Things that go Wump in the Night..

I don’t post much in the way of politics on this blog, but I’m infuriated at the idiocy of “the system” here in the US.

I’m taking a break from reading the new Ron Paul book to post this, and it’s just incredible the difference between his positions and those of the current nominees.

I have to say now what I said back in 2004.. What are the democratic party thinking???

Put it this way. We have a country thoroughly dissatisfied with the Republican party, and what are the Dems putting up in response?

Either someone who a lot of people won’t vote for because she’s a woman, or someone that a lot of people won’t vote for because he’s black.

Go figure.

This is a NUMBERS game. The re-election of Bush in 2004 showed that. The majority of US voters don’t make educated voting decisions, and the media make no attempt to educate them about meaningful issues.

The person who wins a US election is the person that attracts the most sheep. The person who on face value ( because it doesn’t go deeper than that ) that the majority of the voting pool sees as somewhat like them. The person whose BS and rhetoric gels with the BS and rhetoric of the average uninformed citizen.

Sorry - that’s not a black guy, or a woman. It’s a old white guy whose sound bites carry sufficient charm to gloss over the fact that he hasn’t the slightest idea about global economics, and thinks that war is really cool.

It’s the old white guy who ticks all the boxes:

• Goes to church ( even though he’s endorsed by an Evangelical nutter )
• Is a war hero who suffered torture (even though he thinks that torturous sanctions against foreign nations is a pretty cool thing )
• Is white
• Seems like he knows what he is talking about ( which is ludicrous )
• Has an ‘I’m just like you’ air ( and he is if your wife is worth $100,000,000 and your friends are all Washington lobbyists )

Bottom line, I said it in 2004, and I’ll probably say it again, this country that I’ve chosen to live in is great - but I’m tired of dumbass people voting for dumb ass presidents who make dumbass decisions that are not reigned in by a bunch of dumbass congressmen that are more concerned about scoring points that looking after the interests the the people they are supposed to be protecting.

So, Mr and Mrs Average American. This is what you want?

Well if you find yourself unable to put gas in your car, to go buy a $6 loaf of bread because there’s no food in the house you are now renting from your bank, here’s the good news.. Voting for the black guy, or the white woman really wouldn’t have made that much difference anyway.

Although I’ve chosen to live here, and will continue to do so for the next few years, it’s a great relief that I have the choice to leave. I can take my family, get on a plane and live anywhere I want in Europe on either of my European passports.

It’s just a great concern to me the number of people who at that point will be sitting around in the US wondering what went wrong, and trying to work out who they can blame for it.

Yeah, me too. This blog is typo, but to be honest, I’m not a big fan.

Here’s the problem.. I don’t really want a “rails application” at all - what I want is to be able to add blog features to my current applications.

With the need for mongrels et all, what I really think we need is either:

1) An application that you can point multiple domains to, e.g. blog.domain1.com, blog.domain2.com etc. that can be a single install / application with a single environment that is multi-purpose.

2) A blog plugin, that works off a single controller for admin, and a single controller for view that can be thrown into any rails application.

I’ve been working on 2, and it’s turning out pretty well, but at this point it’s too application specific to throw out to the open source community. The focus is on simple simple simple and seo seo seo.

What started off as a standalone project, has now been integrated into Billabill here.

Features include:

• SEO: Independent control of stub, title, H1 and tags
• SEO: Blog title displayed as H1 or H2 depending on context
• SEO: Blog summary used as full article teaser reused as meta description
• Full page caching with a very simple cache clearing mechanism
• Routing setup so that categories become root directory for posting
• Category stored with a post - no separate table. There’s really no need

It can do more than you can see at Billabill, but I’m not using everything, e.g. the ability for any post to be tagged as a header, footer or sidebar menu item.. Again, features on the front without any extra complexity.

What it would need to be great though is:

• Simple THREADED comments with subscription.. why are blog comments linear!
• RSS - 10 minute job, but I haven’t done it yet
• A parsing engine to allow you to easily include links to other internal pages
• A parsing engine to include flickr content etc.

Anyhoo. If I get a chance I’ll try to bundle this up and turn it into a plugin because I really think that is the answer.. just like you can add a WordPress blog to any php site, you should be able to add a rails blog alongside any rails app.

Is this for real? I’ve seen some dumb advertising in my time, but man, if RadioShack marketing department think that every mothers desire is a 1gig Flash Memory card RadioShack have some firing to do.

This follows Twitter sending out an email suggesting that people tweet their moms for Mothers Day? WHAT??? My mom would fly to the US and beat me over the head with something if that was my idea of a Mothers Day salute ( although having said that, it’s not mothers day in Ireland, and I always miss it when it is, so maybe a tweet would be better than nothing ).

Seriously though advertisers. If you think my mom wants a text string or a flash card as a sign of my eternal thanks to her then we you’re dumb as a post.

Here are some other suggestions for mothers day:

• A six pack
• A DIY oil change kit
• Beavis and Butthead DVD set
• A buy one get one free card for the Bunny Ranch