Michael Hanscom

Enthusiastic ambivert. Geeky, liberal, friendly, curious, hopepunk; trying to be a good person. (he/him)

In Transition

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Along with upgrading the backend of the site to Movable Type 3.2, which I did last week sometime, I’ve decided to upgrade my templates to the new MT3.2 styles. As I’ve had a fair number of customizations that I’ve been using, though, it’s taking a bit of time to incorporate them into the default templates provided by Six Apart.

Expect some oddities for a few days as I get things tweaked and configured. Once I’ve got everything working with a basic startpoint, then I’ll see about customizing the style to something a little more “me”.

For now, though…things might be a bit odd. Bear with me, hopefully this won’t last too long.

Basic HTML tag cheatsheet

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After a friend asked me a few questions about the basic HTML tags while trying to clear up some confusion, I went Googling for some sort of cheat sheet listing just the most basic tags. I couldn’t find one — just came up with a lot of full-blown tutorials or cheat sheets listing every tag in the book — so I tossed this together. Hopefully it helps.

I’m only looking at the tags most likely to be used in your standard, basic weblog post, so there won’t be much in the way of structural stuff here, just presentational.

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Why I’m not a Hollywood casting agent

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Seeing as how they’re both horribly typecast these days and just seem to play the same characters over and over in every movie…I think Sam Jackson and Morgan Freeman should switch agents for a few years. Shake things up a little bit. Let Freeman play the “permanantly pissed badass with whom you do not want to fuck”, and give Jackson a few of the “heartwarming kindly older wise man” roles.

Put Jackson in the Miss Daisy’s driver’s seat. Partner Freeman up with John Travolta, guns a-blazin’ and Bible a-quotin’. Let Jackson battle institutionalization at Shawshank. Drop a bright purple lightsaber in Freeman’s hands.

They’re both great actors, and I love seeing each of them do their thing, but…just do something different for once.

More Katrina Incompetence

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On August 27th, President Bush declared a State of Emergency in Louisiana due to the then-incoming Hurricane Katrina. Sounds like a good thing, and possibly one of the few things done right in this whole mess, right? Well…not quite. The declaration spelled out which Louisiana parishes were covered by the State of Emergency (emphasis mine):

The President’s action authorizes the Department of Homeland Security, Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), to coordinate all disaster relief efforts which have the purpose of alleviating the hardship and suffering caused by the emergency on the local population, and to provide appropriate assistance for required emergency measures, authorized under Title V of the Stafford Act, to save lives, protect property and public health and safety, or to lessen or avert the threat of a catastrophe in the parishes of Allen, Avoyelles, Beauregard, Bienville, Bossier, Caddo, Caldwell, Claiborne, Catahoula, Concordia, De Soto, East Baton Rouge, East Carroll, East Feliciana, Evangeline, Franklin, Grant, Jackson, LaSalle, Lincoln, Livingston, Madison, Morehouse, Natchitoches, Pointe Coupee, Ouachita, Rapides, Red River, Richland, Sabine, St. Helena, St. Landry, Tensas, Union, Vernon, Webster, West Carroll, West Feliciana, and Winn.

As Chris Floyd first noticed, none of the coastal parishes were included in this list. All the inland, landlocked parishes were mentioned, but the coastal parishes in the most immediate danger from Katrina? Conspicuously absent. Bob Harris created this map highlighting the mentioned parishes:

bushincompetencemap.gif

So good to know we’ve got the best and the brightest doing everything in their power to keep the people of America safe from any harm.

Olbermann blasts Bush

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Well, not so much Bush specifically, as the entire botched crisis management in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. It’s an astoundingly good editorial sequence — could it be that the media’s finally been jostled awake from its all-to-complacent willingness to give a pass to everything the current administration does?

Here’s the video clip. It’s an embedded .wmv file, unfortunately, but the transcript follows.

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White Foragers Report Threat Of Black Looters

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From The Onion:

NEW ORLEANS—Throughout the Gulf Coast, Caucasian suburbanites attempting to gather food and drink in the shattered wreckage of shopping districts have reported seeing African Americans “looting snacks and beer from damaged businesses.” “I was in the abandoned Wal-Mart gathering an air mattress so I could float out the potato chips, beef jerky, and Budweiser I’d managed to find,” said white survivor Lars Wrightson, who had carefully selected foodstuffs whose salt and alcohol content provide protection against contamination. “Then I look up, and I see a whole family of [African-Americans] going straight for the booze. Hell, you could see they had already looted a fortune in diapers.” Radio stations still in operation are advising store owners and white people in the affected areas to locate firearms in sporting-goods stores in order to protect themselves against marauding blacks looting gun shops.

They’re somewhat on-again/off-again, but when the Onion is on, they’re dead on.

A little ray of sunshine

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While it’s never a happy thing to see one of Seattle’s many homeless inhabitants laboring to push a shopping cart filled to overflowing with what few items they’ve been able to claim for themselves up one of our many hills, I have to admit it’s hard not to grin when they’ve got a big smile on their face, they’re happily engaging in conversation with a passerby who helps keep the cart from rolling away — and the cart they’ve chosen is one of the “keep the kids entertained” models designed to look like a bright red and yellow plastic car.

Pity I didn’t have my camera on me, I’d have gladly traded him a few dollars for a shot or two. Perhaps I’ll run across him some other time.

Safety: 10 best/worst places to live in the US

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MSNBC crunched some numbers to come up with lists of the ten safest and most dangerous places to live in the US in terms of weather and natural disasters.

The ten safest:

  1. Honolulu, Hawaii
  2. Boise City, Idaho
  3. Santa Fe, N.M.
  4. Yakima, Wash.
  5. Spokane, Wash.
  6. Richland-Kennewick-Pasco, Wash.
  7. Medford-Ashland, Ore.
  8. Corvallis, Ore.
  9. Salem, Ore.
  10. Las Cruces, N.M.

And the ten most risky:

  1. Monroe, La.
  2. Dallas, Tex.
  3. Jackson, Miss.
  4. Lakeland-Winter Haven, Fla.
  5. West Palm Beach-Boca Raton, Fla.
  6. Kansas City, Mo.
  7. Elkhart-Goshen, Ind.
  8. Tulsa, Okla.
  9. Memphis, Tenn.
  10. Shreveport-Bossier City, La.

The Pacific Northwest seems to be a pretty good bet, all told, with six locations on the list, three in WA and three in OR…seven, if you count ID as part of the PNW. Amusingly, though, one of the WA locations is the Tri-Cities area, home to the Hanford Nuclear Reservation — but as the Seattle PI points out, these are lists looking at natural disasters.

(via the Seattle PI Buzzworthy blog)