Identity Crisis

[Thanks to Lionel for introducing this one to me]
Written by Brad Meltzer, penciled by Rags Morales, inked by Michael Bair. ISBN-13: 978-1401204587.
Note: Amazon.com's "search inside" feature lets you read the first few pages.

"Anyone who puts a mask on paints a bulls-eye on their families backs."

The look on Clark's face breaks my heart.
We know Batman has no parents. Mom doesn't. 
 
A superhero is as vulnerable and fragile as those dearest to them.

The secret identities of super heroes is threatened: Someone knows all the secrets.  Someone is killing family members.  More than a murder mystery, it’s a view into the same world of costumed adventurers we all know, but there is something unique, and different, in this telling.  Meltzer surprises you with moments and nuances that fit these characters in ways you never dreamt.  This volume is unique.  You can’t think of the Justice League the same after this.  A complex adult telling of gripping story.

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A tasty brew for manly men

Back in November 2007, we got a tiny black cockapoo puppy, which we named Magee (pronounced Muh-gee). My life, along with my wife's, changed. An example: we were forcibly adjusted to higher tolerances of urine in our carpet. Whereas we had been accustomed to levels of 'none,' Magee demonstrated exactly how much more piss and shit there could be. The hallmark moment being when he snuck downstairs to perform what can only be described as The Shit Dance on our carpet. I did not witness it, but I can imagine no other way he distributed so many turds over such a large area than to have been practicing a waltz, while gettin' 'er done.

Over 15 separate turds littered our white carpet when I discovered Magee's latest performance art

Those first weeks were hell. We slept in shifts the first few days, that’s how bad his night-time whimpering was. I understand newborn humans causing groggy nights, but dogs should not mess with you in this manner. Magee took great pains to correct my misunderstanding. Despite having been rewarded multiple times for peeing on a training pad, our eight week old puppy once held his bladder for seven hours rather than pee on his papers. Finally soiled his crate instead. Our dog has a tiny tiny brain. (and we gave up on paper training for outdoor training) I have devoted more attention to my dog's bladder and bowels than I ever thought possible. Oh, the detailed scatological accounts I could give...

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Money

A tasty brew for manly men

Nobody needs to feel bad for my finances.  I've loved computers and programming from an early age, by a quirk of fate it pays well.  I wasn't much in debt, but the shiny smooth seductive plastic drew me into its orbit yet again.  I bought the first bottle of Tamdhu as an incentive for when I paid them off.

My credit-card balance finally returned to zero after a year long hiatus.  I'd accepted a new job and had good feelings about it. I paused for a moment and enjoyed where my career had taken me.  The horizons looked as beautiful as some peaks I'd just climbed.  Endless questions I'd faced about what to do next faded into blissful oblivion. Some questions would one day return, I enjoy change.  But for the moment I was back in that enjoyable mind-set: they're going to pay me to write code!  hotdamn!  I sipped Tamdhu in the newly painted purple room of the first house I owned and life was good.

My next memories of Tamdhu revolve around my friends Cliff and Vlad. Around the time Cliff and I had some long late night conversations, and around the time Vlad moved back to Edmonton.

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A tasty brew for manly men

Meet Betty (the Gas-Whore)

I unscrewed the bottle and took my first swig of the night. Betty the Gas-Whore, my brown camperized Van, was being towed away. I loved that Van. It was my faithful, completely unreliable 1978 Chevy power-to-the-max off-roading adventurous little go-machine. With fold-out bed, gas stove, electric cooler, sink, table, storage friendly it was wired for sound, beer and good times: Betty was leaving tonight for good. I’d promised to give it to Laura the Sailor, a Canadian I met on walkabout. She never returned my email though, so I didn't give it to her.

Taking a swig beside me is my gorgeous love bunny wife Janine. Straight from the bottle, just like me, she apparently doesn’t fuck around with the hard liquor. Her and I took Betty to Drumheller in freezing -20°C cold and visited Pony Canyon. The land sung to us a song of incredible beauty and fun. On our wedding my cousin presented us with a picture of Drumheller, unaware of the significance. The Universe conspired to send us a memento. Shortly we took it to wine country B.C., on our honeymoon. My wife shudders in the cold of our garage and passes the Tamdhu back to me. She hurries her hot ass back inside.

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The Tease

At some point, you'll have to write an application accepting command line arguments.  Typically a console application, but GUI apps can accept command lines too.  Its features and options will grow and you will become frustrated with .Net's default abilities.  You'll desire a robust parsing ability, and you'll wish to configure it easily, automatically and in an extensible way.  Welcome to today's topic

Big whup, eh?  But let's see how simple it was to create: just decorate a class' properties with attributes to describe the mapping.

public class ProgramHelloArguments
{
    public enum GreetingType
        { Standard, Friendly, Familiar }
    private int? _age;
    private string _email;

    [EnumArgument("say"), HelpText("Specify alternate greeting")]
    public GreetingType Greeting = GreetingType.Standard;

    [CommandLineArgument("name"), Required, Position(1)]
    public string Name;

    [SwitchArgument("kissAss")]
    public bool ComplimentUser;

    [CommandLineArgument("email"), Position(2)]
    public string Email
    {   get { return _email; }
        set
        {   _email = value;
            if (!String.IsNullOrEmpty(_email))
                _email = "mailto:" + _email;
        }
    }

    [ValidDirectoryArgument("homeDir")]
    public string HomeDir;

    [IntArgument("age"), HelpText("Optionally specify your age")]
    public int? Age
    {   get { return _age; }
        set
        {   if (value < 0)
                throw new ArgumentParseException("Age cannot be less than zero");
            _age = value;
        }
    }
}

Join me on a magic carpet ride into simplicity as I further describe some of the interesting highlights of how to use it, how it works. and how you can steal the code, make it your own and add the quirky bits unique to your situation.  The full Visual Studio 2005 project code is available.

Admit it, you can tell how its supposed to work just from reading the property declaration, right? Features worth mentioning listed below. (or let me draw you a picture [in a new window], if you prefer)

• Both fields and properties are supported.  As are booleans (Switch), enums and nullable types
• Re-usable validation (e.g. ValidDirectory, IntArgument), I'll show how easy it is to plug in your attributes for custom validation
• Ad-hoc validation in property setters (e.g. Age), or ad-hoc re-interpretation of arguments (e.g. Email)
• Required parameter validation
• Use Position to pass parameters with out specifying the token (e.g. "CommandLineParsing.exe James"), or use tokens to pass parameters in any order
• Use HelpText for auto-generating parameter help files (e.g. "-?")
• Decorate properties of any class.  Imagine your own hierarchy of parameter classes which could be re-used across many programs

Note: The code's a tad too verbose to dump full contents into this article.  I'll omit the boring shit and provide full code for download.  The full code is better commented, but within this article I'll reduce or omit inline comments for brevity and discuss in paragraph form.

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We Are Metallica. Relevance Is Not Our Problem. We have our own private island filled with a hand picked selection of fans who do not use the internet in any manner, only listen when they are told, feel towards our songs as we dictate, and are fed a high-protein soy-based supplement through their anus. This is all the fans we need. We have evolved to a self perpetuating oligarchy that no longer requires outside interaction.

If you haven't already discovered Ron Moore's commentary podcasts (rss feed) with behind-the-scenes DVD-like insights into the evolution and creation of the Galactica.  The commentary podcasts are highly recommended, my zombie friends.  I listen to them riding the bus sometimes.  Moore also recently gave an interview with Wired discussing the BSG's genesis in comparison the to original, he touched on his trek years and comparisons, a bit on new franchise entry, the new Caprica series.  Worth it.  Also just in: lowdown on Virtuality, his new series.

Looking for some people to hang out and chat with about Battlestar happenings? Why not check out The Galactica Watercooler?  His Jimboness approves!  Throw their podcast on over your breakfast background, or on the drive into work.  Their latest 100th podcast was a live, fun, celebration of their history.  Their viewer calls and lengthy discussions provide a lively spoiler-free forum for debate on what's going on in Galactica, what it all means.  They've got a lot of very good insights.  You might consider older entries too, like the first post-Razor dialogs.

U TUCH MY BABEEH!H!!!??
CUNTHEAD U GON DIE~~!

Baltar is right.  Roslin sucks.  She's off the deep end and Baltar, ex-president, one who spent time with Cylons, a center of a religion wonder: Gauis Baltar is speaking some truth.  Roslin's myopic vision of the future is remarkably un-democratic compared with where she started.  The forms of civilization they've held to so tightly are crumbling.  Ladies and gentlemen of the jury: she's changed. 

Adama once asked if they were worthy of survival. The measure of judgment was always how far they'd strayed from their original rules.  And how very far has Roslin strayed.  And if she turns out to be right, then how much will humanity have lowered itself?  What will the cost of salvation be?  If it comes.

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It's not much, but it's helped the look of my site.  By applying a custom field to a specific blog post like so:

Your content (regardless of index, archive, or single placement) then renders like so:

<div class="MyCssClass">Actual Blog Post Here</div>

This allows each post to have different (but common) CSS Styles.  Other plugins allow you to apply a custom stylesheet per-post, but my plugin is more useful when there are a few common styles you want to re-used.  All that's missing is uploading the following code to your wp-content/plugins directory:

<?php

/**
 Plugin Name: Legion's Div Content Plugin
 Version: 0.1
 Description: Wraps the the_content with a custom css class specified in the "legioncss" custom field
 Author: legion
 Author URI: http://FeelingsOfWhite.com
 */

add_filter('the_content', 'legiondiv_the_content');

function legiondiv_the_content($content) {
    global $post;  //required to access $post->ID
    $customCssClass = get_post_meta($post->ID, "legioncss", true);
    if ($customCssClass != "")
        $content = '<div class="' . $customCssClass . '">' . "$content</div>";
    return $content;
}

?>

As a n00b to WordPress, it's hackability has impressed me.  I'm amazed that this is all it takes to write a plugin.  There are plenty of fantastic resources available just by searching the web.

Hi, I'm Barbara Bush, and I approved this blogcast.

I haz nosebleeds?

By the time the scene was over, who did you have more sympathy for: Barolay or the RedShirt-Six? After a viscously quick beat down, we're subjected to a drawn out suspense wherein Galactica does it's best job since Gina at humanizing the death of one of those gods damn frakkin' skin jobs. As the NatalieSix talked to RedShirtSix, you realize just how truly horrible was her death on New Caprica. "We talked about this," said NatalieSix. Yah, talked about drowning in a sewage tank as laughing over her stood resistance fighter Baroley (not a red shirt). During rehab, simple citizen RedShirtSix probably even asked "why do they hate us?" What's she supposed to do, turn the other cheek?

Back aboard The Grand Poo-Barge, when Selix unexpectedly said of Athena "Hell ya, let the Cylon go," it highlighted that feelings of hatred still run deep. There's nothing Athena can ever do to prove her worthiness to the fleet at large. And why the frak shouldn't they be hated, the gods damn Cylons struck first, they melted loved ones in the million degrees temperature of a nuclear blast that still has Roslin's bunkmate CancerKira dying. What are they supposed to do, turn the other cheek?

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For RSS Readers: Congratulations, if you're seeing this, you're subscribed to the correct feed, you don't need to do anything, sit back and enjoy a nice refreshing beverage.

The new domain, FeelingsOfWhite.com, is up and running. There's still a lot of house cleaning to be done, but it's late and I'm tired because I went to see IronMan movie before this. Movie is good. Sleep is better. Updates to follow