Sitting peacefully in my chair, then suddenly feeling lightheaded and completely disconnected from my body, is not okay.
This message brought to you by the “I Hate Summer” Committee. I’m ready for more 70-something high temperatures now, thankyouverymuch…
Who says science can’t be beautiful? Check out the winners and other contestants in the first annual “Art of Science” competition…
This is awesome. Finally there’s a Jabber server that has widespread name recognition and a huge preinstalled userbase.
Wow.
If you use Gaim (like I do) and have a Gmail account (like I do, and if you don’t I have invites to spare), check out these instructions. Otherwise, just follow the link below and either get their software (it includes voice chat, which I don’t specifically need) or find out how to configure your multi-IM program of choice.
Again I say: Wow.
(Oh, the Gmail account thing? Apparently you won’t need my invites: “Google Talk requires a Gmail username and password, and starting today, Google is making it easier for anyone in the U.S. with access to a mobile phone to sign up for a Gmail account. When users visit http://gmail.com and enter their mobile phone number, they will receive an invitation code via a text message. This code enables them to open an account.” Go figure…)
I was reminded, thanks to this bit of gaming humor that someone emailed me this evening, that on the way home Sunday the in-train movie was Madagascar. I won’t bore you with a lengthy review (in short: not horrible, occasionally clever, decently animated, minus points for major plot obviousness, and the lemur dance party song is too catchy for its own good) but I had to tell you about the one bit that made me laugh out loud.
Yes, I get weird looks from people I travel with quite regularly. C’mon, this is me we’re talking about.
Anyway. At one point the lemurs are in a state of panic, and one random lemur holds up a black book on which is written, “To Serve Lemurs,” and he cries out, “It’s a cookbook!”
See, it’s funny because it’s a reference to one of the more subtly dark Twilight Zone episodes. I mean the original TZ, not the watered-down nonsense we’ve seen in recent years. Anyway. During this year’s 4th Of July festivities here at the house we caught a lot of TZ (SFC runs a marathon every year), and “To Serve Man” was one of the selections. If you haven’t seen it, well, if you’ve paid attention up to this point you can guess the twist in the story.
How did I get here from there? Look at entry #8…
In one of the many debates to be found raging in cyberspace about what the Founding Fathers “really intended” by way of separation of Church and State, I found this little chestnut:
“The clergy, by getting themselves established by law, and ingrafted into the machine of government, have been a very formidable engine against the civil and religious rights of man. They are still so in many countries and even in some of these United States. Even in 1783, we doubted the stability of our recent measures for reducing them to the footing of other useful callings. It now appears that our means were effectual.”
— Thomas Jefferson, 1800
I just love that “other useful callings” bit, really. And then, of course, there’s this concise summation:
“The government of the United States is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion.”
— George Washington, Treaty of Tripoli
In case anyone was wondering.
I probably won’t leave it like this, but I’ve swapped out the random signature picker (that which provides the silly text just below the big site logo, up there) with a random slogan picker. At first I was going to use the Sloganizer, which is awfully cool all by itself, but their code refused to play nice with Monaural Jerk’s template-based system. This merely provided me with incentive. I took some time and learned how to make my own!
function gdSlogan() {
$sloganfile = file('/PATH/TO/YOUR/slogans.txt');
$sloganraw = $sloganfile[rand(0,count($sloganfile))];
$slogantag = 'XYZ';
$sloganname = 'YourName';
$sl1 = '<span class="randquote">';
$sl1 .= str_replace($slogantag, $sloganname, $sloganraw);
$sl1 .= '</span>';
return $sl1;
}
The “slogans.txt” file consists of a bunch of… er… slogans, with the characters XYZ where one’s name should go. I then have that string replaced with, in my case, “GreyDuck” but you could use anything else you like. (Note: I also have a “span” wrapper to make the text behave accordingly with my particular stylesheet.)
Why didn’t I just write the slogans file so that my nickname would already be in place? Don’t be silly! How would I learn these little tricks if I didn’t push myself just a little bit? Besides, this means that someone who’s equally-or-less skilled at PHP-fu can take that bit o’ code and, say, my slogans file and plug them into their own site, huh?
It’s a public service, I tell ya. I’m all about helping others.