the other day ago…

OK – this is an interesting tv ad -

the doll is only three dollars – with outfits from one to five bucks.

The new version of spacefeeds.com is live. It is still very much in its infancy, but I think its getting there. It took me a couple of weeks to get it to its current state – and that was during the STS-128 mission and the beginnings of this semester, so I haven’t had a lot of time to dedicate to it. I hope I can put some work into it and get it to where I want it soon (or at least partially there).

Even though the building of the current version took two weeks, the project itself has been a long time coming. I have spent endless evenings scouring the Web for a way to do this and then tweaking well into the wee hours – in the end, I made use of lots of other people’s work. I plan on writing a step-by-step breakdown of how I got to where the site is in the future, but I’d like to wait until I get the site a little more on its way. The main projects I need to give credit to are WordPress and SimplePie – without these there would be no spacefeeds.

Anyway – I hope at least one of you out there enjoys it, and it makes getting information a little easier.

j

OK – someone sent me this link, and I’m having a hard time figuring out if this qualifies as me being rickrolled… I’ll have to ponder it.

The Buddhist concept of patience differs from the Western concept in that it demands awareness instead of stoicism (i.e. patience isn’t suffering without complaint; it’s an understanding of the situation).

With this in mind, I feel that the news media are biased in any given situation; therefore, it is nearly impossible to ever fully understand the situation. But what has helped temper the information I receive and attain my own world view is an understanding of the underlying motive. The first filter I apply to everything is the reality that we do NOT live in a democracy; we live in a capitalist society with representative government. The reason I do not consider this democracy is that monetary concerns actually govern while our representative government exists within these capitalist bounds. If we accept that our society is run by the corporation of which we (the public at large) are at best minority share holders, then the reasons behind the information we receive become more apparent. Once the reasons/motives are understood, we can begin to grasp the situation. What the motives are differ by name and explanation, but they all point to money or power. And with money and power essentially being the same by Western capitalists’ standards, there’s really only one god in our current structure. So if we assume that worship of this dead god is the driving force behind every organization (including government and our society), then we get a limited view of the impetus for the information exchange we call news. Continue Reading »

OK – so after doing the update in order to exclude my weekly twitter digest, I noticed some problems. The main one was that the ‘Older Entries’ link didn’t work. I tried several variants, but the only way I could get them to work again was by deleting the exclude code I had put before the loop. So I deleted it.

I assumed that it was because the is_home() and is_front_page() conditional tags weren’t working properly, so I checked out the loop page again. And I found this example, which works exactly as I want it too. It doesn’t answer the questions of whether or not the conditional tags for home and front page actually work – as a matter of fact, even when you’re not on the homepage (front page) the posts from my tweets category still get filtered out. This is OK for me because that’s what I want to happen; however, if you want something to happen on the homepage (front page) only, I would look for another way.