Today’s my birthday

Originally uploaded by mollygolightly

ZOMD! Molly posted a sugary sweet photo from her bithday when she was 9. That’s my wife! Happy Birthday honey!

Molly and I are going to visit my folks in New Hampshire. Here’s the forecast…. Paws crossed it’s wrong.

My good friend Ryan Junell teamed up with Double Triple again to make another beautiful animation for a music video.

This time it’s for The Octopus Projects‘ song An Evening with Rthrtha, which is as lush and full a song as it’s name is difficult to pronounce.

Click thru to see the video full size, or watch a smaller version here:

If you haven’t seen the animation Ryan and Double Triple made for the band Spoon, you’ll definitely enjoy watching it.

The Germs are the late 70’s LA punk band that influenced everyone you liked in the 80s from LA and were as demented and genius as the Sex Pistols. I can’t wait to see the movie What We Do Is Secret which has practically been as punk a production as the band itself.

Here’s something to get you started from the definitive punk documentary from the era, The Decline of Western Civilization

Here’s a live song with kooky local news intro

Here’s Forming (audio only) from their one studio album (produced by Joan Jett)

This sums up pretty well the eyes wide shut attitude going on right now by people not really trying to make a calculated decision about who to vote for U.S. President

[Cartoon by Nick Anderson, Houston Chronicle]

Six months ago a woman’s cat (Mr. D.) went missing in New Zealand. The owner did not stop looking for him, up to and including standing in a rented Puss-n-Boots costume at a business intersection with big photos of Mr. D.!

It sounds a pretty kooky, but once you listen to her being interviewed you’ll hear a very rational, thoughtful and saddened person simply trying to get a loved one back home. The owner was very sure (correctly so as it turns out) that the cat had simply gotten lost and may now been getting fed by someone, or even re-homed by a loving family. (This is New Zealand afterall, where nothing like Pogo’s murder happens.

Watch the video (click through if you don’t see it). It’s been the most watched video on Catster for the last couple of months.

6 months after the separation, the owner got a call from someone who said they saw Mr. D. in their neighborhood. Walking around the owner came across her cat! But being so thoughtful she even knocked on doors in the area in case anyone has taken the cat in and would be upset if he disappeared. If you’re on Catster you can stop in and say welcome back to Mr. D.

This summer is starting to have a feel of one of those “Son of Sam” simmers to them. Hard times, people losing homes, means people lose their marriages and families, and worst of all, start losing their hope that life will get better. I’m entirely speculating here, but these two stories show people who simply do not care about living amongst society anymore and, in fact, want to ruin society with them on their downfall.

Grim.

1. Man Decapitated ‘Beheaded’ Aboard Greyhound Bus - Canada

“We put our bodies up against the door, waiting for him to come out … and he went back and brought the head to the front and pretty much displayed it … and dropped it on the ground in front of us,” Caton said.

Friends identify the victim as a 22-year-old carnival worker named Tim McLean, though authorities won’t confirm his identity.

2. Man kills teens at Wisconsin swimming hole: police

A man described by witnesses as wearing camouflage clothes and carrying a rifle emerged from a wooded area along the Menominee River on Thursday and opened fire on a group of young people near the swimming spot under a railroad bridge.

…. Be safe out there people

Tom Sepa, who has a job, car, laptop, headset and prefers the term urban outdoorsman regularly sleeps in Golden Gate park because he can’t afford an apartment.

He makes $2k to $3k and month yet he and his wife can’t make $F rents. He washes up in Starbucks bathroom after he buys a coffee.

It is also worth noting that Sepa couldn’t have done this five years ago. With his Wi-Fi card, cell phone, and PayPal account, he can conduct business, collect a paycheck and apply for his next job from a laptop in a tent in the park.

“This is the most liberating thing of the Internet,” he said. “The birdcage is open.”

Perhaps his only concession to the traditional world is a postal box he keeps downtown. What, I asked, does he use that for?

“My Netflix movies,” Sepa said.

Also of note in the article is a 1999 stat that 20% of people sleeping in SF shelters are employed.

Since 2004 American households have been putting away less than $400 a year in savings. That’s almost identical to the saving registered during the depression. How can such a rich country have so little to save? (That’s a rhetorical one. Okay? ‘Kay.)

The NYTimes has done yet another no-holds-barred data analysis of how indebted our country is and rightfully places most of the blame on changes in the banking, lending and leasing policies that turned payment facilitation methods meant to make consumer purchasing more fluid into pure profit centers.

“Today the focus for lenders is not so much on consumer loans being repaid, but on the loan as a perpetual earning asset,” said Julie L. Williams, chief counsel of the Comptroller of the Currency, in a March 2005 speech that received little notice at the time.

Today, 40% of all U.S. households carry a credit card balance (up from 6% in 1970) and the average family has 13(!) credit cards. Two thirds of college students now have assumed loan debts, up from 50% of students in the ’90s. (Don’t even get me started on how good loan rates were subverted by the student loan scandal which finally broke this spring.)

For more painfully obvious indicators of the depth of this national problem don’t miss the Times interactive 90 year time line.

While every person is their own rock and needs to make smart decisions based upon their own abilities, the free market ‘uber alles’ mentality of the last 30 years has allowed for profit motive to drive the heavy marketing of products that even the presiding CEO would never recommend their friends or family avail themselves of. Though free markets always correct themselves eventually, there’s far to many well meaning citizens getting run through the mill by the marketing and sales departments of the too-be-corrected businesses on the wrong side of the markets.

[All photo, images, quotes and facts liberally taken from the NYTimes]

Keith Dsouza has made a superb Wordpress plugin that ‘automatically’ upgrades your Wordpress blog software when they’ve released an update. Wordpress is constantly enhancing their product, and due to it’s global popularity they are forced to constantly enhance the security of the code base, both of which mean they update the code base 4-8 times a year.

I’ve been trying to use Keith’s Wordpress Automatic Upgrade (WPAU) plugin and had some deployment issues I had to work out I thought I’d share.

1. If you download the .zips of your backup to your home computer, both Apple and Win, very reasonably, do not display files that begin with a period. While I’m normally cognizant of this, for a couple tests I thought the backup downloads were empty because Dreamhosts, my web host, uses a common file structure that has a .name pattern for the root. And you gotta make sure your backups are what you expect them to be so make sure you view those files before proceeding with the upgrade.

   I’ve now added the following two aliases to my .bash_profile so I can easily toggle between the display of .files and hiding them so I can quickly and confidently save off these backups.

   alias showdot=’ defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles TRUE; killall Finder’

   alias nodot=’ defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles FALSE; killall Finder’
   

2. WPAU does not (I believe) include your webroot’s .htaccess file in it’s backup. If you’ve never touched or edited a .htaccess file then you don’t need to worry about it. But I found plenty of reasons tweak them for my wordpress blogs and each WordPress update always overwrites them. *Very annoying* and to my chagrin WPAU does not include the .htaccess in the backup. So for now I back it off manually before I begin the backup process.
3. Don’t forget to go back and complete the last WPAU update steps even after you’ve been directed to open a new window and confirm the blog has been updated. If you don’t finish the steps, you’ll need to manually re-activate your plugins as they will still be deactivated.