hillbilly trainwreck continues.

the westboro baptist church announced that they're going to protest at constance mcmillen's graduation. yes, this is the same girl who wanted to take her girlfriend to prom and the whole damn school lost their fucking minds.
constance? you need to get your ass out of mississippi. much respect for telling a bunch of rednecks to go fuck themselves very publicly, but there's no reason to keep living with all that.

also, best paragraph of the morning goes to driftglass:
"Because for most of my adult life, there has been no one on the Right or in the Center who was willing to drag these scum out into the light just keep kicking them over and over and over again until they stopped behaving like the spoiled, whiny imbeciles...or crawled back into their double-wides and left us civilized people the Hell alone."

edit / update:
looks like the hosting company of the beast destroyed our virtual smtp server some time within the last couple days. for an unspecified amount of time, our corporate website has been trying, unsuccessfully, to send out little things like account registration emails, password requests, and check statements. so, you know, nothing major.
keeping with their policy of assuming that i break things like this for fun, they immediately asked me what i did to disrupt the normal flow of operations. my response, as always, was "not a goddamned thing you mouth breathers, get your windows engineer on the line NOW."
in defense of my surly attitude, this is two (2) weeks in a row where they have ruined our website with their patches, and been unable to figure out why. today i spent a half hour arguing with an engineer that the mail we send out does NOT all go to the same address. hell, it doesn't even all come FROM the same address, why the fuck would a handful of different features all send TO the same email inbox?
for this kind of service, we pay mid four figures a month for hosting.

for Science!

this is relavent to my interests.
as a fan of science, blasphemy, and boobs, i'm sold. if this works well enough, i propose 'dickslap the pope' day, so i can be an active participant rather than an observer.

also, over the weekend i found a copy of dokapon kingdom for the wii at the local used game shop. i tried to buy this game twice at amazon.com and got fucked over both times. playing this is my new incentive to get shit done.

oh hell.

as a response, a few questions:

1) multiply these polynomials: (7x + 3)(3y - 1)
2) what is the chemical formula for table salt?
3) what year was the declaration of independance adopted?
4) please define a split infinitive.
5) explain why O(n)! is worse than O(n^2)
6) define and explain the purpose of mitochondria.
7) explain why john brown is a controversial figure.
8) name two components of the new deal.
9) contrast and compare: socialism, anarchy, communism, capitalism.

extra credit:
a) can you operate a shovel?
b) what color is ketchup / catsup?
c) what is the street value of one ounce (1 oz) of heroin?
d) on a scale of 1 to 10, how strong is your gag reflex?

if you cannot answer all most any of the standard questions, the extra credit section will help you to find a career after your parents get tired of you sitting in the house and playing world of warcraft all fucking day instead of learning something with the hope of becoming a reasonably educated and potentially useful member of society.

i have enough of a problem with homeschooling, since entirely too many people are borderline retarded fucks who shouldn't be breeding in the first place, much less responsible for the education of the next generation. this unschooling nonsense is going to lead to kids getting their education from the fucking internet. you can learn things on the net, sure, but without any analysis or critical thinking skills, you might as well just spend your time huffing glue.

full disclosure: question 5 is technically from a college course instead of high school, but it's a very simple concept and usually taught in first semester computer programming.

the extremely short answer

"no"

the question, and i get this a minimum of two times a week, is: "can you re-code your entire site and api to show the branding of our tiny agency when we steal your information to sell things to our customers?"

if you want a site that does all our stuff and has all our information, then code it your fucking selves, i am not hacking together a 40,000 line css file so you can send your paying customers directly to our site and do even less work.
i am not sure how much paint thinner you'd have to drink to think that this project would be simple, easy, or even desirable for us to do, but it is quickly becoming my least favorite question ever.

i know it when i see it

roger ebert says that videogames are not, and cannot be, art.
this bothers me a little, partly because i am becoming a huge fan of his writing, and partly because i am a huge fucking nerd and spent most of my childhood in front of the atari / nes / super nintendo. i submit that a) videogames can indeed be art, and b) they are the superior form of expression in that they are also interactive. a truly great painting, symphony, movie, or book, whatever response it elicits, is still a passive experience. you go to the show or museum, you observe and examine these things, and take away whatever response or emotion you will. and that's fine. art is all about drawing some kind of response from the, for lack of a better word, viewer.
video games combine several kinds of art and deliver a product that you are also in control of. look at the screenshots from anything square enix has done in the last few years, the music from castlevania going back to the 19 fucking 80s, or the writing and storyline of something like myst, and tell me that's not art. i will respond that you may go fuck yourself. games wrap visuals around a story, set it to music, and then let you experience it how you will. if world of goo doesn't count as art, then we're all screwed because language has ceased to have any kind of meaning.

tl;dr: serrano had piss christ, nintendo gave us navi. games is art.

72 hours worth of stupidity

i have been a responsible adult for nearly a solid week now, and i am overcome by a feeling not unlike ants crawling under my skin, driving me to commit vile deeds of an extremely biological and depraved nature. i choose to blame this on [server hosting company], where there is some kind of affirmative action plan in place mandating that they maintain no less than 50% of their staff as mentally disabled people.
to wit: they applied a patch to our server. the site immediately slowed down by a factor of 300 or so. when i called to find out whom to flay, their reaction was to ask if i had poorly re-coded the entire site overnight, and suggested that was where the problem was coming from.
no, i did not re-write and upload 400 pages of asp and sql code overnight just for shits and grins on our weekly patch day.
the problem ended up, naturally, being in a couple settings in some new software they uploaded, which they forgot to check and configure. it took many hours on the phone with multiple engineers for them to realize this.

i want, so very badly, to be able to do a completely shitty job all the time and still get paid for it. this cannot be that hard to engineer, as i have seen it from many, many internets and web development houses in this state. lightburn? you guys are still the magnificent bastard kings of this. no other place i've seen can get away with delivering a site over a YEAR late, and retain clients. whomever does your p.r. is not getting paid enough.

on a less tech related note: if you like anything brockway ever wrote for cracked.com, go get his book 'everything is going to kill everybody', it is hilarious.

this is the new place.

i spent entirely too long on lj. i was comfortable enough over there, inertia and laziness keeping me from bothering with switching to any new internets word type service, but over the last couple weeks their ad nonsense has been fucking my browser over, and making their pages take upwards of a minute each to load. 

i don't remember the last time there was anything on lj that was worth waiting for a minute of loading time to read. 

so, here we are. 

fucking arcane web dev. nonsense for the week:

if, in the fullness of time, you get ambitious and decide to have a nice css dropdown menu on your site, and that menu is directly above a omg kickass flash anim or movie, you may find that the menu is going to be a bastard and drop down behind the flash movie.

the fix for this is as follows: toss these wmode values into the batch of embed tags for the flash object. <param name="wmode" value="transparent">

<embed src="includes/flash-movie.swf" wmode="transparent"  .... 

wmode is not recognized by dreamweaver, so it's not going to help you with this one, but these will get the menu to behave and the movie to still play.