The Art of Humanity is a project I’ve started back in 2008 to capture the essence of people I’ve encountered in my life that have played a part of who I am today. Welcome Erin Anderson of Australia to the list!

Erin Anderson of Australia (8 Pencil Set)

You can view the complete album in progress on Myspace here, or on Facebook here.

The tide is coming
Is it me?
Perhaps desires of the moon

The tide is coming
Is it now?
Not now, but very soon

The tide is coming
The crash of wave upon skin.
Nature’s band is drumming
First outside, and then in

The tide is coming
Do I stand strong, ready?
The conceptual truth stunning
My arms, a surgeon’s steady

Footsteps show me
the places that I’ve been
The watery edge shows me
that this is the end

Cry not, fear not
Release the worries within
Pay homage to the lot
For the tide is coming again

Such of mental velocity
Speed without motion
Such of mental atrocity
Premising the notion

Forgive the passing thief
Tonight is not to steal
The lines of make believe
Crossing what is real

Struggle alone and without qualm
This is the wake of the wise
To hide beneath the calm
Long before they arise

Paint sheds to rebel the foe
Colors fade from remorse
Questions for one to know
Answers all but course

Chained to the light of not
Return to the thorn
Embracing the lot
Until once again, day is born

Passenger to the wings of broken
Justify the language unspoken
Through the gaze of wonder
Exhale the sky, take me under

Am I looking down?
Am I looking up?

There is no free
There is no majesty
There is only me

Passenger to the wings of chokin’
Justify the words misspoken
Bleeding thoughts of splendor
Inhale the mind, poison presenter

Am I reaching down?
Am I reaching up?

Savor this free
Savor this masterpiece
There is only me

Sever the wings of blind and
Justify the lies of rich men
Through the chill of winder
Blaze of cinder, I surrender.

“All rise”. The voice of the judge can be heard reverberating throughout the court room. The air is much like the muddy still waters of a lake drying up. Methodical ritual passed from generation to generation finds itself skewed under the differently cultured growing adults that now fill courts nation wide. What’s really going on inside the minds of jurors? I’ll defer the answer to a comic strip excerpt I found:

The truth in deliberation

Although it is my civil duty and right as an American adult to dump my 2 cents into the legal system, the execution is what gets me. I wake up at 6am for my daily cognition of courtroom grinding. When the legal session is over, my daily session is merely beginning. From court closure I then drive like a bat out of hell toward my place of current employment (who were oh so kind enough to shift my schedule around in accommodation of court times) and struggle retain an inkling of cohesive thought throughout my day (read: night) job. From closure of my employers office I then rush home in a frantic attempt to complete computer repairs before the holidays until around 5am. That is time for 1-2 hours of sleep a night.

I hope someone nudges me out of my mental nap when the judge says “all rise.” this time around…

I recently followed some more information provided here to load the Google android operating system onto an SD card and have windows mobile boot into it. So far I like it, but it isn’t without imperfection. The developers are working hard to correct the minor issues I faced with it: No Bluetooth, resolution and screen orientation.

I also re-flashed my HTC Tilt with a barebones version of windows mobile 6.5. I found that the feature rich version I had led to the early demise of my battery life, so I’m hoping the barebones version I found here will help.

Happy hacking!

Looking back at the women I’ve been with in my life, I am faced with a myriad of emotions. Love and hate, hope and hopelessness. They were all interesting in their own unique way.

All of my exes managed to find that piece of elusive treasure that I’ve searched long and hard for – a happy ending. Maybe it’s my belief that no two people can ever be happy around each other forever. Maybe it is something else entirely.

The girls I left, as well as the girl that left me, are all grown women now. They all have very intricate and deep relationships with that special someone, while some of them have even manufactured their own families.

Am I too damaged and bruised from the past? Maybe I’ve just got a wild and free spirit that doesn’t want to be tamed? Discussion for another day.

For now I’m looking at my life through the eyes of a writer. When I’m done with this little personal escape into memory and emotion, I’m going to put out this cigarette and pick up the pen.

The Problem

Last blog, I redesigned the standard ajax library to allow for simultaneous open connections. This time, I tackled something a little more navigation bound.

Ajax is an amazing little compilation of code that has the capability of reloading only parts of a page that have changed.

source: Ajax, Rewritten!, 11/04/2009

Keep that quote in mind for a moment, while I explain some behavioral methods in web browsing.

Let’s say that you are on an office supply site with a few links you are interested in: “View Cart” and “Checkout”. You can’t remember what is in your cart, so you click the view cart link. While the page is loading, you remember what you had and change your mind, so you then click the checkout link. Your browser directs the page to the checkout link. Why? Whenever you click a link that tells your browser to load a page, it ignores all previous link clicks.

Now let’s get to the behavior of Ajax. Ajax by nature does not tell the browser to load a new page, it only reloads parts of it. The side effect is that if you are on an Ajax powered website, behavior is different. Let’s say you click on a link to Google from the Ajax page, and then change your mind and then click on the page’s home link. What happens? Because there is only one real page request (to Google) it will continue loading Google’s page.

The Fix

Using the JavaScript event object window.onbeforeunload, we can tell the ajax library that we are in the middle of leaving the page (clicking a link to another page). We can then tell each page request sent through ajax library to check if we are in the middle of leaving the current page. If we are, a stop command is issued to the browser (IE plays differently, so some creative code was required). We don’t have to go back and tell the library that the page is no longer in the middle of leaving, because leaving the page will unload the page’s variables by default.

The Effect

With the changes to the library in place, things function as they should. If we click a link to this blog, and then change our mind and click on the ajax powered home page, the original link request is halted. Hurray coding!

Ajax is an amazing little compilation of code that has the capability of reloading only parts of a page that have changed. It does this by making single indices into the html object of the web browser. Notice the emphasis on single. The widely distributed version of the code has the one drawback that you can only load content sequentially, one by one. On my page, I have two areas of content that are bound to Ajax loading (as seen below):

While I could have just accepted the limits of standard Ajax protocol and moved on, I am a bit of a perfectionist. I said “No! This is not going to work. Things must change!”. Equipped with a Dr. Pepper and a few hours to kill, I went to work.

I tried a couple of different methods, with most of them either getting confused with simultaneous requests or failing outright. The method I finally constructed involved the use of arrays. By adding each request to an array alongside the details of that request, I could manage them without crossing their signals.

And so now we have a completely rewritten Ajax library, capable of handling as many concurrent requests as the hardware and software have the room for. I need another Dr. Pepper.

You may have not already known that I am a professional geek. If you didn’t know, then perhaps you should get to know your friends better!

I’ve been using a Linksys WRT54G router for the home network:

It’s a few years old by now but it’s still got a long life ahead of it! One thing that sets it apart from the crowd is that it isn’t Linksys running under it’s hood. The guys at dd-wrt.com have been cooking up custom firmware for awhile, and it just so happens that the WRT54G model router is one of the ones they support.

With a little bit of patience and a pinch of technical know how, I am now running a commercial grade router interface from within the confines of a Linksys entry level router.

Good times, indeed.