redkanga

The past 2 weeks my trash can has been stolen by the idiots that live on the other side of the alley from me. The cops won’t do anything about it, even though I pay the city to have an extra trash can. I don’t understand what makes people think that they can just appropriate other peoples property for their own use.

Is it a cultural thing? Is their a language barrier that prevents them from understanding the commonly used Arabic numerals that have been in use for centuries? My trash cans are clearly marked with my street number. The people across the alley have a different street number, so the symbols that mark the can are clearly different.
The only thing I can think is that they are too poor, stupid and ignorant (each having nothing to do with the other) to realize that they are doing something wrong. I tried banging on their fence to get their attention, but got no response. I tried walking around to the front of their place and knocked on the door, but got no answer. Maybe I should park my tail in a lawn chair in the alley and wait for them to show up so I can at least yell at them.

But that would probably get me shot.

A quick run down.

• Katie went to Las Vegas for a friends bachelorette party. She will be back tomorrow. I am jealous. I stayed home and went to work.
• My buddy Jeremy bought Ron’s boat. I’m glad he bought the boat. I think it was a good deal for everyone.
• Ben and Vanessa moved to Costa Mesa. They are 30 minutes away and I still haven’t made it down to see their new place. Bad me.
• I think Mom has finally quit smoking for good. I’m planning on quitting on March 1.

I was pretty bored with the lack of a logo. So, I opened up photoshop and made one. Ok, I actually made a few and what is up now is the one I liked the best. I call the style retro-geek. I’m pretty happy with it and it does have a redkanga on it, so I think it will stick for a while. I like that it is plain and simple, but also bold and ugly.

I finally found the images that are disturbing Muslims around the world. A blog on blogspot has the political cartoons unedited.

I can’t believe that these are the cartoons that are causing so much rioting and disruption world wide. These cartoons are pretty harmless. They play to the stereotypes that the world has of Islamic fundamentalists. Those people that are setting fires and rioting are living up to the stereotype. It is the duty of every member of a stereotyped group to acknowledge that stereotypes exist and then move on and live your life. I’m a member of several stereotyped groups of people. Do I let the stereotypes define me? No! I live my life for myself not to fulfill a destiny that someone else created for me. Move on, get past what other people think of your group.

That said, the parts of the Koran that I have read are beautiful and show none of the anger and hatred that Islamic Fundamentalists show towards the Western World. Isn’t horrible what people will do in the name of religion? Don’t let your life be defined by the hate and anger of the past.

‘nough said…

Thanks to a headline on my personalized Google start page I hit on this Tech Dirt article about some notes in Bush’s latest budget plan that indicate that he would like to start taxing un-auctioned radio spectrum. The original article at RCR Wireless News indicates that he would like to start collecting “user fees” on the spectra.

This is one of the most absurd ideas that I’ve heard of. The government (in this case the FCC) holds these airwaves in trust for the public. Certain frequencies are reserved for general use (at least this is my understanding) like the 900 mhz, 2.4 ghz and the 5.8 ghz frequencies that are used in many households for cordless phones.

Any of this sound ridiculous to you?

OK, I’ve begun working on my own K2 style… This is a definitely a work in progress. Feedback appreciated. For example, what looks bad, type sizes, etc…

Thanks!

Well, I’ve moved back to the default K2 style since it looks reasonably the same in both Firefox and Internet Explorer. This is mainly because more people look at my site in Internet Explorer than any other browser. Of course, I get mostly bots hitting my site…

Airports suck. I’m sure that this is universally agreed upon, but I’ve got to say it anyway. The first reason airports suck is that the rules of travel are not universally agreed upon. Sure, everyone has to get where they are going but there is no reason to be an asshole about it. Another problem with airports, at least in the US is the passenger screening process. Here at SFO I was asked to remove my shoes. Hmmm, I wasn’t asked to remove my shoes when I went through screening at LAX last Sunday. Ok, I take off my shoes and ask the screener, “Why are we taking off shoes? I wasn’t asked to remove my shoes last time I flew.” His response was, “Everyone is supposed to request that passengers remove their shoes.” I wasn’t really satisfied with his response, but I knew better than to make a scene about having to get my socks dirty. That’s when I noticed that the three people behind me were not asked to remove their shoes. Of course, none of them have a goatee. I have now begun to question if there is a connection between terror and white males with goatees.

So, past the screening, I arrived at the airport a good 4 hours before my flight was to board. This is mainly because I didn’t want to get lost exploring and try to make it to the airport in the middle of Friday rush hour traffic. I suspect that Bay Area Friday traffic is just as bad as Metropolitan Los Angeles Friday traffic, if not worse… especially since to go anywhere but South from San Francisco you have to go over a bridge.

As airports go, SFO is pleasant. Especially when you compare it to LAX. It was easy to drop my car off at the rental garage. There was a problem returning the car at the Budget counter, but that was caused by the rental agent on Sunday night and was easily (not quickly) resolved. Good thing I like to hang on to all my travel paperwork until I am safely home. The tram system for SFO, AirTrain, is easy to navigate and efficient. It’s nice and clean as well. In fact, the entire airport is nice and clean. I don’t think you could turn LAX into an airport like SFO. SNA (John Wayne Airport) is as clean, but not as passenger friendly.

Four hours leaves a lot of time to kill… I’ve written this entry and purchased a small gift for Katie. Think I’ll turn off the laptop find a quiet corner and read. Of course, since I am unwilling to pay $6/hr for Wi-Fi access through T-Mobile this entry will be posted after I get home.

As I am prone to do, I changed my theme. I wanted something a little cleaner, a little simpler, and that worked. A moved over to K2 theme. I got it working fairly easily. The harder part was making FAlbum work with it. I managed to make it work with only a few changes.

For those interested, this is what I did:

• Made a custom falbum.php and put it into the K2 theme folder. (See it)
• Added a css class to my K2 style to fix the way images are displayed. (See it)
• Added a page named “Photos” with “photos” as the page slug.

A lot easier than what I’ve seen listed on other people’s blogs.

The nice thing about K2 is that it looks nice in a smaller browser window. What this means to me is that it looks pretty darned decent on my laptop, which only does 1024×768…

I noticed that the version of FAlbum had been bumped to 0.6.4  So, I upgraded the plugin at the same time as I upgraded Wordpress from 2.0 to 2.0.1

When I did this, I introduced a problem with the permalink structure. The new permalink code in the .htaccess doesn’t play well with FAlbums pretty url code. So, after a little research on google, I moved the FAlbum mod_rewrite code to the top of the .htaccess file and now it seems to work fine.

What gives?