Stage Lighting

As stage lighting is important to film and the theatre so too is the focus of the media on events. When the media continue to focus their ellipsoidal reflector spotlights on personalities not deserving of primary attention at any time, they demean the readers and consumers of media. Caricature personae that stand out in the performance such as the Glenn Becks, the Bachmann/Pawlentys, and the Harry Reids should be dimmed and working aspects of government and political momentum should be brightened, either by increasing the ambient flood illumination on the rest of the cast, or by simply turning off the focused lamps.

Every time one of these people who lack fact checking is reported on, it is as if handing the microphone over to an interupting P. Diddy, taking away from history that could have been. There are plenty of sane, well-spoken actors who could be given their due time, but the media is not responsible enough to gather those. The media does not report on the content of meetings about the deficit, just regurgitates soundbites. Where is the article about... if you want to reach an agreement between bills in the House and the Senate, how about trying to bring a LAPTOP or a CLERK with a LAPTOP to work out the rearrangement. Even an actual pad of paper would help. None of the outlets report how the meeting was obviously just set up for continued posturing. "See, they won't budge."

Especially in need of some stage lighting apprenticeship is the public radio stations. They eagerly give just as much airtime to the whackjobs and vomit mouths, supporting. They snidely report the soundsbites as in-depth as a microfilm, then tell you how they report all the news and convey a valuable service. Nevermind in-depth comparison - oh this soundbite from personality X sounds the opposite of what this person said on this date. Or, we'll report what the spokespeople comment without going back and holding them accountable when they were clearly lying to attempt damage control.

FizzBuzz!

Saw an interesting article in thedailywtf that referred to FizzBuzz in the comments section. There is a test called FizzBuzz, based on the UK math book of math story problems.

Write a program that prints the numbers from 1 to 100.
But for multiples of three print "Fizz" instead of the
number and for the multiples of five print "Buzz". For
numbers which are multiples of both three and five print
"FizzBuzz".

Here's my javascripted solution. It took all of 4 minutes using TextWrangler and Safari, including limited HTML. HTML4 only sorry, another 10 minutes to get validated HTML5! (That should be part of the requirement!)

Yes, I realize if you were concerned about the number of rows, I'd make the output into an array and join("") on it instead of the slower string concatenation, but this has the "less than 256 bytes" or so feel to it, so I'm not going to spend time on string manipulation.

3 books

Harry Potter's crew could have finished off their dark lord in three books too if they'd only had Dwarven allies.

Bloomington is my personal gravity well

Usually I try to get far away from work on the weekend. Typically, that fails and I end up back in Bloomington for one reason or another. This weekend, Quincy's family reunion was down the road from work on France and the hotel was only two buildings over.

Robot Drawing

Yesterday's drawing was a robotic humanoid.

U. S. Federal Tax Spending

A flash app that depicts the US government's use of your tax during the year.

MN Painter: Scott Lloyd Anderson

Scott Lloyd Anderson's work in a PBS special.

I like the geometries and perspectives he finds in modern MN suburbia.

The kids like the waterslide.

MST3K - Mystery Science Theater 3000

Found a posting (109 - Project Moon Base) where my letter was read on Mystery Science theater 3000. According to their mailing list program index, I was number 12 of the fan club.

Tom: Right you are, Slappy. This one comes from a Jeff Conrad in, uh, Bloomington, Minnesota. "Greetings. I've been a long time fan of Mystery Science Theater 3000. Goober, friends and I watch it every week on videotape. Hey tell me, will the new shows be in color or all in black & white? Sincerely, Jeff Conrad."

At first they don't seem to respond to the question, but at the end,

Joel: All right. I guess that ends the experiment, Sirs. Uh, when are we gonna get some color movies?
(Switch to Deep 13)
Dr. Forrester: "Color"? You want color, talk to Ted Turner! (handing Dr. Erhardt a clipboard) Here, file this.
Dr. Erhardt: Consider it filed!

04/02/2012: Here's the wierd thing: I would not have said "Goober," so whoever first quoted this misquoted me. It should be "A group of friends and I (meaning John Thielges et al). Here's a link to the actual video on youtube.

Visibility plugin for jquery - jquery.vis.js

;(function ($) {

$.fn.hideVis = function () {
 return this.each(function () {
   $(this).css("visibility", "hidden");
 });
};

$.fn.showVis = function () {
 return this.each(function () {
  $(this).css("visibility", "visible");
 });
};

$.fn.vis = function (bool) {
 if (bool) {
  $(this).showVis();
 } else {
  $(this).hideVis();
 }
};

})(jQuery);