stevengharms.com

I always liked Bruno Kirby, for me he will always be the young Clemenza from the Godfather series.

And what can you say about that great moustache? It was trimmed to look like the ideal Italian-American paisan barbershop quartet singer, or perhaps a guy named Gino who ran the deli around the corner, or perhaps the guy in the suit on the subway who was an espresso conniseur and expert in science ( I’m thinking along the Marconi or Fermi model here ).

He never really seemed to be able to break out of the Italian-American character acter mold: for better or worse (look at his IMDB listing, not many character last names end in a consonant).

Hearing abouth the death of character actors makes me a little bit sadder than other rarified celebrities, it seems they still dream more real dreams than people who have celebrity poured upon them.

Reddit has netted myself ( and the now hopelessly addicted Social Bobcat ) a real gem: The Ward Nerd.

“Gary Brecher” ( possibly a nom d’écrivain de guerre ) writes for exile.ru and has given non-military people a historical and geopolitical context in which to understand modern warfare. Gary’s text is bleak: tribal warfare makes sense, dying for nation-states is absurd; Hezbollah won, the war in Iraq will be quickly won, but occupation will see total loss.

In modern conflicts, where I’ve been more attentive of late, Gary is like a scalpel, cutting through the media spin and good feelings and photo ops with some goofball in a bomber jacket on an aircraft carrier saying it’s over. I’ve really enjoyed his writing on the topics related to African warfare through the 90’s. Many like to think that the 90s were pretty quiet times, no one flying planes into Manhattan and all, but, in reality, during years many violent people were building up their skills to do horrendously violent things. Furthermore inter-tribal warfare in Africa took no hiatus during the construction of the new economy; genocidal madmen pushed neighobring tribespeople into total extinction with the help of malarial swamps.

Brecher writes like a modern-day Machiavelli, a Spartan strategiest in an Athenian daydream. He chides those without ruthlessness to realize that war is hell, and hell is complete and total annihilation.

On politicians in Washington:

They want to make money or they want to push their own weird religious agendas, or both — usually both. But none of them really like America.

On Republicans:

The Republicans aren’t nationalists. They’re moneyists, as in they only care about money — oil money, mostly. And money is boring. War — fun. Money — boring. It’s time somebody said it out loud: “Fuck Free Enterprise, I just want America to kick ass!”

PJ O’Rourke could only dream of letting loose like that.

The president:

The name of the town where North Korea tests its missiles says it all about our reaction: “No-Dong.” That’s what US Presidents have been showing for almost 40 years, every time North Korea slaps us in the face: no dong whatsoever.

Caddyshack as metaphor:

And it has, folks. That’s why this is such a huge, huge war. No matter what the waterheads on CNN try to tell you, the IDF lost totally, and every force configured like it — such as, oh, the US Army or Air Force — lost too. The Gophers are beating the shit out of the gardeners on this course. The gophers just kicked the shit out of Tiger Woods.

It’s hard to say who gains in the long run. Short term, sure, Hezbollah wins big. But in the long run, maybe what’s happened is that the day when genocide replaces the farce called “CI Warfare” just got a lot closer.

You might disagree, but you will certainly ask yourself if you’re scared or complacent after reading a few.

My, my, my, Maja Ivarsson of The Sounds you’ve picked one hell of a song to show the world that nasty-attituded Swedish punk-ettes can weild the power of feathered hair and Cheryl Tiegs shorts with cunning menace.

Check out the video for “Snakes on a Plane (Bring It)” at your preferred video hosting site.

Well, for those of you who have been following my re-association with a friend that was lost to the great post-graduate scattering, you’ll all be releived to know that we did manage to catch up at Mother Egan’s (a place where my Bay area friend Jeff simply must come) bar and pub on 6th street last night. Little did we know it also happened to be trivia night at the establishment. Being that we ( as a table ) are a competitive bunch of polymaths, we were soon embroiled in a heated battle.

It was definitely good to see Mr. Al and to meet his lovely fiancée. Interestingly enough, a found a lost blogger as well. The authoress of OsakaToMeBaby was at my very table. It just so happened that Al and I were tracing our e-connection via the brothers Steans via the now-absent-from-the-blogosphere (or is he secretly penning somewhere else? Let the conspiracy theory begin), James Dedman. Upon hearing this, the authoress noted that she, too, was tied to our network as she was the authoress, as I said above, of Osakatomebaby.

Now this was one of my most favorite blogs linked off of Jim’s site: it was funny, had good layout and the musings of any American on Japan / Japanese-ness / Fish-out-of-water-ness are inherently interesting. So I had to ask, what happened, why did you stop writing, suddenly, quickly, permanently? Well it turns out that the turning of the wheel of life in Osaka had her move (which interrupted the flow of internet access to the home) and she met a strapping Aussie lad to whom she was now wed (and across from whom she was seated).

Now our gaming continued until the final round when none other than Mayor Will Wynn popped in to deliver the last round of questions. Now how cool is that? Besides getting to work in the very cool city hall on Town Lake, Will takes time to mingle with the common folk down at the Irish bar.

In the end we tied for 4th, another night perhaps.

As you may have noticed from my rotating Flickr badge, there is a smokey gray sport-utility popping up and moving about.

Yes, folks, I have purchased a Nissan Xterra from the friendly folks at [Town North Nissan]. It’s an “S” model with 4x4. I’m hoping that we can use it this winter to go snowboarding in Colorado.

Now some of you will be noting that it wasn’t all that long ago that I was posting pictures of my recently purchased BMW. You might be thinking that I have a Scrooge McDuck like vault somewhere. No, that’s not the case at all. The bimmer was fun and fine in the Bay. I couldn’t have a house, I didn’t go much of anywhere, I didn’t do much of anything extravagant. Was that my fault? Was it the place? I think that the two were certainly both part to blame. Here in Austin, I’d rather load up a car and head out to the countryside, or take the car up to Colorado, etc. The sports sedan just wasn’t the right match for my current lifestyle. So, it’s time to put that sort of thing away ( for a while ).

After picking up the car and riding off, we headed on down to South Congress to go look about a bit.

After parking we first headed to Allen’s Boots, the exterior of which forms the white stone background seen in the picture below. It’s a really great western wear store, it smells like leather and cotton, which I suppose is the requisite smell for a place such as that.

After that we mostly ambled up the West side of the street and then back down. We were really impressed with the beautiful landscaping and architecture used at the Hotel San Jose. They use a very Californian Zen-garden style.

We sat at the San Jose for a bit drinking rosé and lounging by the small pool. After a while, though, we grew a bit warm so we decided to dip our heels into the pool. We sat in the dimly candle-lit poolside area, sipping our drinks as the playlist went through some of the finer songs of T.Rex’s “Slider” and a collection of Serge Gainsbourg.

After our visit to the San Jose we headed back home.

Sunday morning we woke up and went to go grab brunch at the Upper Crust bakery, but upon arriving we found out that they had sold out of the batch of quiches and the pickings were otherwise slim. We headed down to the Lamar location of Austin Java and had excellent breakfast ( steak and egg! ) quesadillas and breakfast tacos.

The rest of Sunday was spent getting ready for the week and making some progress in my understanding of JavaScript ( see previous entries ).

No, not the movie of the same title.

On second thought, bring me his attention this a-ways.

I have mailed him from my GMail account, my domain based email account, and now I’m making a banner post at the top of my blog.

As I told him in my mail:

Alfredo, ‘twas last night while i was lounging hollywood style at the hotel san jose that the musicologist delivered serge gainsbourg followed by choice cuts off of T. Rex’s slider, surely you shoulda been there. Give a fellow a mail when you can.

Steven

I’m suspecting that either there is an overactive spam filter involved

OR

the poor guy’s gotten busy.

One of the main things that really blows programmers’ minds when they really see the power of it is a topic called ‘closures’ or ‘lambda functions’ or ‘anonymous subroutines’.

I decided to edit the previous post’s code to use closures, to get the hang of this technique in JavaScript. It makes your code a lot more flexible as I think the simple example below demonstrates.

For the code, look after the jump…

(more…)

If you’re not in the programming field, you likely got hit by a bunch of acronyms there as if you had been hit by a bus. Let me break it down:

• AJAX : A technique that makes websites look fast and smooth, unlike “old” style application. Think about the way Google maps looks, or Netflix.
• DOM: HTML (the language that web pages are written in) can be seen as a “tree-like” structure. This structure goes by the name of “DOM”, or “Document Object Model”
• Javascript: A language for telling your browser ( Firefox, IE, etc. ), to do something to the HTML page sent from the server within your browser. Thus what’s on the server and sent to everyone else doesn’t change, just your particular ‘view’ in *your browser

So, anyway, if you want to write in the AJAX mindset, you need to understand the latter two ideas rather well. The last time I really looked at Javascript was for one of my senior-year classes (way) back in 2000. Javascript has come a long way (baby) and with the advent of the AJAX technique, it’s really the only game in town.

I wrote a very simple script to help me get the hang of the language, so for you, here it is.

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN">

<html lang="en">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
<title>untitled</title>
<meta name="generator" content="TextMate http://macromates.com/">
<meta name="author" content="Steven Harms">
<!-- Date: 2006-08-19 -->
<script type="text/javascript" charset="utf-8">
    function configurePage(doTextChange){
        // doTextChange is a variable passed as a YES or NO argument that
        // is used to decide if the default text 'Moopy Hobo' is changed to
        // something else

        //Get the HTML <body> tag reference
        var htmlParent = document.getElementsByTagName('Body')[0];

        //Create a <p> tag element
        var childEl = document.createElement('p');

        // This is something subtle, you need to create a text node and bond
        // that to the <p> element.  In the DOM inspector, this shows
        // up as 'nodeName' = #text
        var tf = document.createTextNode("Moopy hobo");

        // Bond the text to the <p> element
        childEl.appendChild(tf);

        // Handle the argument
        if ( doTextChange == 'YES' ){
            childEl.firstChild.nodeValue="Monsier Hobo"
        }

        // This is for getting familiar with using the DOM to manipulate
        // text elments

        //Changing the style at the line level...
        childEl.style.width="200px";
        childEl.style.fontFamily="garamond; helvetica";

        //Changing the style at the line level, but with CSS
        childEl.className='graybackground';

        //add some other JavaScript events
        childEl.addEventListener('mouseover',changebk,false);
        childEl.addEventListener('mouseout',dazzle,false);

        //Finally, put this loaded up <p> tag onto the page by appending
        //it to the <html><body> node
        htmlParent.appendChild(childEl);

    }

    // A function for callbacks, the alert() is pretty annoying when
    // testing so I've commented it out, but enabling it makes things
    // a bit more obvious
    function dazzle(){
        //alert('you are dazzled');
        this.className='graybackground'
    }

    //Nifty!
    function changebk(){
        this.className='redbackground'
    }
</script>

<style type="text/css" media="screen">
    .graybackground{
        background-color: #BBB;
    }
    .redbackground{
        background-color: red;
    }
</style>

</head>
<body onload="configurePage('YES')">
<!-- Look Ma, no content! -->
</body>
</html>

This headline at MSNBC grabbed my interest.

Who’s to blame for your waistline? An in-depth report on Dateline NBC, August 18, 8 p.m.

You must be joking? Way to pander to the couch-potato demographic.

are we overweight because we are not trying hard enough, or are we overweight because somehow the food and marketing industries have eroded our ability to just say no?

I can’t wait to see this one work. I imagine the world in which the answer is not the individual shoving the calorie-laden sugary stuff into his maw, but the corporation that provides it.

“I’m sorry officer, I didn’t mean to drink and drive, but those irrizzzizztible beats from Lil’ John celebrating the crunk lifestyle have rendered me incapable of not opening my pie-hole and pouring high-octane rum down it.”

“I’m sorry, but while listening to Dre’s ‘The Chronic’ I am uncontrollably driven to burn fat trees like it was wildfire season in SoCal, yo.”

Gaggh!

Yesterday was my birthday. I started it out with the exciting tradition of going to work. Work was a bit more exciting than usual as my company’s stock had a very good performing day. Thank you Wall Street for my first present of the day.

After work I headed off to YogaYoga Northwest and took a class with Selena. It turns out that I had overheard her say to another yogi at YogaYoga south that a certain gentleman was her chiropractor. I asked that certain gentleman for his card and now he is my chiropractor as well, and a very deft one he is! So, Selena had actually given me my second present.

Upon returning home I trudged up the stairs to my apartment when i noticed under my hand there was beautiful blue crêpe paper under my hand. My sweet baby had wrapped our handrail in festive streamers. Upon arriving at my door there were big, happy blue and orange balloons taped to the door. I walked in and found a note taped to the door which said “I love you because….”. As i entered into the house I found more and more of these notes which recounted special qualities my sweet girl likes in me ( imagine that! ).

Upon entring I found a tasty chocolate cake, a present, a card, and, of course, my sweet girl. She wished me happy birthday and bade me sit for presents time. I read her very sweet card and then opened my present: a lovely painting she had done of us! As you can see via my flickr, she has quite the artistic gift.

Thereafter we headed to Ristorante Andiamo in North Austin where we had a great dinner of escargots, salad, soup, tortellini, linguine frutti de mare, and cappuccino. We returned home for a slice of cake with Blue Bell vanilla ice cream.

It was a tasty and delightful day. So, off we go on my 29th loop around the sun.