Who ordered the scrambled brains?

Sabemclrd Bniras indeed!

How to print MSDN Magazine articles

I almost died trying to figure out how to print an article off the vapid publishing engine that is the msdn website today. Firefox won’t print beyond the first page. IE won’t print the collapsed regions. Saving the page to a file and editing the styling on the collapsed regions seems to work fine in IE until you try to print and nothing appears. Now that’s what I call annoying!

I finally set upon the task of finding out why Firefox only prints one page. It turns out it’s the utterly pointless “overflow: auto” style set on the body tag. Why oh WHY is that there in the first place? So here’s how to print an MSDN Magazine article off the MSDN website.

Requirements:

  • Firefox
  • Firebug
  • MSDN article
  • These instructions
  • Printer

Using Firebug, find and inspect a collapsed region. It will have a class of “MTPS_CollapsibleSection”. Then use the Firebug interface to add the following rules to that class.

display:block !important;
height:auto !important;

Next disable the “overflow” rule on the body tag.

Optionally, open the Print Preview and select 125% under the Scale dropdown.

Finally, print, without dying. Remember to do 2 pages per side to save our dearest Mother Earth.

Temporary Digs

I’ve been meaning to overhaul my blog/web presence for some time. It’s been a busy summer but I hope to start it next month. In the meantime, I’ve been getting into the swing of “lifestreaming“, mainly with twitter, a bunch of bookmarklets for some link sharing services (digg, Google Reader, delicious), and last.fm. I’m using Swurl to aggregate it for your consumption. So until I overhaul this old dump, I’ll be residing at my Swurl page Update 2010-05-02: Well Swurl closed down long ago. Since then I’ve added Last.fm and foursquare data, which will have to tide over you vast masses of followers until I upgrade Wordpress properly.

Proud to be an American

Marine’s graphic interview describes killing of prisoners in Iraq

“Inalienable rights” for “all” men? Yeah, we Americans might have justified our independence from foreign aggressors on that moral precept, but nowadays we prefer moral convenience, i.e. ethnocentric efficiency. When the situation gets too morally difficult, we crank up the volume of “America the Beautiful” (the randy travis version, not ray charles, of course) and conform!

Target 350

Hello family/friend/acquaintance,

Please take a moment to read this:

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-op-mckibben11-2008may11,0,4443965.story

I hope you have the fortitude and human compassion both to understand the gravity of this problem, and to assume ownership of it. It is my view that doing all you can to conserve energy and to reduce your carbon footprint (the amount of carbon dioxide generated by your actions and purchases) alleviates the problem directly as well as indirectly, by supporting goods, services, companies, politicians, and other social forces that have small carbon footprints. Furthermore, doing all you can also makes this problem part of your daily life, and keeps it on your mind so that you are always looking for new ways to conserve carbon (you know what I mean) and new people to share your concerns with. And lastly, it feels good to contribute to arguably the greatest cause in human history. I ask that you accept the fact that reversing global warming is your responsibility (and every individuals) and that the preservation of the environment will cost your time, energy, money, convenience, and strength.

Consider the following ways you can be more environmentally responsible:
- Setting more conservative temperatures on your air conditioners thermostat timer.
- Voting against any politician (e.g. Clinton, McCain) that thinks tax holidays are even part of a solution to the energy and environment crises.
- Choosing groceries and products that were manufactured closer to you, rather than those that had be transported long distances.
- Calling LADWP at (800) 342-5397 (or your local electricity provider) and enrolling in the Green Power program at the 100% participation level.
- Going to IKEA (or your local grocer if you don’t care about price) and buying enough compact fluorescent bulbs to replace every incandescent bulb in your place of residence.
- Recycling your plastics, glass, metal, and paper, if you don’t already.
- Cleaning the filter on your air conditioner regularly.
- Using http://metro.net to plan a travel itinerary that utilizes public transportation for your work commute. And then buying monthly passes. Trust me, this is nearly not as bad as it sounds, except maybe for females that don’t feel physically or socially secure (sitting at the front of the bus helps). No excuses for males, unless you transport goods for a living. In which case you need to consider getting a hybrid.
- Other changes specific to your particular lifestyle.

Lemme know if you have any good methods of your own for reducing your carbon footprint. Machines/laws/technology/faith cannot solve this problem without human desire.

-Mike

One giant leap for a state…

…but one small step for mankind.

I got a new car!!!

It’s a new 2007 Audi A3! 200-horsepower, 6-speed manual transmission. Black exterior, black interior. Airbags galore. 10 speakers. Four doors (five if you count the hatchback). And four wheels (five if you count the steering wheel).

2005 Audi A3
(2005 model pictured.)

All those previous posts about getting a new car were not mere pipe dreams. Also, congratulations to Natalie, who bought the rights to cruise in the Black Stallion (the Civic I had). Finally, thanks to Shaun for coming up with the moniker of my new car: The Cocoa Express.

Damn Press Coverage

Lotsa press!

And some interesting blog coverage:

Cooool!

MyDamnChannel launch!!

Two months of blood, sweat, and tears. Sixty-plus people involved. Countless monkeys killed for research. All to bring you: THIS!!

My Damn Channel is our latest project, in cooperation with Big Fat Brain and Rob Barnett Media, which aims to be a video portal for big name Hollywood folk. I’ve been so busy I haven’t even seen most of the content yet. But here’s a taste for you, right here, right now.


So sleepy…

In the blue corner…

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2007/7/10/64044/7089

Why didn’t the media do it’s job with the Iraq war? Why isn’t the media doing it’s job? Why is the media in bed with politicians and corporations? I’m only awake enough at the moment to ask the questions, not ponder them. Gut reaction is the influence of greed at the upper echelons of media conglomerations, an obsession with ratings over truth, and perhaps a discomfort with attacking a nit-witted idiot that is so dumb he could be described as almost-lovable. Like Barney Fife, a character I’ve always abhored. But Barney Fife never talked about bringing the full might of Mayberry County’s Sheriff Department to bear on Little Baghdad, the Arab diaspora on the other side of the tracks that happened to have a bit of a problem with street gangs Too bad for the gangs, Standard Oil wanted access to the oil fields they live on. I’ll bet that wasn’t too uncommon, in one form or another, in the ethnocentric righteousness of shows of the 50’s.

Interestingly, shows today are almost over-forgiving and over-conscious regarding diversity. Case in point (no pun intended), Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, where the family of almost every inner-city minority genuinely and unshakeably holds “American values”, whilst the perp is almost always rich, white, and conservative. And while anything is better than ethnocentric righteousness, a show with any kind of social righteousness opens itself to oversimplification that is just as harmful and divisive. Mainstream political action groups bear the blame as much as mainstream news media for complicity in obscuring truth. When you consider that the PR stunt of burying the N-word, as high-minded as that sounds, was intended to increase youth enrollment in the NAACP, one recognizes the antiquity of their conduct and communication in society. It’s a miniscule step forward that will unfortunately be forgotten next week, but it highlights how out-of-touch and antiquated their strategy is. They intend to foil evil social forces, yet are either duped by the news media, or choose not to impress integrity upon them. Society changes, intolerance takes new social forms, and political consciousness must come from new sources to face this. This is particularly interesting in light of the equalizing nature of many new technologies such as the internet (minus the barriers erected to withhold equalizing technologies from minorities, oppressed, etc). …Sidetracked. Point is, the ethnocentric righteousness has moved to mainstream news media in the form of play-journalism. (blah blah blah more thoughts on over saturation of information, decreasing emotional sensitivity in Western culture and inversely increasing sensationalism in media, value system becoming inverted, etc etc you don’t want to spend time reading it any more than I want to writing it… at least not right now)

Ok, so I’m more awake than I gave myself credit for in that first paragraph. Of course it all comes back to the corrupting power of capitalism. Damn the truth, damn integrity, damn compassion, damn creativity–feed people what they want (or if you’re a cynic, feed them something that resembles on the surface what they think they want). Give ‘em toys, keep the masses intellectually sedated. “Getting bored of your 1.3MP camera phone, well now now now hold on just a second, don’t go seeking something deeper and more meaningful in life, just go down to the corner bodega and get a brand new, hot-off-the-assembly line, 2MP camera phone so you can reduce your brain matter to a phone-operating device and maintain that delusional narcissistic sleepwalking that keeps you unconcerned with the capital-hedonism of the few. Oops.” Anyway, in closing, as the caffeine works its way into the nooks. crannies, and sulci of my scrambled brain, I will add that I hope that technology proves itself invulnerable to the corruption of greed (and elitist regulation, and the threat of the ad-supported model), and emerges to challenge the mainstream media and other institutions and give voice, and expanded consciousness, to the muted masses. In that, I can only hope. Failing that, I believe Truth–or perhaps Understanding, to be less morally absolutist, or some un-worded combination of Truth, Understanding and Authenticity–is an inextinguishable, insatiable part of the spirit. Curiosity, Understanding, and Self-Expression. In the end, I can accept wherever we take ourselves with them.

Goodbye, grandpa.

john patrick mcgranahan, jr, with his first car, 1937
Another memory to attach to this date.

1