Wouldn’t it be cool if this was about more than just keeping the flow of the complex chemical reaction which contains, transports, and transfigures what we know as life. About more than just living out my extension of the global and possibly interstellar family tree of life only to wither away and die, whether or not I leave behind random halves of my genetic data co-mingled with that of another only to do the same, like puffs of smoke on an early-morning veranda. The very idea that I, one such puff of smoke—as unique as I am insignificant in this fabric, should be looking for something more, which even if there was would be so deviated and strange from smoke and fabric that I could not relate to it let alone comprehend it’s merit or existence. Perhaps I’m looking in an au fait vacant corner for substance because the content I already have and could with little effort produce at my disposal is dull and to me, like the suggestion of a puppet show would be to a 13 year old who could alternatively witness massive explosions, kung fu, and adult situations in a dim-lit movie theatre. Are the options really as dull as entertaining, fighting for/with/against, planning for, selling to, and buying from the other animals I see walking around all over the place.

Shit, is it really just about moving through space trying to achieve balance in my own neural network preferably leaning toward the happy and good side, but not so much that I lose all bearings of where the line between good and bad actually sits; fastened in place by ideology and culture—and what should really be a personal thing but too often dictated by pastor/government/drug dealer/corporate vendor to the ends of advancing their own misguided ideals.

Why be a drop of water in the ocean if you don’t like being wet.. Or salt. If you see the insignificance of you the drop and that of all the other drops and of the ocean itself. If you see a simple procedure where others see through muddy spectacles, and you do in fact distinguish between happy and sad, between good and bad, then why not simply bend the ocean to your preference and find a warm current to wait for the smoke to dissipate. On the other hand if everything is grey, uninteresting, and lacks a point above and beyond ourselves and the immediate here and now then why expend the effort. The only reason I can see is because the alternative is to vegetate, BUT, what’s the difference really between vegetating in physicality wherever you happen to be at this moment or just personally in your warm ocean current. It really comes down to a choice between pickled cucumbers and pickled eggs… either way you’re fucked.

Stewing in a salty brine trying to figure out how to attain something that only exists at the edge of your imagination, half in and the other half just doesn’t exist, as you’re left wanting. What are you to do with this kind of insight? There’s no point telling anyone cause, sure some will understand and maybe even hold up a sign or wear a badge about it, most will try to ignore you as they catch the first glimpse of what you’re trying to say before they try to forget and cling to their chosen vices, and the rest will try to kill you for daring to talk in a way that scares them so much.

If checking items off a half-hazard bucket list is of no interest and neither is making a splash in the  many quandaries that spring up from trying to live with each other peacefully. Then where is the motivation to get up, get dressed, and go do shit. Why bother going around accumulating stories if the characters, and potential audience will all cease to exist in x number of heartbeats. Could it be that you’re spoiled that 1 lifespan even if it were 10,000 years long would still only be 1 lifespan.

It looks like it’s not about the time allotted but the challenge and the purpose. The redundancy of evolution—in a higher sense as well than just biological, but of matter, solar systems, etc., means that it won’t matter what happens to a single puff of smoke and so the argument of the purpose being the greater good can only be applied when referring to a random but encompassing sample of puffs of smoke. When reduced to a single puff, the options are limitless and therefore hold no value. If everyone received exactly $10 million then hefty inflation would ensue and things would quickly return as they were. The only way to assign value to your options in terms of paths, goals, and reasons to get up in the morning is to limit those options. To escalate boundaries and walls, to become a captive of some rigid, restrictive system. The opening to a bag of chips only holds value if you are inside with the chips and would like not to be. Value is born of discomfort. And to someone such as yourself, with an extremely high tolerance for discomfort, value will only start to emerge from near torture. Like squeezing the tail end of a water drop shaped bead, discomfort—of whatever degree may be required, is your propellent. There may not be a bigger meaning, but you still have impulse. Impulse that creates wants, needs, and dreamed up scenarios of ideal warm currents and the fuel to get there is for some as simple as the idea of not being at those goals yet, but in your cynical, logical, 5 steps ahead of the flock, and above all clinical way of thinking, the fuel to get there must be self induced, unrelenting, rigid torture; applied like clockwork until such a time that such goals are reached and become self sustaining which in some cases might never occur. What’s important to note is that this torturous structure shouldn’t be random noise, but rather reflective of the goal state you wish to achieve. The torture itself should have a direct cause-and-effect relationship with aspects or properties of the goal state.

I'm using Wordpress 2.7 at the time of writing, but my theme is modified from the default theme of version 2.5 or something. My current sidebar uses the widgets feature with some manually added stuff, sort of a lazy way of customizing stuff. I keep adding stuff to it and now I need a second one, which will inevitably require a wider site but my analytics shows most people these days have more than the formerly standard 1024x780 screen resolution and so it should be fine.

So if you're in the same boat as me, hand me that paddle, I'll show you what I did.

In your theme folder open your functions.php file, and find the following code:

 
if ( function_exists('register_sidebar') )
register_sidebar(array(
'before_widget' => '
<li id="%1$s" class="widget %2$s">',
'after_widget' => '</li>
 
',
'before_title' => '
<h2 class="widgettitle">',
'after_title' => '</h2>
 
',
));
 

You may not have the above code, instead look for:

 
if ( function_exists('register_sidebar') )
register_sidebar();
 

In either case we want to replace it with the following:

 
if ( function_exists('register_sidebars') )
register_sidebars(2);
 

Note: changed sidebar to sidebars, and the number 2 indicates the total sidebars we want.

In your theme folder open your index.php file, and find the following code:

 
<?php get_sidebar(); ?>
 

Or depending on your theme:

 
<?php include(TEMPLATEPATH."/sidebar.php");?>
 

Since I want to add another right sidebar, add the following code below:

 
<?php get_sidebar('2'); ?>
 

Note: Anything between the ' ' is representative of the new file you have to create called in this case sidebar-2.php

Or in the later case for consistency you can instead add:

 
<?php include(TEMPLATEPATH."/sidebar-2.php");?>
 

The call for your sidebars in your index.php file should now look something like the following:

 
<div id="sidebar">
<?php get_sidebar(); ?>
<?php get_sidebar('2'); ?>
</div>
 

In my case since I already had a sidebar, the "sidebar" div was inside sidebar.php. As you can see from the code above, it needs to be in the index.php file. Change the div id in sidebar.php to "sidebar1", and in sidebar-2.php to "sidebar2".

Note: At this point you should see the two sidebars, and be able to add widgets or custom php. But it will likely appear below the other sidebar.

Since I have css rules for sidebar, and not sidebar1 or 2, I can just re-assign some of the rules to sidebar 1, create a similar set for sidebar two and adjust the overall body and content width. This all depends on your theme and where you want your new sidebar.

This has been talked about by many people before me, but music videos caused the sully of the music industry. Sure the idea is fresh enough, using another medium such as video to enhance and drive home the point of a song. But since most people aren't artists, most people don't think of music as art. They see music as a consumable item that fulfils a need, and as such are not bothered and even drawn toward what's become the typical music video. Tits, ass, drugs, jewellery, cars, big houses, private jets are all consumable items as well and so suits decided that that's what should be in music videos, and that's what their contracted(grossly untalented) talent should be singing/rapping about. Your typical music videos, the ones that flood the airways and by some commercial force the ones that drive their accompanying audio diarrhoea to the top of the charts are designed to sell products, in fact the bodies that run those charts that they manage to climb are themselves managed by the same fuckers selling ad space in the songs. Lyrics to these puddles of poo are comprised of the dirtiest things they can think of, which in terms of the music industry are poorly strung together half-sentences and repeating the same misplaced vulgar words and catch phrases again and again. I'm all for talking dirty but this is a half-dressed attempt at best. Most of it anyway lends to a 7th grade outlook on dirty which makes it all to clear it was placed for the cheap thrill that resonates the mainstream when hearing such words through a set of speakers to a shitty beat.

Art is when something tangible, like a paint brush or a guitar string, can be used to portray something abstract, like an emotion or a cultural folly. When people are poisoned by infomercials injected into what should be an aggregate of art, and to the point where they are convinced what they are watching is in fact art, it's sad. It's sad to think that not only do these people live on the verge of a human experience–in a significant way, but also that they remain chained in the dark because someone else wants to make a buck. Manipulating someone else's reality and truth  for your own gain is a dirty trick to play.

I leave you with some art.

Support these artists and others like them or soon there won't be any left.

Metallica - Turn the Page Directed by: Jonas Akerlund

Killer Mike featureing Ice Cube - Pressure Directed by: Giovanni Hidalgo

Radiohead - Just Directed by: Jamie Thravest

That's it, I'm getting a ticket back to South Africa and not coming back until someone's figured out how to solve snow. The weather network I blogged about earlier must be using some kind of archaic and inaccurate scale of measurement because the supposed 10-12cm of snowfall predicted yesterday is more like 3 feet and it's still falling. There was a practical blizzard yesterday and so distribution isn't exactly equal, our side of the street was like the bottom half of an hour glass at the 45 minute mark, while across the road everything was fine and peachy. I feel like I've written about this before but because of the sheer height of the snow and the apparently insufficient size of my snow shovel I'm effectively shovelling the entire driveway 3 times. In other words there is a top, a middle, and a bottom to the snow cover.

Further more someone, and this could only happen to me, took all the left handed gloves in the house. AND HID THEM, or ate them, or something. This is a bad thing for two reasons. The first, is that it's -10˚C without the wind chill factored in. The second is that my extremities are extremely sensitive to cold, and after 5 minutes in this kind of cold(15-25 with super warm gloves on) my fingertips, followed by my hands lose dexterity, turn red, and lose all feeling except for something comparable to what it would feel like to have an elephant sitting on it. Then again maybe it's not me, because it seems my ipod can't cope either, if it's not tucked away against me it shuts down after 10 minutes and the little ipod on the screen starts shivering. Not looking forward to the fact that it gets as cold as -45˚ in late February.

On the upside every so often I find some snow treasure. Today I found 2 newspapers, and a pristine tomato that must have been inadvertently flung into the driveway by a Tomato Carrier while it was still snowing, as he was skipping down the street singing about growing methods, artichokes, and clucking like a chicken as they do. When you're on the virge of frost bite you're supposed to warm your hands slowly so as not to encourage them to fall off. Lucky you I chose to do that by writing this, but I still have to go back out there and chip away at the last 4 feet of snow—piled up by forceful snow plows, which left over night through a quazi-blizzard is a lot like rock candy and regret.

Update:

Thought I'd add some pics for the sceptical among you. The first one is of the peachy side, the second is not an artificial hill in any respect aside from one lump directly above the ruler, it's just how much snow there was.

Color Browser is a great AIR app for designers to store your favourite colour pallets. It works with pallet files from sites like ColourLovers.com, you can then customize them or create your own in the app. Levitation Design also has some amazing wallpapers while you're over there.

"Color Browser was designed as a way to store my favorite color sets for reference. Kuler and ColourLovers had great ways to manage my favorites too, but keeping them open, or referencing them quickly was a pain, or not possible if I wasn’t online. So I put together a small application to handle a local set of my favorite color palettes.

It’s grown a bit along the way, but the main purpose is still the same. The ability to open, or drag in ASE files was added (since both of the main color sites export those). And I expanded it from the original five color sets to support much larger sets. Color Browser has recently reached 1.0, so feel free to download it and try it out."

via Levitation Design » Project » Color Browser.

Adobe AIR 1.5 Linux was publicly released yesterday :

We released an alpha version of Adobe AIR for Linux today so now we’ve got some form of support for Mac, Windows, and Linux with the exact same code/.air file. I’ve been playing with it for a few weeks and it’s really impressive to see most AIR applications just work on Linux exactly the way they do on Mac or Windows. Linux support is one of the things I’m most excited about with AIR because I love using Ubuntu and I hope that a lot of the applications I use will be built on AIR so I can spend more time in Linux and have the same experience I do on Mac/Win.

We also announced we’re joining the Linux Foundation so we can help push the idea of RIAs on Linux. In addition to the AIR Linux release we also released an updated alpha version of Flex Builder for Linux so we’re hoping developers can both build AND consume RIAs on Linux.

We’re working on a 1.1 version of AIR that will include some localization as well as some bug fixes from the 1.0 release. The Linux 1.1 version will lag a little but but after 1.0 our plan is to release a Linux version of AIR together with Mac and Windows so all three platforms will have the same release cycle.

Download it http://get.adobe.com/air/

If you have the AIR Linux Beta installed, you'll have to remove it, and all your AIR apps or 1.5 won't install. Here's a step by step guide by the AIR Dev Team on how to do that [ http://blogs.adobe.com/air/2008/12/tips_on_resolving_application.html ].

Update:

After trying everything and racking my brain and the internet, I still couldn't get the installer to start. So I headed back over the the AIR Dev Team Blog and actually read the faq which plainly points out that AIR 1.5 doesn't work on the latest Ubuntu. If only I'd read that before I did a clean install of Linux Mint.

Will AIR run on newer versions of Linux distributions? For example, Adobe AIR's system requirements say Ubunutu 7.10, but I am running 8.10.
While we have not tested fully against newer versions of these distributions, we believe AIR should run fine in most cases. If you run into an issue, please send us a bug description using our feedback form and we will look into addressing it in a future version. For a list of our supported Linux distributions, please see our System Requirements page.

I just looked outside to find tons of snow that, lucky me, I get to shovel in a few hours. After living here for a few years and working with a 7 car driveway I feel the best strategy is to check the local weather for the week and figure out when and if I have to bother moving mountains of snow about. The single most important thing to look for is whether there'll be an up in temperature and then a sudden drop and increase in wind chill. What happens then is a lot of snow creates a thermal blanket with the warm ground which if the temp goes above -5˚C will melt a layer of snow close to the ground. If the temp then drops that layer freezes into solid ice. This is compounded by snowplows which create a mountain of massive ice chunks and solidified snow and dirt at the end of your driveway. Today, there was a weather warning for the province that started out reading like a novel and near the end deteriorates into grammatical sewage. Maybe I'm reading to far into it but seems to me that whoever's responsible for posting weather warnings got a creative streak and then one of their superiors walked in and they had to shuffle some papers around and get back to work.

WITH THE FIRST 10 CM SNOWFALL NOW FADING INTO MEMORY..THE SECOND IN A FASCINATING SERIES OF SIGNIFICANT SNOWSTORMS IS BEARING DOWN ON SOUTHERN ONTARIO FROM COLORADO. THE COLORADO LOW HAS FORMED AS EXPECTED IS RACING NORTHEAST TO CENTRAL OHIO LATER TODAY THEN INTO PENNSYLVANIA TONIGHT. A RAPIDLY EXPANDING AND INTENSIFYING AREA OF SNOW OVER THE US MIDWEST INTO MICHIGAN HAS JUST MOVED INTO WINDSOR EARLY THIS MORNING AND WILL CRUISE NORTHEAST INTO THE GOLDEN HORSESHOE BETWEEN 7 AND 8 AM THEN EAST DOWN HIGHWAY 401 INTO EASTERN ONTARIO ALL THE WAY TO KINGSTON BY THIS AFTERNOON. THE SNOW WILL BECOME QUITE HEAVY AT TIMES AS THE LOW GETS CLOSER. LATEST INDICATIONS KEEP ANY RISK OF A CHANGEOVER TO ICE PELLETS OR FREEZING RAIN IN ESSEX AND KENT COUNTIES FROM WINDSOR TO CHATHAM AND SOUTH TO LAKE ERIE. OTHERWISE ONLY SNOW IS EXPECTED FOR EVERYONE ELSE. SNOWFALL RATES OF 2 TO 4 CM PER HOUR ARE EXPECTED AT TIMES AS THE HEAVIEST AREAS OF SNOW MOVE THROUGH. A GENERAL SNOWFALL OF 15 TO 20 CENTIMETRES IS LIKELY ACROSS THE DISTRICT BY THIS EVENING. AREAS AROUND THE WEST END OF LAKE ONTARIO FROM DOWNTOWN TORONTO THROUGH MISSISSAUGA TO HAMILTON AND EVENTUALLY NIAGARA WILL GET SOME HELP IN THE COLD NORTHEASTERLY WINDS OFF OF LAKE ONTARIO BOOSTING SNOWFALL AMOUNTS TO NEAR 25 CM IN QUITE A FEW LOCALES. IT IS NOT ENTIRELY OUT OF THE QUESTION FOR ONE OR TWO LOCALES TO GET UP TO 30 CM SHOULD AN EMBEDDED LAKE EFFECT SNOWSQUALL DEVELOP OVER LAKE ONTARIO TODAY AS SUGGESTED BY SOME OF THE COMPUTER MODELS. WHITEOUT CONDITIONS FROM BLOWING SNOW CAUSED BY STRONG EAST TO NORTHEAST WINDS OF 40 GUSTING TO 60 KM/H WILL BE A SIGNIFICANT PROBLEM WITH THIS WINTER STORM ADDING TO ITS NASTY WHITE BITE. THIS MORNINGS RUSH HOUR IN AND AROUND THE GOLDEN HORSESHOE MAY START OUT WITH NO SNOW BUT CONDITIONS WILL START TO DETERIORATE RAPIDLY AS THE SNOW MOVES IN AFTER 7 AM. HOWEVER..HEAVY SNOW AND BLOWING SNOW THROUGHOUT THE DAY WILL LIKELY MAKE THE AFTERNOON COMMUTE PARTICULARLY DIFFICULT AND SLOW. TRAVELLERS SHOULD ADJUST TRAVEL PLANS ACCORDINGLY. IF TRAVEL IS NECESSARY ONE SHOULD PLAN FOR MUCH EXTRA TIME TO REACH THE PLANNED DESTINATION. DRIVING CONDITIONS WILL DETERIORATE QUICKLY AND BECOME DANGEROUS DUE TO WHITEOUT CONDITIONS FROM BOTH BLOWING SNOW AND HEAVY SNOW.

via Weather Watches & Warnings: Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario - The Weather Network.

There are a number of situations where you'd want to grab the urls from a block of text. For example you may be loading in some external or dynamic data and want to make the links clickable, or change their colour. Regular expressions are used in a multitude of languages; they define patterns that can be matched against a string, thus certain key characters used in defining a RegExp have to be escaped so they are interpreted as special characters like \d matches any digit. In Actionscript, you can define a RegExp by either wrapping it in double quotes "", or forward slashes//. In each case you would have to escape any characters that match the wrapping in addition to the characters that need to be escaped in the actual pattern. Further more Actionscript requires you to separate out the last part of the regular expression, called flags, and insert it as the second argument when defining a new RegExp object.

Here's how you find a url in text or html:

var str:String = new String('This is a url www.fightskillz.com, and this is another one: <a href="http://chalk-it-out.com">Chalk It Out</a>');
var reg:RegExp = new RegExp("\\b(((https?)://)|(www.))([a-z0-9-_.&=#/]+)", 'i');
var result:Object = reg.exec(str);
trace(result[0]);

First off if you're new to Flex/Actionscript you have to copy and paste this into a function and the variables created will only be accessable within that function while it's running as they are created and destroyed as it runs. If you wanted more permanence you'd just define the variables outside the function.

Now Let's break it down. The first \ is used as a character escape for Actionscript. In actionscript when defining a string within double quotes you'd escape a double that's part of the string like this "Look at this double quote \"". \b searches for a word boundary ie: a whitespace, or the beginning or end of a string.The next part ((https?)://)|(www.)) defines the first part of a 'word' that passes for a url. It's made up of two substrings, the first looks for http, the question mark deems the preceding character optional, so it'll match to https as well. It then looks to see if the protocol is followed by ://. The | character means OR, so if there is no protocol specified, it checks for (www.). Next we have [a-z0-9-_.&=#/] which is a list of characters a to z, 0 to 9, and various others commonly found in urls. This is followed by a + which instructs the pattern to match the preceding list of characters until it can't anymore. It can't anymore when it reaches whitespace, a single or double quote, brackets, or any other non-url character. Finally the RegExp flag i informs the pattern to be case insensitive.

reg.exec(str); executes the pattern on the specified string and returns the results as an array. Since the example is only designed to match the first url it encounters and then stop, the array will only have one result. The method reg.exec(str) is interchangable with str.match(reg)

Somehow searching for an original version of Crying my heart out over you on Google video search, the first hit was this. It's funny, but he does make some good points...