I've had some errors, typographical and formatting/styling and factual, creeping in all along, so today I stretched out in bed all day with my lappy and reworked the unnamed blog engine to include entry-revision functionality. En route I learned a number of things, including some finer points of CSS selector precedence and a bit more about PHP's MySQL functions. I'm not sure exactly what I learned about stateful app design using session variables in PHP, but something wasn't behaving as expected, and I ... (...more)

Note to self, style specs attached to CSS ID selectors take precedence over specs attached to CLASS. That makes sense, since semantically, you might have any number of elements inheriting style from a given class, but there shouldn't be multiple elements on a page inheriting from a single ID, right? Except if you assign an ID to a container, elements within that container inherit any element-specific styles attached to that ID. For example, you decide to have a DIV id="content", not unreasonably, becaus... (...more)

yay, my first lost post on this home-grown blog software... no idea what happened, probably an SQL issue 3.3mi in 54 minutes (down 1m), first burst on lap 3 or 4 was a full lap (previously limited to half-lap bursts), and 3 or 4 bursts total, peaking at 4.7mph (up .1mph). 4.2mph is about where I have to break from a fast walk into a jog, but up to 4.7ish it's an awkward short-strided jog; or else at a comfortable stride, I feel like I'm jogging in a weird slow-mo. So I think it's not going to be long... (...more)

The terms "right wing" and "left wing" come to us from the eve of France's Revolutionary era, and refer to the gathering of aristocrats aligned with Crown and Church on the right-hand side, and revolutionaries on the left-hand side of the National Assembly under King Louis XVI. Louis wasn't such a bad guy really, but he was a weak and ineffectual King and did little to rein in the excesses and brutality of the aristocracy, most infamously exemplified by that iconic libertine debaucher, the Marquis de Sa... (...more)

Lately I've had this phrase kicking around my head, "The Wrong From The Right", as a working title for my thoughts on the advance of right-wing agendas in my lifetime. I really want to dive in by defining my terms, but before I even get there, let me note that a) political terminology is slippery, because almost every term in political discourse is nuanced both by historical context and by doctrinal orientation; and b) some of it is so widely misunderstood, or misused for propaganda purposes, that we ha... (...more)