Tannishblog

…or “What I’ve Been Doing Lately Instead of Playing Computer Games.”

Blog themes never seem to hit the right spot. A consummate geek must modify. Blogger made the tweaking relatively simple, so I was able to create a new masthead in Paint Shop Pro (Photoshop is too pricey), and modify the blog’s colors accordingly. Playing with the structure was off limits, lest the aspiring geek noob break their site.

It wasn’t enough. Partly that longing to get “under the hood” led me to switch to Wordpress last June. The price was right too. Gotta love the free software groupies. My first peek seemed daunting, so I altered a couple color settings and left the template alone. All Wordpress templates are of high quality, so I was happy - for a while.

Working with the same site presentation over time gets weary on the eyes, and incessant curiosity and an attenuated slow season at work compelled me to dive into the CSS sites and read the Wordpress Codex (a lot of it, anyway.) Production themes, as they are called, involved a healthy dose of CSS, a smattering of PHP, a refreshening of my web standards knowledge, Paint Shop Pro skills, and installations of MySQL and Apache web server. Color schemes were limited because I felt obliged to use tan as a base - something about the name…

Ten weeks later I emerge wondering where all the snow went, proud of my finished fourth-attempt of a blog template (the other three will be done soon.) At least I think it’s finished… as much as anything like this can ever be complete.

I hope you like it. Feel free to comment.

The Democrats have already screwed up. Their seats aren’t even warmed yet and they stuff $21 billion of pork barrel spending into the Emergency Supplemental Appropriations Bill for FY2007.  So much for integrity. The NY Times provides a PDF partial list of all "the other white meat" that Democratic congresspersons chose as payment for their votes. Porkbusters.org and Council for Citizens Against Public Waste are almost apoplectic. Who can blame them?

I would remind all the new Congressionals that much of the whining that got them their new chairs was about indiscriminate spending by congress. D’OH!

Our government hasn’t come to grip with the Internet yet. They haven’t understood the new era of transparency we’re heading into. Clinging to old-school methodology, our leaders still live in a world where the inner workings of the Hallowed Halls are mystical, where secrets are commonplace. Similarly, the quid pro quo chumminess governments have with major media outlets are circumvented. Instant access to information by the unwashed masses destroys these dynamics. This is, to my way of thinking, A Good Thing.

Tyranny breeds of secrecy, as does oppression, theft, warfare, and corruption. These common diseases of governments can be treated, if not cured, through unhindered sharing information. It is through the formation of a world in which no one can hide that may save humanity from itself.

Yet large beasts such as the American Political Animal are difficult to turn once the stampeding begins, and so in the fervor of power wresting, our Democratic majority has shown their anachronistic thinking, and their old bad habits. Akin to a pot  smoker in remission, this vote selling is a tough habit to mask, and the Internet is a glass wall the addict is crouching behind ineffectively.

So clean up your act, servants of the public, your actions are plainly visible, your tracks impossible to cover. Welcome to a new world order of accountability and transparency, a world, I note, that you have paid for. Selling votes for unimportant pet projects in this time of war and astronomical deficits - after a bitter campaign of demanding accountability -  is, well, to quote a certain American cultural icon: "it’s DesthPICable!"