Oliphant Parts » Blogging

Shame

nato — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 16:36:24 +0000

I discovered a dark secret last night. My son, at age ten, is living up the blogger stereotype. He is unemployed, living in his parents’ basement, and wears sweatpants all day. And has his own blog, which he updates more than I update mine. I should buy him a bag of Cheetos so he can stain his fingers and keyboard and perfectly round out the image. Imagine, living the dream by ten. I need to teach him to type in all-caps and get him on Wonkette next. I guess I have one more website to monitor every day. Sigh . . .

Oh hey, I’ve found god! It turns out he was busy making podcasts and kind of tuned us all out, which explains why everybody keeps searching so hard for him. His creator, apparently, is a former Mormon. Trippy, man (yes, I am high on stress and lack of sleep).

Okay, that’s it. Hopefully the boy-child will forget to post today and I can pull ahead in the great blogger wars.

Fundamentally Wrong

nato — Sat, 20 Sep 2008 00:58:45 +0000

Attention G-DUB (Tard Sauce), Penis Cheney (Evil Sauce), Walnuts McCain (Apple Sauce), Bubba Clinton (Dick Sauce), Phil Gramm (Whine Sauce) and the rest of you assholes who forgot about the whole Great Depression and thought deregulation was a good idea: It’s the deregulation, stupids! Privatized profits, socialized losses. And yet, no social health care. Why is socialism good when it comes to banks and large corporations, yet so very very evil when it comes to the actual citizens of this country?

It is apparently not fiscal conservatism that drives the Republican machine (once again, yes, I know that Clinton is not a registered Republican), but rather pure greed, hate, lies and hypocrisy. For all your bluster about the evils of socialism, you are quick to jump off your privatization high-horse and screw the average American with bailouts of your own colossal fuckups. Repeal the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, close the “Enron Loophole” and reinstate the Glass-Steagall Act. There is a reason that we built protection in there after the excitement of our first Great Depression. Honestly, it wasn’t so great, so why are you morons so keen on reliving it? Every motherfucking one of you idiots involved in deregulation should be stripped of everything you own to pay back the American people. Haven’t we learned yet that conservative values lead to a complete meltdown that apparently can only be resolved with the application of liberal values? You should all be forced to spend the next five and a half years! being repeatedly kicked in the testicles for eight hours a day. After that, if you’ve somehow accepted that greed is bad, responsibility good, we can revisit whether the kickings should continue for another five and a half years.

This is ridiculous. As an average American (too fat, not overly-bright, and fearful of change. I don’t own a gun, but am seriously considering it. Sure, I believe that religion in this country has been seriously perverted by fundamentalists, so keep your god off of me. But I am willing to drink like a fish and be bitter, so I think I still work out as somehow average), I don’t want to have to learn about Glass-Steagal, worry about how much of the country you’ve already sold to the Chinese or hear one more story about some complete moron who gets $25 million just for being the CEO of a failed institution. Just fix the shit and get the hell out of the way. Regulate, since it is obvious that when it comes to everything, we don’t consider the best interests of our planet, much less our neighbors. And please, for gods’ sakes and ours, get a fucking clue.

p.s. — As for energy independence, how is drilling more going to help when oil is globalized? It’s not like American oil stays in America. It is a (relatively) free market, you fuckwads! And besides, it sounds like when it comes to Drill Here, Drill Now!, you’re doing it wrong.

And hey, McCain, if you and Palin somehow win this thing, remember that I’ve seen a checkbook, so I am highly qualified to run the treasury under your administration. Please send me whatever paperwork I need to sign for the job.

Okay, I feel better now.

Update

nato — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 00:03:15 +0000

Sorry to get geeky here, but thanks to Matt, my Bookmarks Order Widget is a bit less buggy now and available here.

Cheeky Monkey

nato — Thu, 30 Aug 2007 18:46:33 +0000

It’s a work in progress, but my new theme is up. Let me know if it’s interesting, acceptable or just annoying as all hell. I am removing all other themes from my system for now, so if you load my site and it looks funky, just do a hard refresh, or wipe your browser’s cache. The monkey and the banana peel are from Open ClipArt and the theme is based on “Gone Fishing” by Designer Daily.

Update Issues

nato — Mon, 20 Aug 2007 23:58:12 +0000

Okay, this is annoying me: Yahoo and Google do not seem to be getting my RSS updates. Grr.

Okay, fixed again. I had to change the code again after removing /blog/ from my url, hopefully the redirect I added will fix this for anyone using google reader or yahoo. If not, just subscribe again and you should be good to go.

Dusty

nato — Thu, 16 Aug 2007 20:54:17 +0000

And to think it started as such a promising day. After hitting 107f yesterday afternoon, it cooled off quickly, reaching 69f by 9pm. Still, I was looking forward to the rain-showers the weather fools had promised for today. Instead, the morning’s clouds have burned off and it is in the 90′s. So much for a nice rainy day. Worse still: A damned gopher ate my baby burr oak tree.

In other exciting news, thanks to an update to the BlogSecurity article, I’ve undone yesterday’s updates and switched to just using .htaccess to secure my site. The good news, I guess, is that my themes once again conform to the WordPress standard. The bad news is that not everything is working on the back-end. I had to drop the fckeditor.

All better now.

nato — Wed, 15 Aug 2007 21:38:09 +0000

I’ve updated my site, theoretically making it more secure based on the information over at BlogSecurity. It looks like things worked, although if you see a glitch somewhere, please let me know. I haven’t checked all of the comments pages, and there’s something annoying going on with the funny animals theme. If I set that as the default, I get a bunch of headers errors on the back-end. It is fine on the front, however, so I am ignoring it for now. What else? It would be nice to know how to change the default values in WordPress for the various variables. The ones of most interest to me are stylesheet_url and stylesheet_directory, which I had to hard-code to the new locations based on the BlogSecurity advice. Oh, and my google rss links aren’t working at the moment. Grrr.

Updating

nato — Wed, 15 Aug 2007 17:30:12 +0000

I am going to be updating my site throughout the day during breaks from work, so if things aren’t looking quite right, that is because I’ve just hopelessly mangled the code. Also, I am disabling my theme switcher widget, so you’ll all be stuck with whatever theme I am working on at the time. So sorry.

Order Bookmarks Widget

nato — Fri, 10 Aug 2007 23:36:05 +0000

Here’s another simple WordPress widget that I’ve thrown together. It allows you to set a limit to the number of blogroll entries displayed, sort them by all valid sort fields and apply a sort order. It is essentially just a quick way to get at a few of the wp_list_bookmarks() function.

Widgets

nato — Wed, 08 Aug 2007 22:51:27 +0000

I’ve just started using WordPress as my blogging platform and really like the widget plugins. I also like the idea of letting users skin my blog using a theme switcher. The first one I found was Ryan Boren’s Theme Switcher. Unfortunately, it is not set up as a widget, but rather as plugin you manually add to the sidebar code. That is just too much work for someone as lazy as me. So, here is my slightly modified version as a standard widget. You can add it to your wp-content/plugins directory, then go to Presentation-> Widgets and add it to your sidebar. If you click on the configure icon, you can add whatever title you want (the default title is ‘THEMES’) and change from the default list to a dropdown. Have fun. I really didn’t do much work on this thing other than to grab some code off the ‘net to turn it into a widget. If there is somewhere that I should post it, somebody please let me know.