A Dixie Carpetbagger

Background: One of the tougher courses I’ve taken was the “Intro to Ethics” course that all Florida university students have to take.  The professor debated like Bruce fought– everywhere but nowhere until he sensed you dropped your guard, and then he’d quickly finish you.  I mention this because while his class was as as torturous as a Kerry speech, his grading system was easy.

• A- Student can EXPAND the material by linking disparate ideas and themes and create through synthesis a valid link.
• B- Student can EXPOUND on the material, and can reason through the logic behind the material.
• C- Student can EXPLAIN the content of the material, and has a solid understanding of the fundamentals.

The final in this course was a 2,500 word essay, your choice from 10 available topics.  I chose option 10, the most difficult– link the ideas of an opposing pair of philosophers and show that both sets of ideas have a solid logical base.  I chose Nietzsche and Kierkegaard… which wasn’t actually that hard to do.  The short form goes like this– both saw a basic problem (oppressive morality), but differed on the solution.  Nietzsche created a new morality, but Kierkegaard created new interpreters of morality.

The reason I bring this little story up is that in the modern world, we have plenty of EXPLAINING and EXPOUNDING going on, but no EXPANDING.  People always talk about “being awash in information,” and they are.  The problem is that so few people try to synthesize the information into a useful form.  (This was something Bob Heinlein complained about.  He even took a few years off writing to catch up on and tie together all the new information in his fields of expertise.)  This lack of synthesis is why so many people turn away from certain areas of discussion– politics, gun rights, libertarianism.  Information without synthesis is like watching a channel that drops frames… eventually you’ll turn away.

That’s one reason why I draw from so many sources when I write a post.  Each writer has a different take, does different research, and shines a different light on a topic.  Combined, they are the perfect example of a Fermi problem.  We will probably never figure out for certain (insert your choice here– what the anti-gunners are thinking, what is going on in the White House right now, whether the AK or the AR is better), but we can take a series of guesses of try to piece them together.  Ideas, food, and sound– all are better when blended.

If you think you have the situation under control, you are sadly mistaken…

No posts today.  Just as I sat down to begin writing, Chaos and Mayhem had a party.  Now I literally have more urgent errands to do than there are business hours in the day.

To quote my dear papa… “if it ain’t one damn thing, it’s another!”

I was having problems with WordPress and the Journalist theme.  Not only the “phantom bubble,” but the fact that nested comments… weren’t.  Being fed up, I fired up Google and found out that it was the Journalist theme itself that was causing the problems.

Solution?  Activate the default theme, delete Journalist, download the newer version and install it… and now everything works– no phantom bubbles, comments nest, and I could swear that the load time went down a few tenths of a second.

You know that expression Foghorn Leghorn always did, laying on the ground and tapping his fingers on the earth?  Yeah, I’m doing a good impression right now.  Note to self: re-installation is almost always less effort intensive than repair.

But at least I can take some solace in not being the only one having some technical problems.

Okay, so everything should be rolled out and functional, including the tip jar (using GunPal/GPal), the gun death counter, an Amazon widget and a nice banner.

The blogroll has been updated, too… and it’s no longer on a side page, it’s on the sidebar to the right.  Some major additions include the IMFDB (Internet Movie Firearms Database), Where Angels Fear To Tread, Billy Beck’s Two–Four, Nikki Goeser’s blog*, and the Holster Site.

The majority of the work getting all these things to work has been the setup.  Getting all the accounts (GPal, Amazon, Site Meter, Project Wonderful, PayPal) going has taken a while.  For instance, Project Wonderful and Amazon have to approve your application– which takes time– and neither uses GPal, so I had to sign up for PayPal… which needs to be verified… which takes time.

Then there was the banner setup.  Turns out that the theme that I use (Journalist) has a “tagline” (the quote bubble that used to be in the header) that cannot be turned off.  This, of course, was conveniently not mentioned by the writer who gave a how-to about creating a banner for this theme.  So, if you delete the tagline text, it leaves a small one-character tagline bubble.  The workaround?  Replace the left and right halves of the bubble with a square JPEG that matches the background.  (Next time you load the page, if you look very closely, you’ll see the two small squares flash into existence a split instant before the main banner.)

So, now I can (hopefully) make a little coin, which will ease the pain in my wallet come site renewal time.

*For those of you don’t know who Mrs. Goeser, the basic outline of her story is here.  Highlights two things– one, why “gun free zones” make no sense, and two, why I dislike my information being out there.

I should have everything here back to normal Monday… Lord willing and the creek don’t rise.

In the meantime, here’s video of an excavator climbing a tower courtesy of USCitizen.

Update: I’m still here, still writing, and working on doing some much-needed work to the blog.  Like a blogroll.  And a banner.  And some posts.  You know, minor stuff.

Status: Hating Florida heat.  When it was winter, I said “Lord, I won’t complain, just let it warm up.”  Big mistake– to paraphrase Chris Titus, “you gotta be a little more specific when you ask God for something.”

Do you know how you cool off when it’s 90 degrees and 90% humidity?  Poorly.  Sweat doesn’t evaporate, it just rolls off your body (which helps when you’re doing carpentry, but still), and you can quickly lose tremendous amounts of water and minerals through sweat.  Combine this with the shape I’m in (round), and it becomes obvious that– like Frankenstein’s monster– I do better in cold environments.  Anybody got a spare stillsuit?

So, between my home improvement work, getting everything lined up for the fall semester of classes, and trying to take care of side projects, coffee is becoming the base of my food pyramid.  “It is by caffeine alone I set my mind in motion. It is by the beans of Java that thoughts acquire speed, the hands acquire shaking, the shaking becomes a warning. It is by caffeine alone I set my mind in motion.”

However, I do have something to help you waste the some time– an Air Traffic Control Simulator.  Trust me, about 30 minutes in, you learn why ATC personnel have mental breakdowns…

The cleanup and mapping of the disaster zone (a.k.a. the computer room) continues.  The problem is that I’ve begun to go so far in time that my memory is useless in understanding why the items I found have been retained.  In other words, the process is becoming less and less “cleaning” and more and more “archeology.”  I don’t need Tupperware and a duster, I need an SG team and Dr. Jackson.

The list of things to do is also growing.  Which is disturbing– did everything wait until I was solving problems to jump me?  The pocket universe problem is becoming more severe, too.  At this point, the only hope is if the Fringe Division seals the problem from their side…*

In short,not much for the next few days, but here’s something to help you waste your time.

*Why, yes, I watched the season finale.

Taking the day off, having to complete some projects.  Most notably, I’m trying to chart all of the pocket universes in my computer room.  They have to be here… because there is no way this room holds everything that I’ve put into it.

For an example-  I just cleaned out a container of old textbooks I never sold back to the university/college bookstore.  When I had put all of the books up on Amazon, I sealed the container and got ready to put it back under the spare bed… only to find that there was another container of books under the bed.  (If the ones I have listed so far–which is about 80% of them– sell, it’ll bring in almost a grand.  Which is about five times the bookstores would have bought them for.)

Heck, my big ammo can could double as a bag of holding!  I had one big “fat fifty” can and a fireproof locker full of ammo, and when I sorted all of my ammo I filled both of those containers, plus three more fifty cal cans.

Oh, and those are just the project’s that I’ve started.  The next 9 items on the list begin with “build bookcase” and end with “design firearm/ammo vendor database.”  In the middle is “sort/sell sports cards.”

Which has been on my to-do list since 2002.  (sigh)

In the next week or so, I’ll be adding some ads and a GunPal link to the sidebar.

I’m not cashin’ in, I’m just trying to move from “broke, funemployed college student” to “poor, funemployed college student.”

I’m also considering doing the CafePress T-shirt thing… not that I have any artistic skill, but having seen some of the shirts on CafePress, I don’t think that’ll be a disadvantage.

Any thoughts or suggestions?

Good: reading about all the bloggers mingling at the NRA convention.

Better: rebutting MikeB.

Best: Joe making me a Quote of the Day.

Note to self: keep the snark set to “humiliate.”