Miklb's Mindless Ramblings
chronicling life in a digital world
Watching the Alito Confirmation Hearing on CSPAN, and now the second time I’ve listened to Jeff Sessions of Alabama blubber over Alito. Who voted him head cheerleader? Is he not intelligent enough to fake the tough questions, or too stupid to lob the easy ones for Alito to hit out of the park? I mean, I’m not impressed with the some of the lines of questioning I’ve seen from the Democrats either, but this bafoon takes the bloody cake. If these 16 some odd folks are the best this country can muster, we are worse shape than I thought…
EDIT OK, now Graham is trying to compare Alito’s confirmation hearing to crooked Republicans who have taken money from Abramhoff. WTF??
‘Judges Are Not Politicians,’ Roberts Says
I’m not quite sure ‘ol John is really a baseball fan. I’m sure George Will could give a few better analogies than calling balls and strikes if he’s looking to paint himself as a straight shooter. Anyone who watches baseball knows that sure, there’s a strike zone, but every home plate umpire calls a slightly different strike zone. And some call a different strike zone for veteran players than rookies. Jeter doesn’t neccessarily get the called third strike that Julio Lugo does. And one guy may call low and outside a strike after the third, and another gives the pitcher a wider strike zone. So therein lies the question Mr Roberts, where is your strike zone? Are you going to give the pitcher the outside pitch, or are you going to call ‘em high and tight?
As if our country doesn’t have enough on its plate, it is being reported Chief Justice Rehnquist died today. So we are still arguing the merits of Roberts (to no avail), and now the discussion of which ultra-right wing judge will move up to replace Scalia, as he moves to Chief Justice. Unless Bush pulls the PR move and names Sandra Day O’Conner, he has found the perfect distraction from his debacle in the delta.
Roberts Listed in Federalist Society ‘97-98 Directory
So it seemed that there was no real “dirt” to stick to Roberts, that perhaps the White House nominated a “good guy”, who just happened to be nominated by the right. Even former lawyer for Clinton endorsed him. (Not that I take that too far). But now it’s coming out, that Roberts is a card carrying member of the ultra conservative right, and worse, he doesn’t “recall” getting his card. How do you head a steering committee and not remember. Or worse, fake an association with a club simply for personal gain, only later to deny it. Is that the best America has to put on the Supreme Court?
Just a guy wandering the intarwebs looking to make sense of life.
My Twitter
@mcuriale I'd take exception to anyone calling my wife "babe", ex husband/boyfriend/boss. Father's are cool, but that would be weird
Side Notes
It’s always great to see new themes released for Habari, even if they are ports. Florian has ported the WordPress theme Clean Home to Habari. The theme’s name aptly describes the design, a clean, black and white two column design with contrasting red headings. The theme seems to be coded for trunk, that is, using the areas feature. One thing I noticed is that the theme still has some cruft from WP, calling for a dynamic sidebar (widgets) with some text that also references a text widget and and admin options. I of all people can understand though of wanting to get something out before working out all the kinks, so I’m sure he’ll update it as soon as the areas/blocks feature is fleshed out a bit more. I also don’t speak German, so it’s quite possible he references that in the post announcing the release.
permalinkYou’d think “Canada’s best magazine”, The Walrus would at least link back to my bookmarks if they are going to use my graphics in their post about Infinite Summer. Heck, they didn’t even change the name of the image from the 5x bookmark file. Real professional Nav, real professional…
At least they didn’t just hotlink to the image in my post.
permalinkI’ve recently been using Safari 4 beta, mostly because I had been too lazy to get more RAM, and Firefox was just too damn slow with all the apps I’d have open on only 1 gig. Now that I’m at 4 gigs, I’ve been contemplating going back to Firefox, especially with the comments I’ve been reading about the speed improvements of the next version (3.5??). Another reason I’ve been contemplating going back to Firefox is that Firebug is just far superior to Safari’s built in inspector. To that end, I’ve recently come across two add-ons for Firebug.
The first, Firefinder, is a handy tool to “find HTML elements matching chosen CSS selector(s) or XPath expression”.
The second is one that Google previously used internally. Today they open sourced it and released, Page Speed. Page Speed allows developers to “evaluate the performance of their web pages and to get suggestions on how to improve them.”
permalinkLately I’ve been contemplating switching to Safari, as Firefox still seems to be a memory hog, especially since I tend to leave my desktop on for days at a time. With the improvements to the developer tools in Safari 4, there’s less and less reason for me to hang on to Firefox. Couple that with this bookmarklet suite of design/development tools I just discovered, and the excuse of having to use Firefox for it’s superior developer tools flies right out the window.
The suite includes a configurable grid overlay, a ruler overlay, a measurement tool to determine distance between two points, and a cursor crosshair tool (I’ve not found how to use this one effectively, but it could be useful for figuring placement when using position: absolute).
I can’t speak to how Firebug and the Safari tools compare regarding javascript, as I don’t do much with javascript, save using various jquery plugins.
permalinkI’ve not explored Hulu much, but I came across a Front Row plugin, UnderStudy, that allows you to subscribe to various Hulu and NetFlix feeds and watch them in full screen mode via FrontRow. The Netflix doesn’t interest me, as I’ve got that either through my Roku player or my XBox 360, but until I get my mini fixed up and hooked up to the TV, Hulu on the iMac in full screen mode seems like a nice way to take a little break. Granted, you can’t navigate the whole site, rather you have to add feeds, but once you get some feeds for your kind of content, it’s not too bad. It has a few default feeds to choose from, or you can navigate hulu.com and copy a feed link to the clipboard, then enter Front Row and add the feed from the clipboard. Since I’ve not watch Hulu.com on the site, I can’t compare the quality, but the few clips I looked at via Front Row were quite adequate.
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Recent Comments
Florian Fiegel commented, "Hi, the remaining WP-Stuff isn't ported yet. I left it in the CSS-File cause this things aren't essential for Habari but can be used to make the Theme up for ..." on the post Clean Home Theme for Habari
Mary Cotter commented, "Thanks for these. I always appreciate some anal-retentive creativity. For real!" on the post Infinite Summer Bookmarks
Michael B commented, "Thanks for stopping by Russell, I didn't mean to imply that the graphics weren't great, just that they weren't that much of a deviation from the original game. I certainly ..." on the post Dark Nova: Space Trader for the iPhone
suki commented, "just printed the bookmarks! :) thanks for making them. very nice! hopefully it will help to keep me on track..." on the post Infinite Summer Bookmarks
Russell commented, "Glad to see everyone is enjoying Dark Nova on iPhone!
@Michael B - the graphics have been totally redrawn for the hi-res iPhone screen, and we're considering adding some animation ..." on the post Dark Nova: Space Trader for the iPhone
Theme Development
I have moved all of my theme development to Beanstalk. If you would like to check out the full svn repository, you can checkout from http://blogworks.svn.beanstalkapp.com/themes.
Recent Changes
