Unsought Input

Ultimate Tag Warrior is a great Wordpress plugin that lets you add tagging to your blog and build your own folksonomy. You can use it to show related posts or a nifty tag cloud.

As of version 2.3, though, Worpdress has tagging built right in. That means that development on UTW has stopped, leaving us with a very nasty bug in the final version. After someone comments on a post (and the comment is approved), all the non-category tags are deleted.

This is a known bug in UTW 3.1415926. I’m not quite ready to take the plunge into Wordpress 2.3, digging up new plugins to add the features I want and changing our theme. So in the mean time, I found an ugly hack to stop our tags from vanshing into thin air.

1. Go to your ultimate-tag-warrior-core.php file.
2. Find the SaveTags function.
3. Comment out the code that removes tags that are no longer associated with the post.

The end of the SaveTags function should look like this:

// Remove any tags that are no longer associated with the post.
/*
if ($taglist == “”) {
// since “not in ()” doesn’t play nice.
$q = “delete from $tablepost2tag where post_id = $postID”;
} else {
// lop off the trailing space+comma
$taglist = substr($taglist, 0 ,-2);

$q = “delete from $tablepost2tag where post_id = $postID and tag_id not in ($taglist)”;
}
$wpdb->query($q);
*/
$this->ClearTagPostMeta($postID);
}

Please note that this is an ugly hack.  It makes it much more difficult to remove tags from a post when you want to.  I find that we get comments on posts way more often than we ever want to remove tags, so it’s a god tradeoff for the time being.

Got a better solution?  Post it in the comment below.

Magician Criss Angel will join Uri Geller on Phenomenon on NBC. The show is billed as American Idol for magicians and “mentalists,” but that’s not really interesting. Within the next few years there will be an American Idol-style show for every profession, hobby, and pursuit in the history of man.

What’s interesting is that Geller, who has for years gone on TV all over the world claiming to have psychic powers, is still able to get on TV at all. He’s been caught cheating and had his powers debunked so many times it’s not even funny anymore.

He was probably most famously exposed by James Randi (The Amazing Randi). Watch the video below for some entertaining history.

Yes, that’s right, Geller is so busted that he flaked out on Johnny Carson. In 1973. That’s more than 30 years of being busted.

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You probably got to this article by Googling “how to be a hipster” or “learn to be a hipster.” If that’s the case, it’s too late, don’t even bother, you’ll never be a hipster - the fact that you want to be one enough to type it into a web browser means you are already trying too hard.

Besides, are you really still using Google? Or the word “googling”? What is this, 2002?

So enjoy this video, it’s funny enough to make you feel better but it’s a shallow enough commentary that you’ll remain plainly not a hipster.

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Blogs are an integral part of whole “web 2.0″ business, so it’s not too surprising that bloggers like adding tags to their posts. If you are using Wordpress, one of the best ways to add tagging functionality to your site is with a plugin called the Ultimate Tag Warrior.

This article won’t go into all the great features included with Ultimate Tag Warrior (UTW). If you are new to the plugin, I suggest reading this great article by Lorelle. You can use it to show related posts, tags related to a particular post, and a bunch of other stuff. But there’s no easy way to show tags related to a particular tag or category.

If you take a look at one of our category page, for example the Environment category page, you notice a list of related tags. Here’s how I did it.

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A lot of people are buying laptops and skipping desktop computers entirely. Laptops are portable, more energy-efficient, and wifi connections are pretty easy to find just about anywhere. Today’s laptops and notebooks are fairly comparable to desktops in speed and memory. The one drawback is that desktops are still a lot easier to add on to.

So what do you do if your trusty iBook is running out of hard drive space? You could buy a larger internal hard drive and replace your old one, but then you have to deal with installing OSX, reinstalling all your applications, and moving all your old files over. This applies to Windows computers too - swapping out the hard drive of your Dell requires all the same tediousness.

If you just need more space to store your photos, music, and videos, and external storage might be the right solution. You have a few options here, and there are a few tricky details you’ll want to know about that I’ll cover below.

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Recently I have been trying to plan my second trip to Japan and i am finding it incredibly hard. We had even considered just going to Europe to save a little bit of money, you know, by not traveling all around the globe. Usually I plan everything and do everything myself, but this year I wanted to do something “all inclusive” so I could actually enjoy and relax on my vacation instead of stressing out over whether everything was going as planned. You know, so I could have fun on my vacation?

So, anyway, I decided to go to a travel agent. My husband and I were thinking about a trip to Europe, with a few places we might want to travel in mind but no where set in stone (see, we wanted to see what the deals were), maybe a cruise or something tour bus-y. So, having never gone to a travel agent before, I set aside my pride and walked into the office. I told the woman what I have told you here, and she laughed in my face. Well, I also told her how much I wanted to spend. I think that is what made her laugh. It was only a thousand dollars less that what we spent to go to Japan before but she laughed in my face and told me that the cheapest two people could do all inclusive in Europe was $7000.00 before plane fare.

Somehow I don’t believe this. She wouldn’t tell me if they had any specials going on, she told me I had to know where I wanted to go. That was not the point, I said. We were flexible, we wanted to go somewhere that was running a special. Travel Agent 007 told me that that is not how it works. I was left in wonder how all these people got great deals to go abroad and how it doesn’t work for me. I guess the bottom line is don’t get a 007 Agent to tell you where to go on your vacation. Oh, and use the internet. I just was trying the small business support and stuff, and of course as with most human interactions, it backfired in my face. Don’t mind me if I sound a little jaded, I was just hoping she would have been nicer, since the internet is taking her job away.

Anyway, you don’t care about that, you are reading to find out cheaper ways to travel. Now, mind you these are not all going to be luxury five star hotels, but if you can afford that, why are you reading this? (more…)

This goes out to all y’all web developers out there.  You know who you are.  In 1999 while others partied like it was…  1999, you slaved away trying to get your table-based layout working on Netscape and IE.  Thank goodness it’s now 2007, and you can just grab CSS-based layouts from A List Apart.

But off all the possible abuses of old-skool HTML, I bet you never thought of this one:  using table cells and bgcolor to build an image, one pixel at a time!

Link to video for those of you on RSS.

Brought to you by Japan and cutesy anime chicks.

I have stewed over this topic for several months as I am finishing up my second to last semester of my Family Nurse Practitioner (FNP) program. I do not consider myself an expert on this issue; however, there were several things that got me through nursing school that I could not survive without. The following stuff is mainly for an undergrad nursing student. Part II (coming soon) will be more for a nursing student in grad school.

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I ran across a great post at Technocrat titled If We Taught English the Way We Teach Mathematics.

“Suppose that those classes, from elementary school right through to high school, amounted to nothing more than reading dictionaries, getting drilled in spelling and formal grammatical construction, and memorizing vast vocabulary lists — you never read a novel, nor a poem; never had contact with anything beyond the pedantic complexity of English spelling and formal grammar, and precise definitions for an endless array of words. You would probably hate the subject.”

This is a great point, and the post goes on to talk about why it’s not just a lack of “real world” examples that makes math and science such boring, intimidating subjects.  Here’s the perfect example of how a real world example definitely did not help one student with physics:

So if memorizing facts and formulas is no use, and contrived, often bizarre examples are no help, how should we teach math and science?

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Apparently what needs two six-hour classes on the first two Saturdays of spring can be summed up within a couple paragraphs (at least in a couple installments) on a slightly successful somewhat humor associated blog. I am, of course, referring to the first time home buyer class my lender has required me to attend in order to obtain a state subsidized mortgage. I’m not knocking the program as it is meant for first time home buyers. But the elementary view and information this class provides these hopeful and somewhat naive homebuyers is almost worthless. At first I assumed the audience was somewhat knowledgeable in regards to personal finance. I mean, this is a class for people ready to make the biggest purchase of their lives. However, I was seriously surprised when more than a few hands raised to notify the teacher that they didn’t know what a “Credit Score� was.

As I sat in the freezing room filled with plastic folding chairs listening to a real estate professional, a home inspector, and a real estate lawyer try to drum up business for themselves instead of educate home buyers, I decided to put down on paper the important lessons and intricacies that may be useful to a somewhat more educated, or simply alive, first time home buyer that I’ve discovered not only during the home buying process but also through my experience as a former loan officer and what I’ve learned while preparing to sit for the Real Estate Licensing exam in Ohio.

Today’s topic – Preparing your financials for a Mortgage
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So, in my last post, I mentioned that we housed a band, Street to Nowhere, for a night. I do enjoy playing hostess, so I was thinking that it would rock if I could figure out how to set up something here that bands who are coming to Cleveland could stay at my house for free if they’d like. But, how do you advertise that kind of thing?

I mean, I guess that I am doing it here, but that’s not quite what I mean. I would really like to do this,

1. because I love taking care of people,

2. because it must suck not knowing where you are gonna stay from night to night and

3. because I would probably meet some really cool people. (more…)

Had a weigh in for the competition recently and I’m down 30 lbs. total. 30 lbs in two months and I haven’t done anything unhealthy to lose it. I’m getting positive comments on my weight daily. Chuck and I finally got to run his neighborhood again this weekend and challenge the monster hill of doom. End result: 5 ½ miles and one conquered hill.

At the risk of going all Tony Robbins, I want to share how I’ve been able to achieve all of this in such a short time. I was completely and utterly disgusted with myself but now I’m confident that someday I’ll be able to achieve my goals. So read on, and see how you too can achieve what I have.

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When you surpass the weight of Homer Simpson, you began to develop an elephantine disgust with oneself. I had done this several months prior, yet kept engorging myself with foodstuffs through the holidays. It is a lucky bit then, I suppose, that ultimate collision of several motivating entities that drove the forging of both form and mind. With continuing fortitude, I shall hammer myself into an ultra-marathoner.

What a load of pretentious drek that was…

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So, as stated previously in the title, this article is supposed to be about entertainment for road trips (and four hour drives). In particular, road trips that I am taking, but these can be applied to all sorts of events, even just short road jaunts, like the family trip to Wal*Mart or the much more anticipated Sunday excursion to The Mall. I mean, most of these games are created to entertain bored passengers at the expense of others, so please feel free to not read these if you are going to be offended when I am making fun of you on the highway. Just trying to help.

Okay, so most of these can be played anytime but some of them are seasonal, which will be decidedly marked as such as we go down the list. Also, and I will mention this again, please feel free to leave in the comments section more ideas for entertaining games for road trips. I will definitely comment on whether they suck or not.

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I know a little bit about Mormons.  Do you?  Did you know that if you play your cards right, Mormons will shovel your driveway for free?  In the middle of a snow storm?  Let me tell you a little story.

So, today is my day off of work.  I decide since it is snowing a lot, I should probably shovel my driveway.   So, I don’t know, it’s probably around 11:30 and I get all ready and go out and to shovel.  I see two girls across the street and I figure they are probably are selling something.  And, I am cool with that since I used to have to do that crap for band when I was in high school.  So, anyway, I am prepared to buy a band card or whatever magazines they are selling.  I can see that I am in their targets as they make a beeline across the street to where I am dutifully shoveling my driveway and sidewalk that I share with my neighbor (I live in townhouses).  By the time I realize it, I am too late.

These girls don’t appear to be Mormons, which was my first mistake.  I mean, these girls are attractive, one would say cute.  I didn’t know what Mormons looked like before today, but now I know for future reference.  They are going to send out the best looking of their flock to bombard potential brainwashees.  I don’t’ know what I thought Mormons were supposed to look like, but they aren’t supposed to be that attractive.  It’s really a good selling point when you think about it.

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