In contrast with reality

Also, can we all realize that San Francisco is in the middle of California and stop using using “San Francisco” and “Northern California” as synonyms? There are 300 miles of California north of San Francisco.

Ars Technica: Hands-on Hacking Wifi Protected Setup with Reaver

Ars Technica: Security firm finds hacker forums offer n00b hackers training, lulz

Big Loose Comics: Unemp-Lloyd

Unclutterer: An Unclutterer’s Perspective

Unclutterer: Seven Routines and Guidelines to Live As An Unclutterer

Unclutterer: Get Organized in January

Fark: Passengers on a full bus wouldn’t give up their seat to a pregnant woman because in the words of one rider, “She chose to be pregnant” Comments

Fark: Japanese department store loses its copy of the 7 words you cannot say on television just in time to start a new advertising campaign, w/Not safe for work language poster results (Language is NSFW) Comments – Fuckin’ awesome

Freelance Switch: Make Your Web Site More Mobile Friendly

Slashdot: Are Programmers Ruining The Design of eBooks?

Freelance Switch: I Am Not A Web Designer

Beyond The Wand: stuff

Manboobz: Vamps and Tramps but No Camille Paglia

Freelance Switch: Linkswitch

Slashdot: Introversion and Solitude Increase Productivity

Fark: Dog saves owner’s life from abusive boyfriend. Battered women’s shelter takes in both. Spiffy tag standing in because Hero tag has something in its eye Comments

Fark: Couple clears weeds and trash from public land near their home. Does the city a) thank them b) reward them or c) tell them to buy a license for the work or put the weeds back? Comments

Fark: Stationery chain offers porn-themed products in back-to-school sale. Who could possibly have a problem with that? Comments

Sociological Images: stuff

Slashdot: Ask Slashdot: How To Advance A Programming Career

Slashdot: Book Review: Sams Teach Yourself HTML5 Mobile Application Development

Fark: Supreme Court to ABC attorney arguing FCC case: “Can you prove that public nudity isn’t always indecent?” Attorney points upward, to impressive collection of bare asses carved into frieze ringing Supreme Court chamber Comments

Slashdot: Facebook Adds Ads to News Feed

Freelance Switch: Connecting on LinkedIn

Slashdot: Facebook Helps Give Hacking A Good Name Again

Freelance Switch: Gathering Client Testimonials

Fark: Headline: “High school boy places genitals on lunch table.” But the real story is the photograph the editors chose to run, along with what happens when you click it Comments – Linked because of this excerpt from TFA: “Nothing screams ‘unfulfilled potential’ like a hack penis prank.”

Slashdot: Data Hogs: The Monsters Carriers Created

Fark: Today’s Fark-ready headline: “The long, sordid history of bestiality in America.” Apparently, it used to be blamed on the animals Comments

Fark: Comments

Fark: Gay marriage is legal. Marijuana is decriminalized. Health care is free. But apparently, polygamy is illegal. Well, no country is 100% perfect, right? Comments

Slashdot: Are Maker Spaces The Future of Public Libraries?

Pervocracy: Functional – a TV show about funcitonal relationships. I would so watch this show.

Sociological Images: Uncovering the Secrets of Dark, Mysterious Austria

Slashdot: Canadian Library to Loan Out People

Beyond the Wand: stuff

Ars Technica: Sculpteo Aims To Be The Etsy of the 3D Printing World

• Fark: “The mayor of the capital of Iceland, a comedian and founder of the Best Party, writes what could possibly be the most intelligent and insightful welcome to the New Year, ever.” Comments. – What the mayor of Reykjavík most looks forward to in 2012:
  

  What I most look forward to in the coming year is acquiring an Obi Wan Kenobi costume and wearing it around and practicing Jedi-tricks. I also hope I will be permitted to marry people. I also would very much like to see more tourists in Reykjavík. I am mostly interested in getting people that are rich, interested in swimming and like to spend a lot of money on nonsense. Others are also welcome, though.

• Slashdot: Ask Slashdot: Setting Up a Wireless Catch-and-Release – This is one of the many projects I have been meaning to get around to.
• Ars Technica: Native JSON features submitted for PostgreSQL 9.2
• Slashdot: Ask Slashdot: Best Open Source Answer to Dreamweaver? – Every once in a while I look for one of these for the non-technical people I work with, and I never find what I’m looking for. The Slashdot consensus seems to be torn between “It’s unnecessary” and “It doesn’t exist”. I’m inclined to agree with the comments indicating a good CMS can eliminate the need for a WYSIWYG editior.
• Slashdot: Tackling Open Source’s Gender Issues – I always hope these threads will be interesting, but inevitably they fill with comments along the lines of “Women just don’t like programming, can’t we accept that men and women are inherently different?” with a side of evolutionary psychology about how women’s lives and behavior revolve entirely around babbys.
• Racialicious: Exploring the Problematic and Subversive Shit People Say [Meme-ology] – I’ve been seeing a lot of these showing up on Facebook and I was curious how/what these all spurred from, and this is a good rundown.
• No, Seriously, What About Teh Menz?: Male Friendship – Linked for the following passage:
  

  This is not even to mention the sentence that was– I am not even joking– included in the video: “men have a hard time seeing women as human.” WHAT? I had to pause the video to glare at it. I think that that’s the epitome of how feminism without masculism is stumbling around in the dark unable to find a light-switch.

• Slashdot: US Supreme Court Upholds Removal of Works From Public Domain
  Ars Technica: Supreme Court rules Congress can re-copyright public domain works
   
  My distaste for the ever-growing length of copyright not withstanding, such a decision threatens web sites like Project Gutenberg, which could share a work which is public domain, only to have it revoked from the public domain and be cited before they have a chance to remove the previously free-as-in-liberty work.
• Fark: Porn sites black out in protest of SOPA. EVERYBODY PANIC Comments
• Fark: Speed-gardening craze hits Maui. This used to be real estate, now it’s only fields and trees. Where, where is the town? Comments – Apparently permablitzing is a thing. Who knew?
• Fark: Anybody can decide to be an atheist. But only the hardcore converted atheists actually have themselves de-baptized Comments
• Kate Bornstein’s Blog for Teens, Freaks and Other Outlaws: Please Help Me Update My Gender Workbook – Kate Bornstein’s Gender Outlaw changed my life. Although I have not have the pleasure of reading the entire workbook, My Gender Workbook is an interactive exploration of the reader’s gender identity, and probably the closes I’ll ever get to having the chance to have tea with the author.
• Coderholic: Goodbye WordPress, Hello Jekyll! – I love WordPress, but Jekyll’s use of static HTML files is bound to be faster and more efficient than WordPress. I definitely plan to check it out for future projects.
• Ars Technica: Hands on: building an HTML5 photo booth with Chrome’s new webcam API – I dislike Chrome, but this is pretty cool.
• Apartment Therapy: Keeping Your Data Safe – Although it’s light on ideas, this brief article is a decent introduction for a non-technical person to the idea that a backup drive sitting next to your computer isn’t enough. It voices my aversion to putting backups on “The Cloud”, I’d like to add that you can potentially simplify your life by keeping off-site backups at a friend’s house, your office or a safety deposit box, depending upon the value of the data and the privacy it requires.
• Slashdot: Adafruit’s Open-source Wearable Platform, Flora – I’m fascinated to see where this goes.
• Related Topics: The Durability of Motherhood – This story relates to my interest in family dynamics and how people become family. The linked article is about a woman whose mother has been in jail most of her life. The woman’s grandparents took her to see her mother regularly. The author makes an interesting point about the construction of parenthood (which I mentally extend to all familial relationships).
  

  I suppose one is not a parent in isolation (in my view). Affirmation of parenthood by a community around the child is a critical component. Without that affirmation I am not sure what the relationship here becomes.

• The Wild Hunt: Unleash the Hounds! (Link Roundup) – The third bullet-point discusses open marriage and how it interfaces with the pagan community.
   
  The story links to an interesting article by Sierra Black, Our Successful Open Marriage.
   
  Another story linked to quotes Anita Wagner as saying, “It’s not something we’re used to doing. We have no role models for this.” I’m quoting it here because it strikes me as something that comes up frequently not only for people in polyamorous relationships, but for all of us who find ourselves defining our own unconventional families.
   
  This is apropos of a story previously covered on The Wild Hunt about Canada’s recent court decision proclaiming polygamy illegal. It was also covered on Fark.

I googled around, but it looked like most of the spam-fighting functionality was added after my version (0.11). While in Yosemite, I took a couple hours to upgrade it to the latest version, 0.18, and install captchas. We shall see if this stems the tide of robots. I think it will be a temporary fix, at best.

A recovering heroin addict took his cat to the humane society for a cut. He couldn’t pay right then to have the cat treated, so “[t]he staff said if he signed papers surrendering the cat, Scruffy would be treated and put in foster care…” Once the cat got to foster care, they decided the cut was too serious to use their limited funds to treat, so they euthanized her.

My first reaction is to agree with many of the Facebook comments they received, “One called for the staff to be euthanized, while another said what happened to Scruffy was murder.”

Besides the part where they apparently lead Scruffy’s person to believe that surrendering Scruffy was her only chance for health care, things like this happen every day in shelters across the country. Shelters have more animals than resources, which means they have to make hard choices like this one. I’m sure absolutely no one, including the person/people who decided to euthanize Scruffy, felt good about it. It’s possible that the money they saved treating Scruffy may allow other cats/kittens to receive the care they need and ultimately be adopted into loving homes, like the one Scruffy lived in.

I’d be lying by omission if I didn’t admit that part of the reason this story gets to me is because Scruffy’s person was an older man fighting addition.

Even though it’s totally irrational, I like to think that when terrible things like this happen, it paves the way for something good that wouldn’t have otherwise happened. In this case, it appears the shelter in question is changing their policies to prevent this from happening again.

There are some ways I really enjoy being unprofessional and immature. My Facebook profile picture is vulgar. My outgoing voicemail message is a non-sequitur. I routinely wear jeans with holes in the posterior. I’m happy this way. Obviously, there are times and places to be all business, but I don’t want to be – even on the internet – only business. My sense of humor and whimsy are integral parts of who I am. I may check them at the workplace door, but just how much and where can I be my whole self? Only offline? Why bother to maintain an online presence if it’s necessarily an inaccruate reflection of who I am?

To illustrate my point, I’m about cool story bro in a way that I wouldn’t in a workplace. If you believe this will make you uncomfortable, skip down to the following paragraph: My original Facebook icon was a neon cartoon penis on an orange background. In maybe 2005, I tried to Facebook-friend a real-life friend, but he turned me down because he didn’t want a penis on his profile. He said if I changed my profile picture, he would accept my friend request. “You promise?” He promised. I changed the orange background to rainbow and submitted a new friend request. True to his word, he accepted. I haven’t changed it since. I’m loathe to think that I might have to change it to make it less vulgar. But I can only have one profile picture.

I recently needed a Facebook account to work on a client’s Facebook page. I didn’t think the profile picture would make a good impression, so I started a new Facebook account with a picture of my boring face. I’m still trying to decide how to proceed. Do I maintain two profiles indefinitely? Do I keep totally separate subsets of friends? Or do I simplify my life and change the picture on my original profile?

There are news stories about people being hurt by the things they put on the internet, but the things you share – whether online or off – can potentially enrich your life just as much as they can potentially hurt. A former employer told me that they brought me in for an interview over other candidates because they read this blog and thought I sounded like I’d be fun to work with. For every post I dismiss writing because it might turn off a potential employer, it’s also possible I miss the opportunity to make a connection with another human being – whether that human is hiring or not.

There are some things about myself I’m not willing to whitewash over. Several months ago I posted an excerpt of a book about sociopaths. A friend told me he wouldn’t admit on a public blog that he read a book about sociopaths because potential employers might see it as a sign that he’s unstable. I’m not comfortable with that amount of self-censorship. I don’t think instability is a legitimate conclusion to make based on having read one book. I honestly don’t know why I find omitting a fart joke an acceptable compromise, whereas glossing over a sociopathy book is unacceptable.

I don’t know the point at which acceptable self-censorship becomes too much. I seem to be discovering it as I go.

I wasted no time upgrading this site to WordPress 3.3, but no fun format box. I poked around at options and Googled, to no avail. Most suggestions seemed to revolve around some browser problem, but I could see it on the other site, plain as day, so my browser was obviously capable of displaying it.

For lack of a better idea, I started grepping. I used Firebug to get the id attribute (“formatdiv”), figuring there would be a finite number of instances in the code. Indeed, there was exactly one. It was in wp-admin/edit-form-advanced.php. There were two relevant lines:
if ( current_theme_supports( 'post-formats' ) && post_type_supports( $post_type, 'post-formats' ) )
    add_meta_box( 'formatdiv', _x( 'Format', 'post format' ), 'post_format_meta_box', null, 'side', 'core' );


This alerted me that it was a problem with the theme, which unsurprising considering that I’m still using a customized version of the 2009 default theme. I knew it worked in the latest theme, twentyeleven, so I went to that directory and grepped for ‘format’ and braced myself for the worst. Once I eliminated the CSS files, it was easy to hone in on line 104 of functions.php
add_theme_support( 'post-formats', array( 'aside', 'link', 'gallery', 'status', 'quote', 'image' ) );

This takes place in a function called setup. I went over to my theme and looked for a similar function in the functions.php file. It did not have one. I pasted it in toward the middle of the file and hoped for the best. The format box appeared like magic. I haven’t actually tinkered with it yet, but I wanted to write up my experiences – before I forget them – so that someone else with an old theme can bring some new magic into their WordPress experience.

An unfortunate computer-generated ad.

I’m not sure what “Manhood items” are, but it made me giggle.