wheresrhys

I never thought of using the ftp client I use for work on my personal server before, mainly because my old employers never accepted ftp into their servers (we had to use remote desktop and a variety of other techniques that never worked consistenetly).

Anyway, I am now down with the ftp, and it rulz. LOL.

Which reminds me of my youtube idea: post mundane videos of very ordinary things on youtube and give them titles like “Man sitting on bench… LOL!!!!”, and then wait for the stream of “Wot is this? This isn’t funny”, “It’s ironic, dumbass. Some of us have gradooated, y’know”, “Are U retarded or sumffink”… to emerge.

Which in turn reminds me that a good friend of mine is working for the BBC at the moment pulling out the funniest bits from their comedies and sticking them on youtube – officially sanctioned pirating. He has to do Four pints of lager and a packet of crisps soon – that’ll be a struggle.

Further to my post about the usefulness of position:fixed, in particular with regard to the .submitbox in the wordpress admin interface, I’ve continued to refine it all.

I came across Eric Meyer’s MW Adminize WordPress plugin (via the latest Sitepoint list of useful CSS links). Essentially what it does is compress the navigation and header of the admin screens into a smaller area by including an extra stylesheet.

“Hang on, ” think I. “Now that looks pretty much like a toolbar – why not use position:fixed on it”. Which is what I’ve done, and the effect is most satisfactory. There’s was a bit of ironing out to do as various page elements (which presumably have position: relative/absolute) overlaid it, but z-index:2000; soon sorted that out.

At present I’ve had to edit not just Eric Meyer’s CSS file, but also a couple of the php pages in order to insert a div with id=”toolbar”, but in a future iteration I will painstakingly go through each page element that needs position fixed and then remove the containing div, thus making it a candidate to be a branch of the original plug-in.

Watch this space.

My good friend Matt has always had Michael Moore down as a bit of an idiot, but then again, he often thinks people are idiots. Sometimes for such trivial offences as not thinking.

Anyway, I took this with a pinch of salt. Bowling for Columbine is pretty decent, and what I saw of TV nation was generally both funny and right on. But it turns out that on this occasion Matt is right!

In the flat I was staying in lately there were two copies of Stupid White Men… so I took one. It’s one of the worst books I’ve ever read. Not only is the style brash, squanderingly antagonistic towards the sympathetic ear of the reader, and ineloquent, but much of the substance is… well… lacking in substance. Below are three of the most egregious examples.

New York’s water supply … is collected and stored in twenty-two open-air reservoirs in the Catskills…

an acquaintance remarked … how wonderful it is to boat on the reservoir.

“Boat?” I cried. “You’re boating in my drinking water?”

That was when the cases of Evian began entering my apartment

How much of an idiot is he? Had he presumed there existed several hermetically sealed huge lakes in the hills. And why does he care so much about people boating but not fish dying. Does this man not have reflective capacity? This extract of the book is, in fact, a  pretty good example of the short-sighted, “me me me” rich American idiocy he rails against in the rest of the book.

After the Soviet Union lost over twenty million citizens in World War II, it’s no surprise that they sought insurance against future invasion by seizing and dominating nearly every country that bordered them

Has he not heard of the non-aggression pact between Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia which saw Russia occupy the Baltics and half of Poland right at the start of the second world war, before they lost the 20 million, and actually purely as an aggressive expansionist measure? The man’s wilful misinterpretation of history makes you wonder about his research into and manipulation of present day facts.

Thirdly, virtually the whole of the “We’re number one” chapter is idiotic and often offensive. I laugh a lot at offensive jokes, but they must justify themselves by either being hilarious or insightful. His are neither. What is the point of writing a chapter which jokingly suggests all protestants in Northern Ireland convert to catholicism, and seriously lays out high school level manifestos for creation of peace in the Balkans and the Middle East.

At the end of the book I felt appalled that, at it’s time of publication, it was seen as a provocative shining light for the American left. Thank god for the rise of the Daily Show.