Well, well, well. 12th hurricane, 24th named storm, and this one could seriously have her eye on Tampa. As the computer models have her slightly lower than the Tampa area, the most recent discussion talks of some slightly different motion than previously forcast, and how the recent NOAA jet’s flight data would have on the models. Keep an eye out folks, it ain’t over yet.
Miklb's Mindless Ramblings
chronicling life in a digital world
Brian Williams - MSNBC.com Is reporting that miraculously a half hour before the Prez arrived for his big speech, the power came on in New Orleans. And like clockwork, an hour after he left, it went off. I’m sure there’s a logical explanation I mean, those left behind don’t really need it for anything, do they?
Much has been written and discussed regarding the preparedness, or lack there of, in Louisiana, and surrounding areas, especially regarding the levees. So much to my surprise, I get an email today from Factcheck.org , and it leads off with a link to the Louisiana Department of Homeland Security. The link is a repost of a Times Picayune article outlining a dry run done July of 2004, before Charley and Ivan, of the effects of a Cat 3 storm on the levees and underlying parishes. Just another example of ineptness, and deceptions the administration continue to hide from.
Proclamation Apparently, there’s provisions that state the Labor Secretary sets a minumum wage to pay various levels of laborers and “mechanics”. Well, Bush has suspended this provision. It’s written into the provision that he can, and in some circumstances, I can understand why. But we are talking about Bush, and Cheney, and I can see how some corporate contractors seize an opportunity to not pay laborers a federally mandated min. rate, but still charge their “normal” fees. So prior to the Hurricane, a skilled worker in NO would have been paid a certain rate if working on a federal contract, now he will be paid less. Good thing those tax cuts went to those who needed it most…
BobHarris.com
has done some looking, and it appears that the Bush administration, in their back slapping of pre-hurricane state of emergency annoucement, FAILED TO MENTION THE COASTAL PARISHES!! Check out the map Bob’s got at his site, and the link to the whitehose.gov press release. So far, he’s found no explanation. Good one McClellan.
Just a guy wandering the intarwebs looking to make sense of life.
My Twitter
@mcuriale I'd take exception to anyone calling my wife "babe", ex husband/boyfriend/boss. Father's are cool, but that would be weird
Side Notes
It’s always great to see new themes released for Habari, even if they are ports. Florian has ported the WordPress theme Clean Home to Habari. The theme’s name aptly describes the design, a clean, black and white two column design with contrasting red headings. The theme seems to be coded for trunk, that is, using the areas feature. One thing I noticed is that the theme still has some cruft from WP, calling for a dynamic sidebar (widgets) with some text that also references a text widget and and admin options. I of all people can understand though of wanting to get something out before working out all the kinks, so I’m sure he’ll update it as soon as the areas/blocks feature is fleshed out a bit more. I also don’t speak German, so it’s quite possible he references that in the post announcing the release.
permalinkYou’d think “Canada’s best magazine”, The Walrus would at least link back to my bookmarks if they are going to use my graphics in their post about Infinite Summer. Heck, they didn’t even change the name of the image from the 5x bookmark file. Real professional Nav, real professional…
At least they didn’t just hotlink to the image in my post.
permalinkI’ve recently been using Safari 4 beta, mostly because I had been too lazy to get more RAM, and Firefox was just too damn slow with all the apps I’d have open on only 1 gig. Now that I’m at 4 gigs, I’ve been contemplating going back to Firefox, especially with the comments I’ve been reading about the speed improvements of the next version (3.5??). Another reason I’ve been contemplating going back to Firefox is that Firebug is just far superior to Safari’s built in inspector. To that end, I’ve recently come across two add-ons for Firebug.
The first, Firefinder, is a handy tool to “find HTML elements matching chosen CSS selector(s) or XPath expression”.
The second is one that Google previously used internally. Today they open sourced it and released, Page Speed. Page Speed allows developers to “evaluate the performance of their web pages and to get suggestions on how to improve them.”
permalinkLately I’ve been contemplating switching to Safari, as Firefox still seems to be a memory hog, especially since I tend to leave my desktop on for days at a time. With the improvements to the developer tools in Safari 4, there’s less and less reason for me to hang on to Firefox. Couple that with this bookmarklet suite of design/development tools I just discovered, and the excuse of having to use Firefox for it’s superior developer tools flies right out the window.
The suite includes a configurable grid overlay, a ruler overlay, a measurement tool to determine distance between two points, and a cursor crosshair tool (I’ve not found how to use this one effectively, but it could be useful for figuring placement when using position: absolute).
I can’t speak to how Firebug and the Safari tools compare regarding javascript, as I don’t do much with javascript, save using various jquery plugins.
permalinkI’ve not explored Hulu much, but I came across a Front Row plugin, UnderStudy, that allows you to subscribe to various Hulu and NetFlix feeds and watch them in full screen mode via FrontRow. The Netflix doesn’t interest me, as I’ve got that either through my Roku player or my XBox 360, but until I get my mini fixed up and hooked up to the TV, Hulu on the iMac in full screen mode seems like a nice way to take a little break. Granted, you can’t navigate the whole site, rather you have to add feeds, but once you get some feeds for your kind of content, it’s not too bad. It has a few default feeds to choose from, or you can navigate hulu.com and copy a feed link to the clipboard, then enter Front Row and add the feed from the clipboard. Since I’ve not watch Hulu.com on the site, I can’t compare the quality, but the few clips I looked at via Front Row were quite adequate.
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Recent Comments
Florian Fiegel commented, "Hi, the remaining WP-Stuff isn't ported yet. I left it in the CSS-File cause this things aren't essential for Habari but can be used to make the Theme up for ..." on the post Clean Home Theme for Habari
Mary Cotter commented, "Thanks for these. I always appreciate some anal-retentive creativity. For real!" on the post Infinite Summer Bookmarks
Michael B commented, "Thanks for stopping by Russell, I didn't mean to imply that the graphics weren't great, just that they weren't that much of a deviation from the original game. I certainly ..." on the post Dark Nova: Space Trader for the iPhone
suki commented, "just printed the bookmarks! :) thanks for making them. very nice! hopefully it will help to keep me on track..." on the post Infinite Summer Bookmarks
Russell commented, "Glad to see everyone is enjoying Dark Nova on iPhone!
@Michael B - the graphics have been totally redrawn for the hi-res iPhone screen, and we're considering adding some animation ..." on the post Dark Nova: Space Trader for the iPhone
Theme Development
I have moved all of my theme development to Beanstalk. If you would like to check out the full svn repository, you can checkout from http://blogworks.svn.beanstalkapp.com/themes.
Recent Changes
