This reminds me of when I locked my keys in my car three times in one week in Novemeber. I had honestly, never, ever, ever done it once in my life prior to that, and then when I was looking for apartments, I did it once, and then twice, and then three times that week. I’m on number two with accidentally closing the blogger window. OK, this time I’m serious about the typing in a separate editor.

As Bill Keller says, good riddance to Mr. T., Mr. G. and Mr. H. They and many others in our government blacken and disgrace us more than any outside force can.

Hmm, I have to stop mulling over this stuff, it’s rather pointless and just gets me all moody. I mean, things aren’t all bad. I’ve got a desk, broadband, my blog back up, and having been getting oodles of cool music: Sigur Rós, more Jimmy Eat World, Dashboard Confessional, India Arie, The Gloria Record… As you can tell, I’m still going through my whole post-emo indie rock consumption phase (I bought like the whole Post-Parlo library a few weeks ago, hopefully I’ll be getting that soon; a former co-worker was drummer for two bands, Subset and Silver Scooter), and also getting into some shoegaze as it’s apparently called, and just some random stuff.

So it’s early Saturday morning now, and I’ve been surfing around, catching up on reading and thinking about how there are all these people who are way more talented than I (or at the very least, way way more accomplished) who are suddenly looking for work and it’s sorta weird. It’s one thing for your pals to be out of work, but actually I don’t know what I’m saying, it’s just weird and different and time flies and it’s 2002, not 1998 and… It’s late. The economy sucks.

Another part of my monster post, was that I did some thinking on how I got my “world news.” Although I try to keep up, I’m not really a news junkie, and I’m politically aware and active, but I wouldn’t mind not having to deal with all that if I could just sort of be left alone [Give me the ability to work and make a decent living, the freedom to do what I want, balanced against the rights of others to do what they want, and you can have the rest. I have the former now, but the latter seems to be causing such a fuss].

In any case, as my dream world does not exist, I’m left having to keep up with what’s going on. I probably should read the EFF headlines more than I do (same w/ the ACLU), but in any case, most of my initial views of news is filtered, ususally through blogs or lists (Politech, Crypto-Gram, etc.)I read, or /., or k5 or occasionally mefi. When the spirit moves me, or when something interesting goes down, I will go to places like the IMC, Disinfo, Alternewswire, and Cryptome to balance off anything in the mainstream media (The Guardian, IHT, BBC, NYT, Yahoo, and if need be, MSNBC and CNN). There are also some magazines that I try to keep up on: The Economist, Salon (not nearly as much as I used to), The Nation.

In any case, there’s not nearly enough time to keep up on all of this, especially since my primary interests lie elsewhere. But I try not to depend on any single source of information but rather try to get some different viewpoints, dig on my own for anything that catches my eye. Hmm, okay, more than enought unneccesary typing for the day.

Oh, one thing worth retyping at least some of are my summaries of some reading material. I know I’ve posted some of this over the years before, but hey, here’s some good stuff:

Oh my Goodness. I now understand why people prefer pen and paper. I just wrote a huge tract on the Separation of Church and state, how crappy WorldNetDaily is, and I just lost it all by clicking close on the wrong window. My CMS is definitely going to have an autosave function. And a confirmation popup on-close when there’s unsaved text in the entry area.

I cannot believe what I just did. I am practically in a state of shock. I had literally been typing for… more than an hour on this (w/ my wrist splints and Vioxx). I am a moron – and from now on I type my blogger posts in UltraEdit.

Anyway, read this thread, extrapolate what I would have said. Because all my comments relating to the actual topic at hand on the Seperation of Church and State were ignored, I’m no longer going to reply, obviously it’s a lost cause having intelligent political discussions with some people. Life’s too short.

I’ve done a number of tweaks to make this page slightly less problematic. I abandoned the whole absolute positioning from the right idea. It just doesn’t work. I tweaked the min-width and max-widths. Also, I’ve fixed the IE alpha filter problem; apparently, it had trouble w/ transparency on a nested element within the absoutely positioned container. It seems to work now.

oh yeah, *yawn*: B9 d++ t++ k s u f i o+ x e+ l- c-

I can’t even think of anything snarky to say (actually I could, and I have, but in this case it just doesn’t fit,) because this is totally messed up.

As far as I can tell, the worst thing about it is that there are no witnesses that came forward yet and no one who stepped in to stop what seems like a pretty one-sided beating (resisting urge to comment on engineers getting beat up). Sure it’s shady that the annoying people weren’t removed from the theater when they started causing trouble earlier in the screening, but that’s pretty much the expected service level at most movie theaters. One thing that piqued my interest, “[the parents] had arrived late for the showing on Saturday night and began drinking cans of lager.” Either movie theatres (w00t! British spellling) in the UK are just way cooler than in the US, or the place was a frickin’ dive. I’m tending to think towards the latter.

(look up Social Psychology junk, groups helping people, tangential: response to authority, etc.)