Wake Up America

I love my country just as much as any other patriotic American. The American spirit is that like no other – a spirit of innovation, power, and independence. Many great things have come from great minds of Americans. The land is both as diverse and as beautiful as the people and cultures that inhabit it. The history is colorful, rich, and exciting. And the freedom that our country stands for – there is no other like it. But we need to wake up. Wake up. Wake up and smell the reality. Search out and find the truth. Don’t believe everything that is said to you. Don’t just trust somebody because they seem trustful or have the same viewpoint or support your beliefs. Take what people say to you, take it in with some thought, and digest it. Actively choose to accept or reject a notion based on some basic logic or personal investigation. We Americans have become complacent of our ignorance to the truth, to how we relate to the world, and to how we are being manipulated. We have become susceptible to advertisements, big media, and dogmatic beliefs that affect our opinions on life, politics, and the world around us. We willingly accept our ignorance, choosing to accept without a second thought what we are being told – to follow what we feel is most comfortable, unable to do what is uncomfortable. We refuse to learn new skills for the fear of gaining new responsibility. We refuse to learn from the past, our own mistakes, and the mistakes of others. We have become lazy. We want everything done for us, in small digestible bits, now, and easy.

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New Photoblog

I’ve decided to do away with the old gallery idea and just go with a photoblog. I won’t post all my photos online, but I will still have them around. I will post to the gallery (http://www.systemanomaly.com/gallery2) any events I am part of and certain special projects (like the More Than The Camera project). The gallery will in no way look like the rest of the page, and I don’t intend on it. This is so I can separate the blog/website, photoblog, and gallery.

Check out the photoblog. I plan on updating it often with new photos and, until I go through them all, a mix of old photos. It’ll be mostly my favorites.

Along with the photoblog, I will also keep up with my Flickr photostream and upload any new photos from the photoblog to there, but usually a day or two after. The photostream will also contain images not on the photoblog that don’t fit there, but I don’t mind having on Flickr.

Space Geekin’

We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.

– JFK

Today is the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 – one of the greatest achievements of mankind in the field of space flight. To this day, we have not landed a human being on another rock in space.

The whole mission is being recreated and streamed in real-time at We Choose The Moon. Get on, follow the different stages of the mission, listen into a “live” broadcast of the radio com, look at videos and photo galleries on each stage, and relive 1969.

NPR ran a story on restoring the original video of Armstrong stepping on the moon. Three years of searching yielded a disappointing reality – the original tapes, which were of higher quality than anything broadcast, were erased by NASA during a shortage of magnetic recording material. NASA decided to take the best of the broadcast video from different networks and have it digitally restored for the public. These videos are on NPR (and I’m sure elsewhere on the net). It’s remarkable how much more detail was pulled from these low-quality videos.

We set sail on this new sea because there is new knowledge to be gained, and new rights to be won, and they must be won and used for the progress of all people.

– JFK

We need to return to the moon and go further. I’m both weary and exited for the future of space flight. Hopefully, as the years go by, the importance of space programs will be realized by politicians (specifically, the President) and we will be propelled back into a golden age of space flight. One day, we will go to Mars. It won’t be easy. But going to the moon wasn’t easy either (not to mention, they had only slide rules, pencils, pens, paper, and a very, very basic and slow computer to simulate landing – there is no excuse today with our modern computers).

New Look, Valid XHTML

I’ve been working furiously on two projects as of late. First off, My Life Is Pirate took the first step and now has a logo. I basically took a hand drawing and turned it vector. Sweet. Next, if you haven’t noticed, System Anomaly has a new look. I haven’t finished it fully (still got a little bit of sidebar work and the gallery still looks like the old site), but it’s about 90% complete. It was a ton of code work to get many of the small, but neat features working.

I retooled the Twitter integration in the site. The Javascript was, at best, not. It wasn’t valid XHTML 1.0 strict (which is what the site is now), nor was it API efficient (every page load hit Twitter’s API). The new code is PHP and works beautifully. If Twitter goes down, I don’t. It also caches my updates so that it doesn’t have to hit Twitter every time the page loads – just every 10 minutes (if the page is always being loaded every minute). There was a bit of custom and non-custom code involved, and I’ll cover it later in the post. My only issue with it is that sometimes the sidebar lags in its loading – it’s not Twitter, just the page itself.

If you take a look at the bottom of the page, I have a new footer. Looks pretty cool, hunh? What’s even cooler is that the footer is time sensitive. Depending on the time of day (based off CMT, not GMT), the footer will change from morning, day, evening, and night. City also lights up at the appropriate times. This was possible through some messy (as in, I had to work around WordPress) PHP. I’ll also cover it when I cover the Twitter stuff.

So, looking at the header, I’ve combined the header with a bunch of links – the title goes to home, and the rest go to their appropriate locations. No longer are the Archives part of the header – they are now listed out in the sidebar. I think this to be better.

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Integrals

Baby, Lets take the integral of e to the x to infinity.