digip : sailing the high seas of the internet

There is a nic elittle debate going on right now ove rat the Hak5 forums on the topic of americas “Cap and Trade” legislation.

http://hak5.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=13512

What are your thoughts on the US’s Cap and Trade plans?

Read this, then come back to read my comments on it:

http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2009/06/26/obamas-tax-increase-americans/

There are several problems I have with this article. Number one, it is not factual, but an OPINION of Mr. Ferrara’s. While he is entitled to his opinion, he is also known to write the opinions of others, whether they are his own or not, because they PAY HIM to write these things. He has admitted to taking money from convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff to write op-ed pieces favorable to Abramoff clients, so its not exactly like I can trust his opinion in the first place. Articles like this are often called “Op-ed”, meaning opinionated articles opposite of the editorial in a news paper. Well, this sure is opinionated; I’ll give him that…

Being that it is published on the Fox News website is also another problem I have, in that nothing Fox News prints or discusses on TV has ever been supportive of Obama or Democratic policy in general.
If anything, this is more propaganda for the GOP than it is factual. Energy prices will rise whether Obama passes this bill or not, and all while killing the environment and us as the same time. If we continue to pollute the air, land and water, what will become of us, regardless of whether or not you believe in global warming?

Why not invest in something better? Sure, it may cost more at first, but once we find a way to produce cleaner, safer, affordable and easily mass produced energy, the world will be better for it in the long run. I would much rather pay a bit more for cleaner energy now so that the environmental effects are a positive one for my children and their children, versus continuing to pollute the air, land and sea with the current technology in place, all while the prices still continue to rise anyway.

Do people think that gas prices will get cheaper? It will only cost us more in the long run, both in money and in damage to our earth, so if we are going to have to pay more anyway, then make that energy clean burning, efficient and nature conserving for our future and our children’s future. Generations to come will benefit from the sacrifice to find these new alternatives, but if we can’t make that change now, it will be future generations who pay the price for our mistakes and lack of change.

I finally got around to updating the main site: http://www.twistedpairrecords.com/

I am a procrastinator when it comes to my own work. I’m like that guy who runs his own landscape business, who has all the big accounts and does great work, but his own yard looks like a trash dump. Yeah, that is pretty much me. I get a little OCD when it comes to doing design work for other people, but when it comes to my own site, I tend to be lazy. I guess it has something to do with the fact that no one pays me to do my own site, nor is anyone telling me what they want done or how to make it look. Its a lot easier when you have someone giving you ideas and telling you “I need it to look like this…”

Well, the latest incarnation is up and I am quite happy with it so far. It encompasses our original idea of a twisted DNA helix, alacart of the T-Virus from Resident Evil, with a little touch up by myself. The theme is Twisted Pair, so there are two, or a pair of columns on either side of the page which contain all the info for the site. I tried to go against having separate pages for each section, like a traditional site, since this was meant to be a bit twisted and keep the theme of a “pair” throughout, I ended up with this latest theme.

- DigiP

This is why the RIAA lawsuits are such rubbish in the first place.

http://www.electronista.com/articles/09/06/24/riaa.forced.settle/

Now that singer Michael Jackson is dead, I think the world should start pirating his music ten fold. I still have like 5 or 6 albums of his on original Vinyl, but I think the world of people who never had the chance to see or hear him need that chance now, and the internet is that one place that can bring all those people together. I think in part, the man might still be alive had they not booked him for the 50 show tour they placed on his shoulders, when he only agreed to do 10 to begin with, I guess the pressure to get in shape and be an entertainer took its toll on him. He was reportedly so thin, he weighed less than he did during his infamous child molestation trial. The tragedy of the industry is that they directly or indirectly had a role in his death as far as I am concerned, and his desire to please his fans was too much for him to say no, when he should have just taken the time to leave the pop scene and get healthy.

Youtube has disabled the embedding of these videos, but thats ok, you can still go to youtube to watch them…

Don’t stop till you get enough…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_hz2am90Hk&feature=channel

Rock with you…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7hK3Y1Ehv9c&feature=channel

Scream…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vNl2Pm9-7Vk&feature=channel

R.I.P. – the King of Pop is dead…

Both dead today….two icons from their respective entertainment backgrounds are gone today. Farrah lost her battle with cancer, Michael, apparently suffered a heart attack and was not able to be revived.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neda_Soltani

Nuff said…

Well, I decided that it was time to create a new site. One strictly dedicated to my side work, doing web and graphic design. I had been using my blog’s info page as a sort of resume of sites I have worked on, but with all the work I have been doing lately, it only makes sense to give it a site of its own. So, Designs by DigiP is born. You can check out the new site here It is still in the early phases of design, but I wanted to get some information up right away so people can contact me for future work. I threw this together in like 1 hour, so its not that great at the moment, but it will have to do for now. I have class and work tonight, so I will work on this a bit later when I can find the spare time between family, work, school and side work doing other web sites for people.

Friday was my birthday, and today is fathers day. Friday was also our 5 year wedding anniversary. We were married on my birthday, right here at our home.

I got the triple wammy this year, since I get to celebrate all of them so close together.

Quinn is now 3 1/2 and Audrey is nearing her first year at 10 months old. It seems like the kids want to run the show around here, getting loud and keeping us up all hours fo the night, but there is only one head of the house around these parts, and I wear the pants, shorts, and pajamas! Kids, GO TO SLEEP!

Such a great song, it still holds up with todays music.

On a side note, I finished up some great achievements. I was working on some sites for clients, and figured out some things I had no idea how to do. I also have been looking at so much code lately, that my eyeballs bleed javascript slide shows. Problem with all these jquery plugins is that 1, most of them use jquery. Well you say, isn’t that the point, but I tell you, no, you should not use these built in plugins directly. They are guidlines on how to get things done. 2, they use mootools and other such image tricks, scaling scripts that don’t show all of the images, etc.

I ended up writing my own little script from scratch. I had to google for some help with the structure of the elements, but other than that I was able to do everything I needed to do except get the images to fade in from one to the next. I ended up using some sample code and modified to my liking, and now have them working properly. The images fade in, from one to the next, and resize when the page resizes. One thing I had to be sure to do though was declare the doctype as html 4.01 instead of xhtml. I often use xhtml in my design work for which is a more proper way of handling everything these days, but it was breaking the scripts and giving errors from embedding code into the body tag. Changing the doctype fixed the problem. This was a nice discovery, as I had problems with other peoples code in the past and couldn’t figure out why it wouldn’t work propery, and it was because the author failed to spcify the need to use a specific doctype for the page the scripts were used in. Some of the time these scripts give errors when used with XHTML Strict doctypes due to the aprsing involved in XHTML. I never really gave much attention to this in the past, as I was using standard templates I saved for my pages, inseting code and then using w3c to validate everything. I couldn’t do that this time becasue I had to get things working before I could even attempt to validate anything.

Anyway, happy fathers day to all you people out there. I’m going to try and take a nap now before I have to go into work tonight…

I was looking for some cool jquery stuff to play with and I came across http://stackoverflow.com/. Its a site where people can ask programming questions and get help with code. Sort of like a yahoo or google answers, only geared towards programming. Its also free and requires no registration to use the site, which is a nice touch.