mrclay.rg

Google+ will fit some people really well, and is certainly bringing some fresh ideas to the table to keep Facebook on its toes. That said, here’s why I kinda hope it doesn’t take off, and why I’m seriously considering leaving the party early. There were compelling reasons to abandon Friendster and MySpace at their peaks; [...]

With no name on the return address. Check it out: It gets better: Page 1 | Page 2

Whenever a teacher or police officer is revealed to have engaged in abusive behavior, a certain group of people always crawl out of the woodwork to defend the person of authority. They’re prepared to ignore any amount of evidence presented and to blame any abuse victims for being overly sensitive or for failing to do [...]

The pic on the right is from The Berrics’ “New Year’s Dae” video. The skating is amazing—well worth a dollar—and the site’s registration and checkout was painless, but the rest has been a disappointment: There’s no way to download this “downloadable part,” as it’s advertised. You must install an Adobe Air application, which downloads the [...]

On December 13th (just rebroadcast on 97.3 The Sky), radio host Allen Hunt, in a conversation about a recent adult incest case, stated that “incest is easier to defend than gay marriage because…at least incest is opposite sex and has the capacity to create new life.” Earlier the implication was made that gay marriage is [...]

Indistinguishable from magic, and available in your pocket. Your jetpacks have arrived!

Leslie Nielson will be sorely missed.

I’m starting to believe the only way out of this recession and national deficit is through tough choices that offend the ideologies of every political party: higher taxes for everyone spending cuts, including the military bailouts for state/local safety nets that ease real human suffering, not select industries finding and migrating to foreign aid measures [...]

Why is there a StackExchange proposal in the works for a “Musical Practice and Performance site” when KeyMinor already exists on the SE platform? The proposed site is “for people who play musical instruments. On-topic questions will be about technique, practice, theory, composition, and repertoire.” KeyMinor already serves this purpose, it’s just not known about. [...]

The Atlantic has a great piece on Paul Romer and his push for “charter cities”. I agree completely with Romer that fair laws with economic liberties is the only way to support economic growth. While probably true in the old world, very few countries remain impoverished simply because of geography. Tyrants plague the people of [...]

What could have Afghanistan become without decades of war?

At my new job, we maintain a site powered by Elgg, the PHP-based social networking platform. I’m enjoying getting to know the system and the development community, but my biggest criticisms are related to plugins. On the basis of “keeping the core light”, almost all functionality is outsourced to plugins, and you’ll need lots of [...]

Shameful law firm Jones Day sued real estate news site BlockShopper claiming “trademark infringement” over the way the site used link text, but really because the firm didn’t like how the site reported the home purchases of their partners (which is public record). The case should’ve been thrown out, but the judge allowed it, and, [...]

The deeper you dig into the history of the Drug War the more craziness you uncover. You’d think an office in charge of drug policy on a national level would monitor science and policy outcomes and work to refine those policies over time, or in the very least not break laws spreading misinformation about drugs. [...]

Depending on how you navigate through the menus to get to the video replays, the game (and entire Xbox360) will tend to lock up in the waiting screens, requiring a manual reset on the console. Usually this is before you can view even 3 or 4 replays. Now that I’m capturing a ton of replays [...]

The latest example of law enforcement solutions to reducing drug use. Police raided the home of a couple in the hunt for a drug factory because a [moss phlox] plant in their garden smelled like cannabis. … the couple, both in their late 70s, returned home to find that the drugs squad had battered down [...]

Here’s a chili (javascript syntax highlighter) enzyme for highlighting .htaccess code snippets. This is for the 1.x series (I’m using 1.8b here) so this will likely not work for the latest 2.0 release without some modification. Also the highlighting is pretty basic, but at least you get comments and the first directive on a line. [...]

88 I got: A, ABBR, ACRONYM, APPLET, AREA, B, BASE, BASEFONT, BIG, BLOCKQUOTE, BODY, BR, BUTTON, CAPTION, CENTER, CITE, CODE, COL, COLGROUP, DD, DEL, DFN, DIR, DIV, DL, DT, EM, FIELDSET, FONT, FORM, FRAME, FRAMESET, H1, H2, H3, H4, H5, H6, HEAD, HR, HTML, I, IFRAME, INPUT, INS, ISINDEX, KBD, LABEL, LEGEND, LI, LINK, MAP, [...]

Update 1/14/2011: According to Dustin Gurley, this still works in WP3 w/ minor modification. Thanks, Dustin. Update 1/30/06: a plug-in now exists to handle this. WordPress lacks the ability to specify the exact order that link categories appear in the sidebar. The get_links_list() function can only order categories by name or id, and this limitation [...]

Advertising.com revealed that people click on annoying pop-up ads 13 times as often as they do passive banner ads. This will surely translate to even more sites using pop-ups for generating ad revenue, but I’ll still never see them because the software developers of the web browsers Opera, Netscape, Mozilla and Safari care about user [...]