Some friends are moving to Cal-e-fornia from Tejas. I don’t know why, but apparently they want to move from where it is hot and humid to where it is hotter and humidor. That being said, I wrote a very quick ditty to celebrate this wonderful opportunity. You may listen to it below:
Disclosure: I was born in California, this song is, like almost all of my work, tongue-in-cheek.
In no particular order: Photos from 2012 of our family and people in our family. No names are given to protect relatives I didn’t get permission from 😉 More to come…
Creative Commons: source
I’ve heard from some folks lately that voting third party is a lost vote or a vote for ‘the other guy’. Let’s think about how that plays out. If I talk to a democrat and I say I’m voting third party they say, “That’s a vote for Romney.” If I talk to a republican and I say I’m voting third party they say, “That’s a vote for Obama.” So really I’m voting for both candidates when I cast a third party vote based on this logic. I’m kind of OK with that since a ‘split my vote between these two people’ option doesn’t exist on the ballot.
Or, there’s the other position: a vote for a person that represents (most closely) your views is a vote for that position, even if it carries little to no electoral weight. In other words the larger two major parties will see over time that their platform does not represent the third party position and may come around, over time, to represent other ideals.
Vote third party this next election – or at least split your vote between the lesser of two weevils.
That title is pretty straight forward and is sure to draw fire (no pun intended) from various folks, but let’s be frank: you can’t jump into an argument about gun control (or the second amendment) unless you recognize that rights come with responsibilities. If you’re not going to carefully, thoughtfully, deliberately execute your rights with responsibility, then you don’t get to keep the right. Let me explain:
You have the right to drive a car in the United States starting at about 16 years of age all the way until (depending on the state) they take that license, and right, away from you. You could lose the right for getting DUI’s too many times (I’m all for 1, but let’s say 3 is a safe number to let drunk driving happen on accident the first two times). You can lose the right because you’re too old and you’re dangerous to other drivers. You can lose the right if you speed excessively. In other words, you have the right, but you can lose it if you don’t take responsibility.
I want US citizens to be able to have various weapons for various sorts of safety, target shooting, hunting and of course looking like Chuck Norris:
But after we get over looking like Chuck Norris if you’re not a safe, responsible, rights-aware citizen, then you probably shouldn’t be having a gun. You probably lost that right. As a civilization I’m actually for more citizens having guns. But with training. I really do think every healthy US citizen should be required to go through 2 years in the military and serve the country. I didn’t do this. i was chicken. But I also think that even if you’re cleaning latrines you should know how to handle a weapon, deal with intense situations, and generally be aware. Not that I’m obsessed with war, but that I’m concerned that rights like gun ownership need training, and making it mandatory (like drivers ed) except for those who are really, really fringe, makes more sense than removing the rights.
Now: let the flaming begin!
From my notes from church this morning:
Justification is very misunderstood. It is complete and part of identification with Christ unto new life. If we don’t understand it as complete we feel compelled to works. If we don’t understand it as part of identification we fail to grasp the fullness of the work of Christ on the cross.
I just installed 9 slate tiles in our front entry area at lunch. Tiles. Like Scrabble. Only with the worst typography ever! You can’t even spell anything with the tiles I used. And they’re imperfect. The weird thing is that the imperfection is the stuff that you want to avoid in some parts of life, but they make the slate cool.
The slate has lots of colors and I had to cut it down by a quarter inch or so on both of the sides (it’s a square tile, so you only cut two sides). It has different thicknesses, too. We could have found similar thicknesses, but that would have taken potentially hours or choosing colors and patterns we didn’t like just for a thickness difference.
Part of me worries that this looks like a total “DIY” project.
Part of me worries that it will make our house look less cool to some guess.
Part of me worries that I’m even worrying.
It’s kind of like having a crap set of letters in Scrabble and you play near a triple word score and you’re worried that the other person has a Z or Q and they’re totally going to eat you alive. Except it’s tile – so really it doesn’t matter that much. Next month I could rip it out and put in something else that we like more.
Who’s winning?
I needed to load up the CKEditor library dynamically as part of a module pattern using jQuery’s promises. I kept getting issues about broken paths to files like the skin and the language files due to the context not being the root server path. Because the software I’m working on is installed internationally and on all sorts of servers with different paths I couldn’t use the CKEditor config.baseHref setting. The fastest way to accomplish this is through a custom load script (instead of $.getScript) like so:
function loadScript(srcURL) {
var deferred = new $.Deferred();
var e = document.createElement('script');
e.onload = function () { deferred.resolve(); };
e.src = srcURL;
document.getElementsByTagName("head")[0].appendChild(e);
return deferred.promise();
}
Then you can just pass loadScript the URL to CKEditor (or another complex library that will do sub-sequent downloads and path references) and it will execute in the global space.
Jessica and I were having a very brief discussion about a new movie that is out and I said that the male lead was described as a stud by someone who saw the movie. The 9yo walked by and said, “A stud is a piece of a lego.”
Yes, yes it is.
Time for a euphemism lesson? I think not.
This morning on the way to school Jessica asked the girls what we should do while some friends come into town this summer. Abby replied, “Let’s go to the art museum!”
Jessica suggested that not everyone might enjoy the art museum because not everyone is like us in the things they enjoy.
Abby: “yeah, we’re a nerd family.”
Evie asked, “We’re nerds?”
Abby: “Yeah, and it’s cool!”
I’m such a proud dad 🙂
So Monday the 16th (yesterday) was the 8 year anniversary of our having lived in the Denver metro area. We like it a bunch, but we still miss friends and family from around the US (and world) – but it’s the longest amount of time Jessica’s ever lived in one place. The same can be said for Abby & Evie 😉 I lived in Nevada for longer, but I hardly count.
W8w.