Beating Anorexia

This man took anorexia out back and beat it with a stick.

Statement of Congressman Ron Paul, United States House of Representatives, Statement on H Res 489 Regarding Tiananmen Square, June 3, 2009
From: http://www.house.gov/apps/list/speech/tx14_paul/China.shtml

I rise to oppose this unnecessary and counter-productive resolution regarding the 20th anniversary of the incident in China’s Tiananmen Square. In addition to my concerns over the content of this legislation, I strongly object to the manner in which it was brought to the floor for a vote. While the resolution was being debated on the House floor, I instructed my staff to obtain a copy so that I could read it before the vote. My staff was told by no less than four relevant bodies within the House of Representatives that the text was not available for review and would not be available for another 24 hours. It is unacceptable for Members of the House of Representatives to be asked to vote on legislation that is not available for them to read!

As to the substance of the resolution, I find it disturbing that the House is going out of its way to meddle in China’s domestic politics, which is none of our business, while ignoring the many pressing issues in our own country that definitely are our business.

This resolution “calls on the People’s Republic of China to invite full and independent investigations into the Tiananmen Square crackdown, assisted by the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights and the International Committee of the Red Cross…” Where do we get the authority for such a demand? I wonder how the US government would respond if China demanded that the United Nations conduct a full and independent investigation into the treatment of detainees at the US-operated Guantanamo facility?

The resolution “calls on the legal authorities of People’s Republic of China to review immediately the cases of those still imprisoned for participating in the 1989 protests for compliance with internationally recognized standards of fairness and due process in judicial proceedings.” In light of US government’s extraordinary renditions of possibly hundreds of individuals into numerous secret prisons abroad where they are held indefinitely without charge or trial, one wonders what the rest of the world makes of such US demands. It is hard to exercise credible moral authority in the world when our motto toward foreign governments seems to be “do as we say, not as we do.”

While we certainly do not condone government suppression of individual rights and liberties wherever they may occur, why are we not investigating these abuses closer to home and within our jurisdiction? It seems the House is not interested in investigating allegations that US government officials and employees approved and practiced torture against detainees. Where is the Congressional investigation of the US-operated “secret prisons” overseas? What about the administration’s assertion of the right to detain individuals indefinitely without trial? It may be easier to point out the abuses and shortcomings of governments overseas than to address government abuses here at home, but we have the constitutional obligation to exercise our oversight authority in such matters. I strongly believe that addressing these current issues would be a better use of our time than once again condemning China for an event that took place some 20 years ago.

I disagree with Cameron on both of his points.

First, doctype. I use XHTML because it is standardized - lowercase tags, consistently self-closing tags, etc.

Further, HTML5 does add more semantic meaning, yes. But this does not mean the div with a semantic class = meaningless. On the contrary, even <video> can be made more semantic thusly, <video class="documentary">, just like XHTML. Really, this is the strength of HTML. Whatever your flavor DOCTYPE, it can be extended by classes. This is it’s beautiful strength and flexibility. Because of it’s lack of inherent meaning, the designer can imbue it with their own meaning. Isn’t it a small miracle that technology like RDFa and microformats can be built into simple HTML with only the attributes that HTML comes with? And that with those technologies, a veritable world of connected data is possible? Yes, it is a miracle. HTML 5 is not such a huge advancement.

Richard made a good response to Cameron’s argument on px measurements for type. But I think there is even more. For me, building a site with ems, despite the periodic necessity of minor calculations, is an act of truth in the medium. Using ems, each part of the design has a relationship to the whole. The design is beautiful when each part has a relationship to the whole. And when that beauty has it’s roots in the math beneath the design, it approaches the beauty found in nature. A px is a bludgeon to force your taste on the design. The em is a friend, it counsels the design and takes advice from it.

“I made this my rule: When the Lord commands, do it.” ~ Joseph Smith: http://tr.im/mAqF

The Harold B. Lee Library recently started streaming music to one section of the library.One of the questions we’ve gotten since providing this service is, “Where can I see a list what is playing?”. I figured it was somehow possible and a friend helped me figure out how.

We use iTunes to stream the music to the ‘Music Area’ (clever name) of the library. Last.fm, through their ‘Scrobbling’ software, provides access to an RSS feed of your latest tracks. Here’s my recent tracks feed. (Insert your last.fm user name in the url to get your own feed.) Once I installed the Last.fm application on the remote computer, our feed started working instantly. That was step 1.

Step 2 was to get that feed published on a library page for easy advertising. Thankfully, jQuery has a plugin called jFeed. It does what you think - parses the RSS XML so you can output it as HTML - tada! That was relatively easy - they even provide a method to overcome cross-domain scripting woes. Step 2, Check!

Wait! The timestamps are 6 hours off! What?! I don’t know why this happens but I’m not the only one. But I assume that the 6 hour difference is consistent and create a fix thusly:

var timestr = Date.parse(item.updated);
var newtimestr = timestr - 21600; //subtracting 6 hours (in seconds)
var timeago = jQuery.timeago(new Date (newtimestr)); //this is explained in the next paragraph


Everything is now working fine and I could have left well enough alone, but I didn’t. The feed was displaying, the links back to last.fm were working, everything was special. However, I didn’t like the format of the datestamping: Tue, 19 May 2009 22:50:43 +0000. This is the standard date format for RSS publishing. And it is a great format - for computers. However, I wanted to display it in a human friendly way.

Enter timeago. Timeago is a jQuery plugin that does magic - it takes the loverly, aforementioned GMT timestamp and turns it into this: 7 minutes ago. That’s a lot more human friendly. And since I have more humans than computers as friends, I went with that option.

Obviously, this would have been easier for some to do in PHP. And it probably would have made more sense. Maybe someday I’ll do that.

I am excited about the future of the internet. It’s done amazing things in it’s short lifespan and the future is looking even brighter.

One of the bright spots in that future is the semantic web. At this point, the best thing I can do for you is share a video to explain it. Here’s my favorite:

The Semantic Web, In English from james levy.

So what is my contribution to this illustrious future? A WordPress theme, of course!

We’ve been using Microformats at the Harold B. Lee library for a couple of years. Recently, we even built a Ubiquity script to make use of that valuable markup. At Web Directions North, I met Manu Sporny, an advocate of RDFa, another flavor of semantic markup for the web. That meeting led to the opportunity to design and build a skin for the RDFa blog.

Since, RDFa and the semantic web is about the future, I built a lot of forward looking functionality into the design. I built a 9 column, fluid grid. I’ve been enamored with the work of that unstoppable robot ninja, Ethan Marcotte. He recently blogged and otherwise published on max-width fluid grids. I think these are brilliant. They provide the readability of fixed-width with the flexibility of fluid width. If you shrink the browser width, the design accommodates accordingly. Increasing or decreasing the font size further illustrates it’s flexibility.

There are other forward-looking details. I’ve included drop shadow on the RDFa text (visible in Safari). I’m using css columns in the footer (sorry IE users). I’m using @font-face with the lovely Museo Sans for titles and other details. I used these features, not to slight certain browser users. I generally try to accommodate as many browsers as possible (I do work for a library!). But for this site, I wanted to push the edges. I wanted to be thinking about the future - that’s where the value of the semantic web lies. We don’t get immediate returns on our investment in semantics; those returns come down the road as we continue to build for the future. The design of this site, in small ways, will improve as browsers adopt new standards.

Now, if I could only take the time to design a decent theme for my own site…

Death & Taxes by wallstats.com

Wallstats.com has produced a visual description of the US Federal budget. I like to think of it as a map to the end of the Republic.

I started the year off well but have slowed down a bit. Hopefully this marks a turning point.

A lot has happened that I haven’t recorded - mostly family illness. Hannah was really sick a couple weeks ago. Just as she was getting better the two youngest girls got sick. Yesterday I started showing a fever. The two oldest girls have gotten off with minor sniffles.

Little Philmont was a success. The training really hit home with a lot of leaders in the Stake. The venturing program has been reinvigorated because of the event - that is a huge success. I am obviously not to credit for all of this - those that did the training are to be congratualted. Brother David Pack from LDS-BSA has breathed some life back into the Venturing program. Our Stake Young Men Presidency also did a great job preparing and presenting leadership training materials. All who attended were blessed. I only wish more had attended.

We moved Mom into her new place yesterday. Actually, I didn’t do that much moving because I was watching the girls in the morning while Hannah attended Stake Women’s conference. In the afternoon, I went up with my hometeacher Brother Danner and his wife to pick up Mom’s new washer & dryer and deliver them. They were a big help.

Mom’s new place is enormous. It’s called a condo but I think it has a thousand more square feet than our house. It has 3 bedrooms, a living room, a sun room, 3 fireplaces, a living room, a large kitchen, a family room and 3 bathrooms; plus a couple more rooms for good measure. It’s up on the bench and has a view of the lake and valley. There are tennis courts near by so I’m thinking we could drop the girls at Grandma’s sometime and have a tennis date. She has a year contract. It’s $1000/mo. but that includes utilities. Still, it is expensive. As usual, I am worried about her finances.

I was presented with the District Award of Merit on Friday night. I was surprised to be given this honor. Eight of received the award and I felt out of my league. The people in that group are of high caliber. I hope to live up to the honor that I have received.

“It has been frequently remarked that it seems to have been reserved to the people of this country…to decide the important question..whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force.”

Only recently have I heard of Moleskine - an artistic style notebook brand. I was intrigued but held off being too interested because of price - they’re fairly expensive. When I found out they’re available in the BYU bookstore I gave in. I thought I might as well try them.

I purchased a set of three of the Cahier - small, gridded paper with a soft, brown cover. Here are my first impressions:

Likes: The size is good. I got the small size because I wanted to be able to carry it in my pocket. I’m taking a cue from my co-worker Ben on this one - he carries his in his shirt pocket. Pocket-size means I can take it everywhere and use it when inspiration strikes. The spine is stitched instead of stapled. This hand a nice handcrafter quality to the notebook. And I like having the grid lines when I want to sketch so I get good proportions, alignment, etc.

Dislikes: The grid lines are way too dark. There wasn’t a sample open at the store so I just had to commit to the purchase before seeing the grid lines. Now I wish I had just purchased the notebook with blank pages - the grid lines are that dark. And they were very expensive. 3 notebooks cost me over 7 bucks and they’ve only got a few pages in them.

Conclusion: I’ll use these until they’re full - no sense in wasting them. And then I think I’ll actually make my own. I can purchase grid paper with much lighter lines. I can wrap it in heavyweight stock for a cover. I can stitch or staple it myself. It will be much cheaper and much better. I’ll write a follow-up when I get to that point.

Aside: Along with the notebooks, I bought a nice pen - Zebra Sarasa 0.7. I really like it. At $1.50 it was a good deal.