Whew. What a finish. Three after three goes up… they just couldn’t make enough of them.
Spurs? Hornets? Either way, the Lakers are waiting. Should be fun.
Via Robert Melton, I’ve actually found a site that can give me wallpaper. I rarely change my desktop because 2560×1024 isn’t a common wallpaper resolution at all. Kept my self made onequite some time, kept the Stellvia Kouta/Shima one two years, and I’ll probably keep this current Chrono Trigger one a long time.
Texas may hold the option of splitting into multiple states, but it’s California that most needs broken up. Traditionally, the proposal has been a North-South split, but some of us have other ideas.
Via Paul Cella I came across this post by Jeff Culbreath reacting to a proposal to split California into three states. Both Culbreath and Phrelin.com focus heavily on geography in taking the traditional north-south split, but adding a third state, separating the northern coastline from the rest of the proposed Northern California.
I think this is a bit self-serving, and misses where the meaningful split is.
Phrelin.com is apparently based in the Redwoods, and Culbreath lives in Glenn County. So when I say it’s “self-serving,” I perfectly understand why they don’t want the burgeoning Bay Area swallowed whole into Northern California. That’s their state, and they don’t want their state overwhelmed by the populous coast. So likewise, I hope they’ll understand why I, in Riverside County, would not want my Southern California overwhelmed by the mess we call Los Angeles County.
Notice a pattern? Republicans in inland Northern California want away from the Bay Area coastal cities. Republicans in inland Southern California want away from the LA Area coastal cities. So why don’t we just split the whole state along those lines? We can create an inland Eastern California, with low population density and sane values, separate from the coastal Western California, where all the fruits and nuts congregate.
I believe that Phrelin and Culbreath are wrong to focus on geography. Instead we should look at people. There is a cultural divide between the California of the coast, with all the excesses our state is known for, and the California made better known by Victor Davis Hanson, the son of a California farming family. But this divide doesn’t stop at Sacramento or Fresno. It runs the whole length of the state. Heck, I live east of active diary farming, and I’m only an hour out of LA. When I was in high school, the Future Farmers of America were alive and kicking at my own school. So there are cultural bonds running north-south in inland California. And likewise, don’t we think the hippy-dippy fruits and nuts of SF and LA will get along just fine?
As for my map, I do things I think are highly debatable though. My inclination is that over time, we’re going to see the Sacramento-San Francisco corridor urbanize, so my thought is to just put that whole area into my Western California, though Yolo, San Joaquin, and Stanislaus counties could probably fit in well in the East. I’m highly flexible on the border in that part of the state. I also put Orange County in the East, though demographically I’m sure it needs to go into the West. Perhaps Orange and a few other counties like Kern would ideally be split.
In any case, please, please, please, people: If we’re going to split California, don’t leave me in the thralldom of LA County! Being represented by Senator Boxer is bad enough; Senator Waters would be a nightmare.
The Sacramento Bee is coming after State Sen. Tom McClintock, California’s best known conservative and candidate to Rep. Doolittle’s seat in district 4.
Oh yes, he’s “intolerant,” an “ideologue,” and worst of all, he’s anti-earmarks. The Bee quotes approvingly of an attack by a supporter of former Rep. Doug Ose’s, who is running against McClintock to return to the Congress, who says in horror “Tom will publicly refuse the tools available to all 435 members of Congress.”
As for me, I’m with the Republican quoted at the end of the article:
“I think Tom is probably the most active voice in restraining state spending,” said state Sen. Sam Aanestad, R-Penn Valley, a campaign supporter. “He just tells it like it is. He’s upfront and he doesn’t play political games.
“If that’s a weakness, it’s one I’d like to have.”
For what it’s worth, I’m with McClintock for Congress, and against Ose. This is a district we can have our pick of Republicans. This is no time and no place to go with a pro-spending Republican.
Down four days. Blah. At least it came back on between 7:30 and 8 this morning. Now to work on a partial refund, heh.
Got it done. I can’t quite do Django’s inheritance without a bunch of work, but I got something done right away.
In Django, the parent template puts in block tags which may or may not contain default values. The child templates then also have the same block tags containing their preferred values. The tags then go on down the line neatly. The child templates also declare their parent at the top of the file.
In Liquid I leveraged the existing capture and include tags to get close, along with creating my own default tag based on capture. The base template uses default, declaring where the common blocks go, including default text where appropriate. Inheriting templates use capture to override those where wanted. It works, but it has an aesthetic glitch: because I’m just using context variable assignments, the inheritance is ‘declared’ by using an include at the bottom of the child template file.
So it’s not perfectly like Django, but I can certainly use it.
So I gave up on messing with Rails. I’m sure if I needed to work with Rails I could do it with no problems, but I’m not going to invest myself in it. If someone else wants to be tied to that Gem dependency nightmare, that’s not on me though.
In downloading Mephisto for Rails though I found something nice (I nearly wrote ‘found a gem,’ but that’s not a metaphor I want right now!): the Liquid template library for Ruby. I don’t know if Liquid learned from Django, Django learned from Liquid, or both learned from a third party, but I liked this template format in Django, so I’m definitely going to use it from now on in my own Ruby work.
Hmm… A grep in Liquid shows no reference to Django, and a grep in Django shows no reference to Liquid. So I’m assuming they both got this style elsewhere. Well whoever invented it, I like it.
I just need to make sure that this Liquid supports template inheritance. If not, I’ll add it. And then I’m rewriting my whole website to use it!
Hey, Ruby on Rails people? Mephisto people? Heck, the whole silly Ruby on Rails world? Gems are not a substitute for documented requirements. Some of us don’t like to just install whatever come up willy-nilly and hope the versions are compatible, and hope that the next time we install we get the same versions.
I’m still offline as I write this, but I’d hoped to use this downtime to mess around and learn Rails. Forget it. I would never, pending a radical change in the release and documentation practices of Rails, recommend its use in a production environment.
Yeah, I know there are people who surely use it just fine. But my guess is most of those people are intimately involved with Rails development. I’m not, and I never will be. Should I have to be? I sure don’t have to be to use Django.
Ruby is the superior language, but it’s not worth this, when Python is good enough.
Being offline, I’m limited in what I can do. So I’m briefly borrowing my father’s laptop and its company-provided Sprint wireless Internet access and downloading Ruby on Rails. Except… it’s the most horribly designed website for a website development framework I’ve ever seen in my entire life.
Zero documentation of dependencies. They say it’s “low” on dependencies, but don’t say what they are. No way to download docs, no, they try to shill a $40 book instead.
I’ve never heard good things about Rails, but all this stupidity doesn’t bode well for the framework itself being worth anything at all.
Offline since Thursday, 7:15am. Still offline as I write this. They first claimed it was a 24 hour planned outage, and now claim it wasn’t, and nothing was ever wrong on their end. They also ref use to even come out and see what’s wrong until Monday. This despite being paid $80/mo for “business” class service.
Business death is more like it. What good is a business you can’t reach? Death to Verizon. I wish nothing but ill to that company’s ventures for all time. As that’s what they’re trying to do to me.
Also, death to slimy, no-good, low-down, corrupt cities and their ‘franchise’ contracts with kickbacks surely added. This is America. We demand competition.