Earnest Apathy

One of the things I love about jQueryUI is the fact that it can generate a download based upon one of several great-looking themes. This rolls up all the images and CSS into a single zip along with a customized JavaScript file. This is awesome, but what happens if I want to grab multiple themes, drop them into an ASP.Net website, and be able to switch between them?
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I stumbled across something tonight that will make my life better: ZoomIt by Mark Russinovich (of SysInternals fame). I teach technical classes, and the fact that I can zoom in and draw directly on screen (especially on a window full of code) during a presentation is positively awesome.
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I’ve been using Opera as my primary browser off and on for several years, now. I just keep coming back to it, primarily because of its speed. I’ve been using the Opera 10 Alpha for a number of weeks, and the biggest problem I have with it is some quirky things in the Gmail email composer. Other than that, it has been rock solid.
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I’ve begun writing a collection of my thoughts about the problems that we presently face in these United States.  I have not edited, proofed, or censored these writings.

Allow me to start with Politics.

Politicians have too much power. This has led to several problems:

• Lobbyists and the corporations that back them have incentive to win the favor–and vote–of representatives and senators. In a climate where this sort of thing is possible, it leads to a competitive atmosphere where it becomes necessary to have lobbyists in Washington in order to remain on equal footing with other corporations.
• Career politicians and the power of pull. Rather that being merely equals amongst Americans, congressmen have power, money, prestige, and distinction. All that political positions should entail is taking care of the minutia of government that the vast majority of the populace lacks the time to attend.

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My two-year-old, who normally eats very little if anything at all, just ate three pancakes! I also had some, and I must admit that they were awfully tasty. We ate them all up in one sitting!
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With the ideas, help, and suggestions of some very smart folks, I’ve been able to put together a userscript that displays whether jQuery is used on the current page—along with version—and can also load jQuery into the current page by clicking the indicator if jQuery is not already present.
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Microsoft would like us to believe it can help us “See How Windows Server 2008 Stacks up versus Linux.” Let me see, how can I can sum up the entire site for you…
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I had to search my desktop files and email history for forty minutes before I turned this up:

var rfc2822 =
/^[\w!#$%&'*+/=?^`{|}~-]+(?:\.[\w!#$%&'*+/=?^`{|}~-]+)*@(?:[a-z0-9](?:[a-z0-9-]*[a-z0-9])*)+\.(?:[a-z]{2,4}|museum|travel)$/i;

That’s a JavaScript variable declaration, but the RegExp is valid for Perl and can be quickly translated for other languages.

I wasn’t getting enough sleep or anything done around the corners of my life, so I created a blog. I figured it was the most productive thing I could do with my free time.

I read somewhere–was it V?–who said something to the effect that bad writers create a blog so that they can pretend that they’re working on their writing. Good for them.

By the way, I’m a bad writer. Pleased to meet you.

So why am I here? Well, because I have something to say. Not right now, mind you, but in general, I do. I think the world is a messed up place, and not for (all of) the same reasons that everyone else seems to think it is.

More importantly, I need a place to collect my thoughts because I keep losing the slips of paper. No, that’s only partially true. I don’t usually lose the scraps: I either forget about them or find them while sifting through old junk but the pencil lines are difficult to read. This way, at least, I have a semi-permanent place to keep all my stuff so I can search it without getting dust up my nose.

Okay, seal’s broken. Next post might be more meaningful.