- Turtles
- Burnt hair
- Ice cold bread
- Molted snakeskin
- Shopping bags
- Home Owner Associations
- Small tires
- Erasers
- Lids
- Car doors
- Window dimensions
- Extinct Indonesian languages
- Tattoo removal
- Yellow pills
- Reusable straws
- Thulium
- Medium-sized leaves
Category Archives: Personal Interest
Stop Recycling, Stop Conserving Energy, Stop Ignoring the Problem
You think you’re helping by recycling your two bags of garbage every week? All that does is make you think you have the right to deflect personal responsibility. If you use services provided by any wasteful corporation, you are the problem, and you are still responsible for finding a solution. “…the vast majority (of energy consumption) is commercial, industrial, corporate, by agribusiness and government. So, even if we all took up cycling and wood stoves it would have a negligible impact on energy use, global warming and atmospheric pollution…. Personal change doesn’t equal social change.” 
photo credit: mpwillis1
We need policy changes that require social responsibility to qualify for subsidies and tax cuts, not random scatterings of hippies who skip a shower to save water. You want to know how to really help? Fight to end corporate welfare for those who make the world a worse place to live. If a corporation isn’t making the United States a better country, do you think they deserve your tax dollars? We need to make the world better, not just slow down how fast we make it worse. And we can, but not by skipping showers, recycling, riding a bike, and then brushing our hands off like we fixed everything.
photo credit: Neubie
Jensen, Derrick. "Why personal change does not equal political change.(Upping the Stakes: Forget Shorter Showers)." Synthesis/Regeneration 1 Aug. 2009. Print.
More Inane stuff
Je M’entraîne à Devenir Chasseur de Dentiste
Alphabetizing Group Directories in Buddypress
Buddypress is awesome. It is really pretty amazing. But it is far from perfect. Some things are really difficult to modify unless they’ve been expressly designed to be changed. One of those things is the issue with the sorting of group directories.
I’ve built a site where members are given access to follow a group of professionals. I use Buddypress Follow, and it works pretty well. One problem, when the members come with the intent to sign up and follow a specific professional, the group members directory is not alphabetized. By default it is sorted by sign up date (I think?), which is pretty much the last sorting method you’d want to use if you are trying to look up a specific person by name. I’ve spent the past six or seven months off and on trying to find some nice way to rectify this without any luck. A lot of people seemed to be looking for a method, but nobody was finding it. So I figured this one out on my own.
Right now, I have a custom activity loop showing only activity done by the professional members of the site, and it is the default home page for all members. This page had to be set up to look up member ID numbers, which I look up directly in the MySQL database like so:
Continue reading Alphabetizing Group Directories in Buddypress
An Essay on Relationships
Relationships provide us with context for our lives. Every single external action we take is done in terms of a relationship. Relationships with hot water and tea leaves, potassium and oxygen, or wood and heat. But physical relationships are the obvious ones that don’t always have a significant lasting effect on us. The intangible interpersonal relationships are the ones that drastically shape who and what we are to become. Interaction between people is the only way the context of your situation can change. Those skilled in learning from the relationships of others can use that information to find the most effective ways to interact with those around them. When looking for a job or a promotion, we have to know the ways to create an appropriate relationship with someone who is in the position to give us what we seek. When finding a romantic partner, we need to have the experience to know what to say and the ways to say it to get a positive response. When buying groceries, we need to know the right ways to behave to not get kicked out of the store. The range of situations where a good understanding of the ways relationships work is infinite.
an interesting illusion
Before and After
Good
“When I do good, I feel good; when I do bad, I feel bad, and that is my religion.” Abraham Lincoln
Discrimination
found on http://kissmyblackads.blogspot.com/2009/08/discriminatienl-hide.html