My Errant Mind

If you haven’t come across it yet, you might want to check it out if you’re a book lover. GoodReads.com is a social networking site for the lover of literature, and if you’re wanting to find, well, good reads, you will find a lot of suggestions from others.

It is a nice concept really. People reviewing books and sharing thoughts on various topics and authors…and publishing information and the ability to order any books you come across are right at hand. Nifty.

You might even strike up some friendships. If so, you can add those newfound friends to your friends list, much like other social networks. It’s a nice niche social network for those who are tired of getting swamped with pointless widgets or “poked” on Facebook and thousands of irrelevant bulletins and invites to events in another reality on MySpace.

Check out GoodReads.com (which also has author bios and information). You might enjoy it!

[A very special thanks to CJ for introducing me to the site. ]

OK, today’s Song Of The Day is by the band who had the honor of being the band I chose to kick off this feature. All hell…err, hail, The Bastard Fairies.

I thought with my previous post about the soldier getting in trouble for shooting a copy of the Quran, it was appropriate. Enjoy We’re All Going To Hell by The Bastard Fairies!

Oklahoma National Guardsmen are having to work 10 hour shifts without food in Iraq according to allegations being made by some of those serving in Oklahoma’s 45th Infantry Division. They are being forced to skip meals and being starved it seems.

U.S. Rep. Mary Fallin and U.S. Rep. Tom Cole have asked the National Guard and the Army to investigate the matter. If this turns out to be true, this will be one of the most disturbing and disgusting issues to come out of this war.

Here we have defense contractors getting rich, oil companies getting rich, PMC’s getting rich…and yet they are withholding meals from American soldiers? I urge everyone to urge your elected representatives to look into this matter and call for an investigation. Make this an issue that the mainstream media must pay attention to!

Here our President is talking about the SPP in New Orleans and all the benefits we’ll get from partnering with Mexico and yet we’re starving our soldiers fighting our wars? What the hell is wrong with this picture? Some of my great uncles served with the Thunderbird Division in WWII, and as these are fellow Oklahomans suffering this stupidity, I take this personally.

The news that Gary Gygax passed away has had me reflecting on the past today. It made me quite sad to hear of his passing.

I and many, many friends over the years have played Dungeons & Dragons (mostly AD&D of course) and enjoyed it well into our adult lives. I started playing back in the 70’s as a kid—thanks to my older brother and his friends—when the first rule sets came out in small paper bound booklets, and continued playing with friends even when in the Army. I even played it with the kids of a friend I had played it with as a teenager—it was truly a transcendental game.

Any time you can get the oddballs, jocks, popular kids, siblings and soldiers, parents and children, guys and girls together and enjoying something in common, it is a good thing.

It was such a shame, hearing preachers and naysayers claiming it was about devil worship and akin to being hooked on crack and other ridiculous assertions. The world is full of people willing to suggest anything that doesn’t fit their perception of what is proper is bad and a possible detriment to society.

Dungeons & Dragons brought out the best in everyone I knew who played it. For a lot of young people it was one way to cope with a world that made little sense growing up, parents that were not around or a less than pleasant home life.

Gary, you brought incredible numbers of diverse people a lot of enjoyment. You gave a lot of young people a way to find common ground. You brought millions together and showed them it was not only OK to be dreamers, but showed them the magic to be found in real life—by giving them the means to share their thoughts, hopes, dreams and ideas with others. Your wonderful game formed friendships and taught people how to work together and get along.

Yours was a gift of discovery and camaraderie, and it was truly magical.

Those of us who traveled the shadowy hinterlands of imagined worlds with companions that remained long after the last dice had been rolled and the pizza was all gone will not forget you. Even though we know that someday we, too, will pass on—we are not afraid. You taught us to love adventure and be bold in the face of the unknown, after all.

Rest in peace, Gary Gygax. You will be missed.

OK, so this is the first time I’ve done the whole embedding a video in a blog post thing. Actually this is the first time I have been inspired to do so.

This performance by Richard Hart at Inside The Bungalow in Mesa, Arizona was just really moving for so many reasons. I like his guitar tone, his voice reminds me of Bob Dylan—only clearer and more pleasant to listen to—and his tasty slide work adds such a distinctive vibe to the song. Just check it out for yourself and see what you think.

There are other reasons I like the song. I find empathy easy enough with this one…

November is almost here, and once again it is time for the annual National Novel Writing Month competition. Participants have one month to write a 50,000 word novel. It is not about polish, it is about churning out words and forward motion.

Of course, it is by no means easy. I first tried it in 2002. I have tried and failed to meet the goal every time—so far—but it has been great fun and an invaluable learning experience. I also met some interesting people along the way.

Wake up November 1st, come up with an idea for a novel, write it over the course of the month…that is what November means to me. If you aspire to write a novel, give it a try. It is a lot of fun.

I keep telling myself that this year, I will finish. I did not participate last year, though I signed up. I ended up moving three times between the start of November and early December. Since taking up blogging and writing on demand (which has always been one of the difficult challenges for me) rather than waiting for some elusive inspiration, I feel my chances are better.

It will also help that I participated in two writer’s groups over the past two years (serving as the public relations chair for one). Immersing yourself in the culture of any endeavor helps, at least motivationally and mentally. Still, it boils down to determination and persistence and desire.

A tolerance for allowing something imperfect that you wrote to stand while writing on—despite feeling as if it is worthless drivel and better thrown into a fire—helps somewhat.

There is nothing to be lost by trying, and so, I will. Again. I finally sent out a second draft of a novelette to a friend to read…something I have not done in many years. It has been several years since I last had articles published, but I feel change is coming. It is welling up inside. Does it involve novel writing in some form?

That remains to be seen…

Sign Up And Give It A Try!

If you are interested in trying you must hurry and sign up. You must enter before midnight October 31st!

All you need to participate is the ability to connect to the Internet, and the desire to write. A hint of madness can’t hurt, either.

I am mulling the idea of chronicling the experience here in the blog, but remain undecided on the wisdom of that.

National Novel Writing Month competition

NOTE TO SELF: Do not forget to stock up on coffee…

PS: If anyone has a good idea for a novel they want to throw my way, please share. The most stressful part of NANOWRIMO is coming up with something to write about. While I know some people have carried around ideas for some time that they use, I rather enjoy making the most of the challenge and starting completely from scratch. The more stressful and insane it all is, the stronger one is for surviving it.

Check out the World Community Grid if you are interested in making the world a better place. They’re out to create “the largest public computing grid benefiting humanity,” according to their site.

Do you remember Seti@Home? You used spare computing power to analyze radioastronomy data as part of a world-wide search for ET life, by running an application in the background on your PC? Ring a bell?

Well, things are buzzing right along in the field of grid computing, and now it is being used as a tool for social change. Among the problems they are using grid computing in an attempt to help solve are cures for dengue, hepatitis c, West Nile, Yellow fever, and AIDS—as well as getting a clearer understanding of human protein structures.

So, if there are times when you aren’t wandering around Second Life, playing UO or WoW, or swapping instant messages (and/or whatever else you do online), then consider donating spare CPU time to a good cause. World Community Grid is also accepting proposals from public and non-profits for research projects that would make use of their grid technology.

I thought I would share a script I cooked up recently for dynamic menus in WordPress. It allows you to create menus two levels deep that will show the sections of your site, and child pages of a top level page when on the parent or any other child pages in the same category.

You simply style your “page_item current_page_item” and “page_item” classes appropriately in order to get mouseover and ’selected’ links to appear differently.

Here’s a link to the text file, which contains the PHP code: wp_dynamic_menu.txt

You simply tweak it to suit your needs and then copy and paste it into ’sidebar.php’ where you want your navigation menu to show up. (This means it is for use with your hosted WP installs, and not WordPress.com blogs…sorry.)

You will notice that menu item ‘3′ is a hardcoded link for ‘Blog’ in the script. This script is designed to use WordPress as a CMS, so the blog link is hardcoded. What you do is create a different template for your blog pages, and for your sidebar include a modified sidebar.php file…perhaps called sidebarblog.php.

In that file, you would need to hardcode the links for ‘pages’ in your navigation menu and where the ‘blog’ link goes, insert the default PHP code for generating post categories between opening and closing ‘ul’ tags, like so:

ul
php wp_list_cats(’sort_column=name&optioncount=0′); php
/ul

[I am leaving out the < and > and ?'s that should obviously be included.]

It seems to work without slowing things down up to about 10 main menu sections (or slightly more). Beyond that, and results will vary depending on your hosting account. I hope you find it useful.

[NOTE: This navigation menu is designed for use with static pages, but with dynamic menus for those pages. It is designed to show child pages of parent (main) categories in your navigation heirarchy. It helps WP manage your navigation more like a website. You still need to do some tweaking for your blog post navigation. Alter the link paths to suit your blog's navigation setup. And really, the menus are sort of pseudo-dynamic...]

You see so many wasted opportunities and wasted lives, most of which is the result of a crappy society and an even worse government. Family is often only the vaguest of notions in America anymore, but you have no control over it. Someone else—who never lost a moment’s sleep over you or your family or your story—does. There’s no justice to be found in our legal bureaucracy which is nothing more than a job protection racket for attorneys, judges, and companies operating private prisons.

Sometimes it all just gets you down, but you manage to shake it off. Sometimes, it’s harder to do.

Sometimes, it feels like no matter what one does, you are trying to bail water out of a sinking boat with a paper cup in the middle of a terrible storm.

To my friend who went missing a couple weeks ago, I hope you are safe—wherever you are.