ll love you long time.) So, I replaced it with a Canon PowerShot SD1000 – basically the upgrade to my old SD450 – which arrived today.
And what image should I snap to test out the new device? Well, if there’s one thing I’ve learned from my short time on Flickr, it’s that all the cool kids take pictures of their Moleskine journals. I thought I’d succumb to the meme and join the crowd.
The Congress finds the following:
...
The Internet has aided in facilitating violent radicalization, ideologically based violence, and the homegrown terrorism process in the United States by providing access to broad and constant streams of terrorist-related propaganda to United States citizens.
Maybe they meant to say Newscorp? Disney? TimeWarner? General Electric? Viacom? CBS?
Every Saturday morning, the first thing I do upon waking is go for run. After coming back and showering, I break-fast with this oatmeal, which I find to be mighty tasty.
Ingredients
All ingredients I acquire from the bulk section of my local food co-op (except the honey, which comes from the farmer’s market). Everything, of course, is organic.
4 oz. thick rolled oats
1 - 1 1/2 tablespoons brown sugar
3 tablespoons raisins
1 spoon full of honey
A pinch (or two) of sea salt
(For me, this makes one serving. Your mileage may vary.)
Directions
Put the correct amounts of oats, sugar, and raisins in a container and set it aside.
Place 1 cup of water in a pot and bring to a boil.
Dump in the oats, sugar, and raisins.
Add a pinch (or two) of sea salt.
Mix it up, allow everything to return to a full boil, then lower the heat to something around medium.
Watch it till the mixture becomes your preferred consistency, stirring occasionally. It usually takes 5-6 minutes for me.
When it looks to be about done, turn off the heat and mix in one whopping, overflowing spoon full of honey.
So, things are looking a little different around here, no? I’ve had this design floating around in the grey-matter for a spell, but I didn’t think I’d start on it for a while yet.
Then I got bored.
I whipped it up last night and today. A lot quicker than I thought. There’s still a few tweaks I want to make, but it looks so much better than the last one, I decided to put it up before it was polished.
The design is very CSS heavy – though “heavy” might not be the right descriptor, as the whole thing is rather quite light in terms of size. CSS dependent. How’s that? The last few visions of this site have been CSS dependent, but in this one – inspired in large part by CSS Zen Garden – I’ve done my best to take out all styling from the pages and put it in the stylesheet. Of course, there’s probably a bit of legacy styling lurking here-and-there in various old blog posts. Let me know if you stumble on any.
The design has been tested in Firefox on both OS X and Ubuntu, as well as Safari in OS X. Let me know if you stumble upon any bugs, unless you’re using IE. Actually, if you’re using IE and want to send in a screenshot, I’d be curious to see how the site renders.
I’m sure someone will be curious about the stripes. I put them in there as a joke and placeholder till I figured out what I wanted to do with the background, but hell if they don’t look halfway decent. (It always ends up with me that some of the best design features start as jokes are bugs.) So, for now, they stay.
For years, I’ve always added the target attribute to links going off-site. And for a while less, I’ve wished that I hadn’t – I believe that where a link opens should be left up to the user – but never had the motivation to stop or, more importantly, go back and edit all the old links.
Till now.
Instead of the Transitional doctype, I want to validate my pages with XHTML 1.0 Strict, in which the target attribute is deprecated. Google had the answer, in the form of Lorelle’s guide on search and replacing in WP databases. It’s quite simple, even for one with database-fu as weak as mine. Just login to your database via phpMyAdmin, hit the SQL button on the upper left and enter your query.
Lorelle’s sample is:
UPDATE wp_posts SET post_content = REPLACE (
post_content,
'Item to replace here',
'Replacement text here');
I had to change my table, which is still named from my b2/cafelog days, and so executed this:
UPDATE b2posts SET post_content = REPLACE (
post_content,
'target="_blank"',
'');
New streetcar tracks on Seattle’s Westlake Avenue have turned into a trap for bicyclists.
The tires on a standard road bike are narrower than the 1 3/4 inch groove that holds a streetcar wheel. If a bicycle veers into that gap, it can easily get stuck, pitching the rider onto the street.
…
Despite the goal of Mayor Greg Nickels to triple bicycle use, the new streetcar line includes long stretches of track in the curb lanes of Westlake Avenue, where bicyclists normally ride. Many riders have adapted by riding on sidewalks, to the left of the tracks – or in the left lane, which aggravates motorists.
Obviously, I agree. Though I don’t see an issue with just switching to the left lane. It may be an annoyance to those in motorized vehicles, but, honestly, that’s their problem. If they can afford to buy a car, buy insurance, buy gas, and maintain their car, surely they can afford to slow down a bit and let us pass.
Bruce Schneir’s recent admission that he keeps his passwords in his wallet has been making rounds throughout the ‘Net. I respect his opinion, but I must admit, the idea surprises me. I suppose it makes sense, since my wallet already holds other bits of precious of an equal value, but it seems to go against my natural paranoia. I do sometimes write new passwords down and carry them on me until I memorize them, but then I incinerate the piece of paper it was written on. And when I write the password, I do it on a piece of paper placed on a hard surface, so as to not unintentionally leave an impression on a notepad. Too paranoid? Maybe.
What if I encrypted the passwords with Solitaire and carried the cyphertext with me. Still too paranoid?
For the past two months, I’ve been attending Unbridled Martial Arts – or, as I refer to it, Fight Club. It’s a mixed martial arts club, mixed gender and of various skill levels. There is no belt-system, or ranking of any kind. Tuesday and Thursday nights are stand-up fighting, which draw from the likes of muay-thai, kickboxing, judo, American boxing, and karate. Wednesday nights are weapons and grappling. The weapons training is escrima, with the weapons themselves being escrima sticks and knives. Grappling draws from wrestling, Jujutsu, judo, Shamrok submission fighting, and Israeli self-defense.
There are no contracts, so class sizes vary. Usually attendance at the stand-up fighting class is around 16, and weapons/grappling about half of that.
Rob is the only instructor (though he sometimes draws on other students to assist). He’s a great teacher, and somehow manages to split his attention throughout the class’s various skill levels. During my first few sessions, I always felt that he gave full attention to us noobs, and now, I feel like he gives his attention to those of us slightly more experienced, even when we have a batch of beginners joining the class.
All the instruction is focused on real-world street self-defense. There are very few flashy moves. I believe one could become a more effective fighter by studying a classic art, such as Aikido, for an extended period of time, but what’s taught in Fight Club is skill enough to make one sufficient in a short period of time.
