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It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his livelihood depends on him not understanding it.

—Upton Sinclair

We will have to shift from the materialistic, dualistic belief that people and the environment are separate, toward a new consciousness of an all-encompassing reality in which people feel their oneness with animate nature and all of creation.

—Albert Hofmann

I live in an apartment building in London. The flat is dirty and disheveled. There are anonymous roommates and my room is full of expensive electronics and equipment. The back wall of my room has a window that reveals a view of the internal wall. We are moving out today. Everyone is packing up their stuff and I go into my room to pack my belongings. In the window that views into the wall, there is a fire. I start to panic and call 911. The line is busy. I call back and get an operator and tell her that my apartment is on fire, send the fire department. “My fucking apartment is on fire! Help! Send help!” The operator is uninterested and annoyed that a Yankee doodle is bothering her.

I go outside and cross the street to wait for the fire department and see president Obama on the sidewalk.”My apartment is on fire and the 911 operator doesn’t care. I’m not sure the fire department is going to come,” I say.

He looks into my eyes and earnestly speaks, “we must intercede in these times of crisis.”

Here is how to get WordPress Post categories via straight SQL query:

SELECT
	wp_term_taxonomy.description,
	wp_terms.term_id,
	wp_terms.name,
	wp_terms.slug
FROM wp_term_taxonomy
	JOIN wp_terms ON ( wp_term_taxonomy.term_id = wp_terms.term_id )
WHERE wp_term_taxonomy.taxonomy = 'category'

In WordPress, there isn’t a simple template tag to get the category slug or description if you’re making a category.php template. Here is a little work-around:

$cat = get_query_var ( 'cat' );
$catslug = get_category ( $cat )->slug;
$catdesc = get_category ( $cat )->description;

This mobile app by TAT uses facial recognition and social networks to present a layer of augmented reality over visual/video displays. Check it out:

Links

TAT.se
wikipedia/Augmented_Reality

Recently ran across this problem in Actionscript 3 with dynamically naming and retrieving child elements. Created a loop to name sprites and add using the name property and addChild method:

for ( var i:int = 1;  i <= 3;  i++ ) {
	var bkgd:Sprite = new Sprite ();
	bkgd.name = "bkgd" +i;
	addChild ( bkgd );
}

Now these sprites are accessible via getChildByName and are retrieved as DisplayObject by default. But when retrieved as DisplayObject, you can not add children via addChild method. The trick is to cast the DisplayObject as a Sprite:

var addBkgd:Sprite = Sprite ( this.getChildByName( "bkgd" +layerNum ) );
addBkgd.addChild ( layerSprite );

Better photo this.

Celeste painted this elephant mounted above Ryan’s painting between my Yamaha BB1200 and Gibson archtop.

Recently got the myTouch G3 phone with Android OS by Google. It is a lot of fun. I got it to speak French. There is an application that you can get from the Market called Rings Extended. It is free to download and install. Rings Extended allows you to assign ringtones from all of the audio files on the phone, not just the default Android ringtones.

Next, I went to Yahoo! Babel Fish since I can’t actually speak French myself. It traslates as best as it can from one language to another. Translate phrases like “incoming telephone call” to “appel téléphonique entrant”, etc. Copy the French phrase from Babel Fish and go over to AT&T’s speech-to-text demo page (see the links below). You can paste the text in and select to have it spoken in French by the Juliette voice and it will create a .wav audio file for you to download.

From here it gets pretty obvious… USB or Bluetooth your phone to your computer, copy the files over and then choose the ringtones for your different applications.

Now my phone sounds sexy and everyone thinks I’m super-cool when I get a call or (nerd) alert….

Links

Android OS by Google
Yahoo! Babel Fish
AT&T’s Text-to-Speech Demo