The power of the individual: The American Enlightenment and Romanticism

April 25, 2007 by aaron
During the 18th century, scientific and social changes reshaped the concept of the self. The individual slowly separated from the collective and began to develop as an antithesis of the collective agrarian society of prior centuries; thus, giving rise to a wave of new philosophical thought that evolved into the popular movement of the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment developed around the belief that scientific thought and expression should be free from religious interference and that the foundations of society should be human reason and logic.
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Tag Management for WordPress 2.3

April 22, 2007 by aaron
Now that you have gotten used to WP 2.3 and had time to fiddle around with all those tags, you are probably finding that you need to edit, rename or delete tags. While I was going to write my own Plugins for this for a while, I found the perfect Plugins to do the work for me — and by perfect I mean really good, so I take no responsibility if they eat your dog.
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How to use the elusive comma

April 18, 2007 by aaron

The comma has the most uses of any single punctuation mark making it one of the hardest for people to use properly.

The Basics:

  1. They join sentences and ideas.
    • I am going on vacation for the summer, and I hope it doesn’t end up like last year.
    • If you are happy person, life seems much better.
    • However, it is best to just do it.
  2. They aid reading and offset less important information.
    • Members, welcome! — If this does not have the comma then literally it is a command to the members to welcome.
    • However, no matter what your excuse is, it doesn’t change the fact that you were late.
  3. They separate adjectives and list items.
    • I was attacked by a big, angry dog.
    • Tom, Fredrick, Negussie and Andy play football every day.
    • I am going to the grocer, butcher and florist.
  4. They format numbers, dates, titles, and places.
    • 39,552,923
    • I was born on August, 22 1967 in Columbus, Ohio.
    • James Pratt, M.D., won the Nobel prize in medicine.
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Cave of Crystals

April 16, 2007 by aaron
The giant crystals in the following slide-show were revealed when water was pumped out of a Mexican mine. The slide-show will explain everything else.

Fantoche Wall Animation

April 13, 2007 by aaron
This clip is of a wall animation: literally a stop-motion drawing on a wall. Artist Site.

Bash Script to Set Random XScreensaver as background

April 10, 2007 by aaron
This short bash script will randomly select a screensaver and display it in your background window, so you can have a random screensaver background instead of having to select a particular. Obviously you will need to have Xscreensaver installed for it to work. !/bin/bash files=(/usr/lib/xscreensaver/*) # Look for files in the XScreensaver folder n=${#files[@]} # For aesthetics "${files[RANDOM % n]}" -root & # Choose a random screensaver and execute it in the root window.