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We’ve been spending some time trying to complete some fixes and improvements around the homestead. We are very pleased to announce that our lighting project in the basement has been completed successfully without and damage to life or limb. With a little help from some Home Depot book, we managed to install a series of basement lights all the way back to the main circuit breaker with blowing ourselves up or burning down the house. It really does wonders for our basement and overall workspace project. I had been hesitant to deal with anything along the electricity front, but par usual m||3’s no fear attitude brought us to successful completion. View the fruits of our labor!

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Unless you’re not a total geek then you weren’t following the Macrumors.com live non-refresh needed feed of the Apple “special event” today. As mostly expected from rumors site, Steve Jobs delivered exactly what was expected in terms of the updated iPod line and the iTunes Movie store. I’m really not that interested in downloading a movie for lesser quality at $14.99 that I can purchase on DVD for less, but who cares. Apple has continually shown that they know how to bring digital downloads to the masses while everyone just plays catch up. However, I’ll keep my Netflix going since it fulfills my movie needs quite well thank you very much.

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Mexico Pictures Here!

M||3 and I headed out for Mexico on 08/26 hurricane be damned. Despite a bit of a rough airplane flight, we arrived in Cancun without issue. I was thankful that once we arrived this time that we knew what to do and didn’t get caught in the newly arrived confusion. If you don’t know exactly where you’re going in the Cancun airport, then you’re tempted to ask help from people that won’t give up until you have committed to visit their holiday resort. So a note for anyone going to visit there, once you leave the security point, don’t talk to anyone unless you know exactly with whom you are dealing.

Regardless, m||3 and I headed straight for the Alamo rental car company, who eventually swept us into their van and shipped us off to their HQ to give us our mini car for the week. It was a bit of a rush, but after we got everything set up and noted to Alamo every single ding and scratch in the car, we were on our way.

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Heading to Playa del Carmen today.

I suppose there are lots of things we do to feel good about ourselves. I am quite sure that it varies from human to human, but I must confess my latest personal feel good is the amount of recycling that we’ve been doing lately.

Now before this gets classified as a tree hugger rant, I should say that recycling has only been on my proactive radar from my Athens days where they would pick up your recyclable materials from the curbside. Having earth preservation tenancies from younger hippie predispositions and currently firmly believing that we currently belch out way to much waste to landfills on a daily basis, how could the process be wrong?

Having lived in Atlanta for some time, I only recently became aware that Dekalb county offers an amazing recycling program where they pretty much pick up everything, including all plastics.

I finally got down to breaking up some boxes of some recent larger purchases, namely a toaster and a Onkyo entertainment system. Much to my surprise and satisfaction, both were nearly completely packaged with materials that were completely recyclable. The only thing left over that wasn’t recyclable were a couple pieces of tape.

It has made a tremendous difference in our output of waste material. We really only take out the trash once every two weeks. My sincere hope is that all this stuff that we’re recycling is really making it to a reusable state. I have my doubts, but would prefer to believe that such materials are actually going towards reuse.

If you live in Dekalb county of Atlanta, sign up and feel better about yourself.

Once of the things I’ve been trying to achieve for a long time is the ability to load fonts dynamically in Flash and track it with a preloader. Anyone who has spend any time with flash knows that if you want to embed fonts into the file, you need to include the font in the library. If you need a dozen or so fonts for whatever reason, then you’re basically out of luck since it will skyrocket your file size to 500Kb just for the fonts alone.

What you say? Just use loadMovie as you need it! No dice. With loadMovie to bring in the font, it will not registered as embedded and therefor will not format the font. Well, then, why don’t you just use as a shared asset? Forget it. Shared Assent need to be loaded at runtime, so you end up dealing with the heavy front load anyway.

After dealing with this ridiculous problem for a long time and searching high and low all over the internet for anyone that has solved this problem, I found some people who have. I’ve build my own little version here of which you can download all the source files.

It seems that Wordpress is messing with my .swf path information. If the above doesn’t work, then view the .swf directly

I am no Actionscript guru. I feel like a caveman chiseling this stuff out of stone. Most of the advances I’ve made are because there are kind souls out there who are willing to help and post their work for you to download and tinker with. I thought I might type up this tutorial to try and return the favor, or help someone else out for a change.

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The state of the world at this point has obviously got myself as well as plenty of others unhinged. I could unleash a diatribe that would be as lengthy and unproductive as anything else in the blogosphere. My feelings are easily classified as “leftist”, but tagging my opinions is a means of the perspective I strive against. If nothing else, the “us vs. them” has been a very popular tool by pundits and people currently in power. I don’t know how to write about what I feel in political terms without falling into their trap.

What I do know is that something is wrong. I don’t agree with current foreign policy and I am firmly convinced that actions that my taxes pay for were spent to achieve someone else’s ill conceived notion of a perfect world. Not only that, but the delivery device of general consciousness, namely much of the media, has advocated a environment of hostility and hate. They do this because in our capitalistic society, it’s what drives.

It is time for common sense. Inflammatory rhetoric must stop. The issues that are upon us are serious. People should be informed of realities and non ethnocentric concerns. There is a vast lot out there who have charisma and only exploit current turmoil so they can stay on television. Their ratings or book selling monetary totals are not going to solve our world’s problems. People need to recognize them for the opportunists they are and stop believing in them.

This is not a game. Stop giving people who have obviously nothing to say but things of self interest in mind a soapbox. If we demand more from our news outlets they will listen.

Please participate in the Media Matters petition to stop such insanity.

We need to go to Tennessee to pick up some fireworks, and someone owes me money in Kentucky.

A friend called the other night and casually mentions that Tom Waits was coming to Atlanta. We immediately went to Ticketmaster and found that seats were still available, an amazing thing considering that his shows notoriously sell out in a few seconds. Considering that tickets for the show at the Tabernacle were on sale since July 8th, I was amazed to find that as of the 25th of July that there were still seats left. M||3 and I eagerly grabbed two reserved seats in the balcony.

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Today we took my brother’s children to a show at the Center for Pupperty Arts to see Everybody Loves Pirates. M||3 have been there several times over the last few years to see some amazing shows, most notably Avanti, Da Vinci which was one of the most amazing things I’ve seen in years.

We showed up early and I wasn’t sure exactly what we were going to do in the mean time, but thanks to a little curiosity by the children they steered us to their permanent exhibition, of which we’ve never seen in all the times that we’ve been there.

Simply put, their permanent exhibition is amazing. The presentation and amount of puppets they have is fantastic. During the exploration, I was managing my niece and hearing m||3 say “you should really come see this”. I disregarded her out of following this child around and only made it to what she was talking about a little later.

They have a complete puppet of a Skeksis from the Dark Crystal. I couldn’t believe it. I don’t know how many other people love this movie as much as I do, but to view one of the puppets from this movie was completely awe inspiring. I’m tempted to just go back and study the details at some later date.

If you live in Atlanta, do yourself a favor and visit and/or support the Center for Puppetry Arts. They do good things.

Ever since the Podcast phenomenon began to take hold of public consciousness, I had encouraged a cohort of mine to start one. He did and I had been dealing with how to easily manage his publications ever since. Managing XML manually to maintain the feed seems so archaic nowadays so I had been in search of a better way that would also allow him more control. Through the minimal amount of Google-Fu I discovered the Podpress plugin for Wordpress. Recently I completed the transition of his static site to a Wordpress with the Podpress plug-in installed where now all he has to do is FTP the MP3 up there and make a post.

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