The Tao of Tao

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New Site: JSU Researcher
2007-11-04 18:08:00
This is a very basic site for the Jackson State University academic journal called, The Researcher. It only has limited content management, but will be hosted on JSU's website which will give it an instant boost in the search engine rankings with a .edu domain name. I went with a professional bookworm design with straightforward content. I wanted to keep it clean. Check out the site in it's development area, click here.
More About: Site , Web Sites , New Site

Making Floats Fill a Div
2007-09-03 00:21:00
If you've ever run into the problem of floating an image or div and the having it stick out of it's containing div then you know frustration as well as the next guy(or gal). I used to just declare a static height but that's really not the way to go and it might even be impossible if the content in that div is updated regularly. In order to make the div recognize the height of the floated element you need to place an empty div inside the container div, but beneath the floated element. Then you simply need to style that div to "clear: both". It's really that easy. I have no idea how many countless hours I spent trying to figure that out. Too many to say the least. It's especially handy when you've got multiple horizontal sections such as on my page here.Technorati Profile
More About: Fill , Makin , Oats

This Casa is Wired
2007-08-25 02:45:00
You may have noticed that even though I'm now in the first world my posting rate had fallen off their for awhile. Well, along with all of the luxuries that the first world has to offer it also comes with a lot bureaucratic crap. For instance, Comcast payed to have our apartment wired. So I call Comcast and ask for their internet service, they say that my apartment isn't in the database even though the apartment next to me is. Apparently this is because it's a brand new apartment and didn't exist before, yet somehow I feel they should know I exist since they installed the wiring. So they say they have to send someone out to make sure I exist, I say sure, they say call back in a week, I sigh and say ok. One week passes. I call back they say, who are you?, and I say you don't know yet. They say they'll send someone else to make sure I exist and to call back in another week. A week passes. They now know I exist and that my money is real. They setup a time for someone ...
More About: Life , Casa , Wired

A New Villager
2007-08-24 03:22:00
Well, my attempt at full time freelancing has failed. It turns out you need a cushion of money to sit on while you drum up business and get things rolling. I'd planned for that somewhat but I hadn't planned on Christine wanting to go fully furnish our place immediately or that one of my larger jobs would get held up for so long. So I've been hired at a place called New Villa ge Media. They do web development for all kinds of different sites. Really it's not so bad. It's nice to have a dependable income and not have to worry about all the taxes, even though I'll have to worry about that anyway for the freelance work I've already done. I'm also getting to see what it's like to work as a team on a site. I've already learned how to work with SVN, which is this code repository software that lets multiple people work on the same files and then merges them together. They actually hired me to do design work with some CSS. I don't think they understand that I know a lot m...
More About: Freelancing , Ager

Workaround for 100% height divs
2007-08-13 16:31:00
One of the major headaches that I came across when making my transition to tableless web layout was that I would often want a graphic to repeat all the way down a page, but setting the height of a div to 100% doesn't work as you'd expect. The problem comes in when you start to scroll. The height: 100% attribute only means 100% of the initial display of the page. When you try to scroll down it cuts off the below what you can first see on the page when it loads. Essentially your div is only 768px or whatever 100% of your screen height is. I was surprised at the lack of solutions to this problem, but I've recently seen people espousing the same fix I came up with as well. For example, perhaps I want a center aligned page with drop shadows on the left and right. I believe the rational way to approach this would be making three divs and floating them all left inside a center aligned container and putting the shadow graphics in the outside divs with a background repeated in the...
More About: Karo , Eight

How's my renovation?
2007-07-31 21:31:00
If you were here before my recent renovation you'll recall that my site was much more casual and personal feeling. Now that I'm back and getting a real job I decided to dedicate Stop and Wonder only to business purposes. I felt that I needed a complete redesign of the site to make it official and that's where I'm at. It was about time for my annual redesign anyway. Christine told me I needed to move away from blue since it's been a staple color in my last couple of Stop and Wonder so I decided to compromise and incorporate red into my design this time and move blue down in prominence. I had no real design scheme apart from showing off a little and making everything shiny and professional. I think I succeeded. I also spent a day making the flash slideshow of some of my work on the homepage. I hope you like that, I plan on upgrading and updating it. I also have plans to make my portfolio a flash file as well, but that's going to have to wait a little while. I can only ...
More About: Renovation , Reno

Freelancing: Can I fly?
2007-07-23 02:46:00
In a way I've been freelancing for the last year and a half. I liked to think I was practicing for when I got back to the states and started working full time. There wasn't much pressure on me since the cost of living in El Salvador is almost laughable compared to American standards. Now that I've got actual serious bills to pay on a regular basis there's a little butterfly in my stomach hatching more every day. My main problem is getting more business. I have the skills and the talent I just have to bring the marketing. Advertising on-line to do on-line advertising has more than a little competition. I have some good ideas for the real world that I think might be effective. I've also started to build a base of satisfied clients who are recommending me to people. Once I have enough people doing that I should be able to dumpster my flyers and other mundane marketing. There's definitely an uncomfortable feeling of not knowing where your next paycheck is coming from. I...
More About: Freelancing , Elan

A New Chapter
2007-07-19 21:24:00
As I mentioned before I'm branching my personal blog and political rants off into a new website. It seems appropriate to do this now that I'm starting a new chapter in my life. I'm going to leave all of my pictures and old posts here on Stop and Wonder but I'm going to mainly be blogging about Web design and programming here from now on. The new site is called www.Taos2Cents.com, catchy huh? I'm still fine tuning it an adding new features, but it's up and running good enough to handle my posts. I truly hope you'll stop by and check out my new digs. I plan on posting a lot about more political things and posting video and pictures from the protests and events I'm going to start attending now that I'm back in the states. See you over there.
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I'm Back Baby
2007-07-11 07:23:00
I arrived in Houston yesterday around 11am. My trip was significantly less hassle filled than the time I brought my cat, Mr. Pink, back with me. However it still had its little quirks. For instance, I had my corkscrew wine opener confiscated passing through security in El Salvador. I could tell the El Salvadoran guys saw something unusual in my bags as it went through the x-ray machine. They all gathered around the monitor and were making jokes. I can only imagine what they thought it was. On the flight I was seated next to an extremely old woman who was clearly very Salvadoran. She was even wearing the typical aprons that I rarely saw women over 25 not wearing. I had to help her put her seat belt on and put her tray table down etc. The people sitting across the aisle from me also decided that they needed to take two giant boxes of Pollo Campero fried chicken. It's Central America's answer to KFC, only nastier and more processed. So I got to enjoy the sickening smell o...
More About: Baby , Back

Alive Earth: Virtual Global Warming Concert
2007-07-07 05:36:00
I logged into YouTube a minute ago and had an interesting message waiting for me. Apparently a group in England is holding a sort of virtual concert to go along with Al Gore's Live Earth concert. They held some sort of competition and voting to see what videos and songs they were going to put in their 10 video line up and they picked my "What if you knew?" video that I made for David Rovics a couple months ago. I had no idea that it had been entered in anything, certainly not by me. I haven't watched all of the other videos yet, but I think mine holds its own pretty good. Especially for not having any actual video footage in it. The song itself isn't really just about global warming, it's about all of the issues going and how people aren't aware or aren't touched by the problems. I'm also surprised they decided to call it "Climate Change" rather than global warming. "Climate change" is one of those neo-conservative buzz words to distract people, as if it could be...
More About: Global Warming , Environment , Concert , Global

Set a place for me when I'm gone
2007-07-07 02:00:00
Christine is leaving tomorrow morning at 3am, her flight doesn't leave until 6. I'll ride with her to the airport but I don't leave for another 2 days. She's going to meet her parents in DC while they're there for a conference and find us an apartment. It's nice to know I won't be too involved in the stress of picking out our place. If I wasn't so confident in Christine's ability to pick out a good place I might be more concerned. Our Peace Corps friends came a few days ago and we basically partied for 3 days with them. It was a good time and I'll remember it forever, assuming I dodge the Alzheimer's bullet but in that case someone please use a real one on me. I suppose that somewhat gruesomely brings me to setting a place for me when I'm gone. On the 2nd night we had a good group at our house and talked and played card games until late. One of the said card games was Texas hold 'em which we played with chips tournament style where people were out once they r...
More About: Life , Place , Lace

Server Upgrade
2007-07-02 16:17:00
Hey everybody, I'm upgrading servers so the site is going to be down for anywhere from 1-3 days starting later today. I'll miss you too.
More About: Server , Serve

Countdown to Re-Americanization
2007-07-01 20:02:00
In 10 days I'll be leaving on a jet plane and boy am I ready. I could tell you all the things I would miss and things I won't miss, but really I won't be missing all that much. I'm tired of being frustrated and seeing so many things that could be better but not being able to do anything about them. I've come to understand that just about all of the problems here and no doubt in the rest of the third world could be solved from within but our discouraged from doing so from outside influences. The 1st and 2nd world don't want the competition and actively work to undermine the average working class. Sure, the 1st and 2nd world make a good show of how they're helping them, but how come all of these people are still poor and ignorant? I'm just tired of living in it. I want to be somewhere where I can have some real influence. It's like how they talk about Earth avoiding an asteroid. If you can change the asteroid's course even the tiniest bit at the heart of the problem...
More About: Travel , Countdown , Cani

Biodegradable Plastic...Brilliant!
2007-06-29 17:35:00
I've argued for a long time that there has to be a way to make a biodegradable plastic substitute. My chemist friend said it was possible but cost prohibitive, but I just didn't believe that on a large scale production it would be. Now, for the first time it's here, it's really here!. Three days ago we finished throwing away the mountain of plastic bottles we'd collected with our ecology kids. We had to throw them away because they were "too dirty" to be recycled. We hand washed about 60 pounds before we gave up. It was sad throwing them in the dump knowing they'd be there forever and all the time we'd put into trying to stop that from happening. People in El Salvador and surely many places that are modernizing are so accustomed to just throwing down whatever banana or mango peel or pit and not have to worry about it being there FOREVER. It's extremely hard to change people's habits, the best thing to do would be to build a product adapted to that habit and here it ...
More About: Environment , Plastic , Biodegradable , Brilliant

Modern Gods
2007-06-27 17:42:00
I was just wandering around You Tube as I'm prone to do to waste time in between spurts of web work. I came across this poem and animation about God. The poet quite nicely summed up many of the different ways in which God is served to us in modern society. Apart from the message, I also really dig the animation itself, even the kind of weird sound effects fit well. I'm particularly fond of his immigration reference and the angel minute men, but he's right on about everything else too. I know I've been pretty disappointed in some presidential candidates trotting out their God race horses. I think the whole theme goes well with my previous post because I too don't want my God watered down by some human being. Anyway, here's "The FoxHole Manifesto" for your viewing pleasure.
More About: Modern , Gods

An Offer I Couldn't Refuse
2007-06-25 20:07:00
I'm not a religious person by any stretch of the imagination so when the neighbors asked Christine to be god parents to their little girl I wasn't particularly thrilled. Then I found out they were just doing it because to send Estelle to the catholic school in town, which is by far the best, she had to be baptized. I'm pretty sure the reason the Catholic school is so much better is because the nuns don't take any guff and since the kids are actually paying to attend parents don't mind having the nuns discipline their kids. All in all you can tell a big behavioral difference between the public school and catholic schools kids. Since Christine and I aren't Catholic or married for that matter we're not exactly prime candidates to be god parents but Christine is the one paying for Estelle to go to school so they wanted to give us the honor. Honestly, before I knew about the school issue I thought they just wanted us because they thought we could take her to the states or sup...
More About: Life , Offer

A Looming Departure (Video)
2007-06-22 02:17:00
In just under 3 weeks I'll be back state side. I'm starting to feel the sense of excitement that I've come to associate with moving. Pulling up roots and moving is similar to riding a roller coaster. If you've never ridden one it might freak you out. Who knows if it's safe? How does everything work? After a few rides though those worries fall away and the thrill of something new and different is all you look for. UPDATE: This was on the frontpage of CNN this morning: Girl's feet severed on ride at Six Flags. I hope that's not a bad omen for our move. I figure I ought to update you on the different projects and things that have been going on here before I forget or I get caught up in moving. Christine is really the one still involved in the humanitarian work. I sit in the house all day working on web pages trying to save up for the move. Moving to a 3rd world country is easy, but going from a $75/rent to something 10 times that much takes some saving up. One of th...
More About: Video , Life , Departure , Ming

Sicko Review
2007-06-20 17:18:00
I'm not exactly proud that I downloaded Michael Moore's new movie 10 days before its supposed to be released. Maybe I'll make it up by writing to my congressmen or by writing this review or heck maybe I'll even go pay to see it again. I don't think Michael is in it to make money anyway. I have to be honest, I wasn't totally impressed with "Fahrenheit 9/11". I enjoyed it, but I doubt it changed very many people's minds about anything. Basically, it was too polarizing and the way it was done let in a lot of criticism about bias, especially how Michael questioned people. I think "Sick o " is going to blow it out of the water. First of all, health issues know no political party and the health case system doesn't have very many backers these days. Second of all, Michael did a much better job with his questioning and attitude. He almost seemed to be playing the conservative's advocate at times. My hope for this movie is that it shames the United States into action. After...
More About: Movie Reviews , Review

Looking for some Dam Justice
2007-06-17 18:52:00
I first went to Costa Rica about four years ago and it was at that time that many Costa Ricans were protesting the possible privatization of their communications company, at the same time teachers were protesting their pension fund being slashed. Apart from the graffiti I didn't actually come face to face with the demonstrations until several days before I left on my six week trip. The teachers were marching from the capitol to another city nearly 20km away and I was on a bus that going that same way. Well, needless to say it was a hot 30-45 minutes on the bus until we got around them. It didn't occur to me that they were intentionally blocking the highway. The last day on my way to the airport I learned that blocking the highway wasn't just something that they happened to do while marching it was a tactic in and of itself. As we actually had a flight to catch it was more than just a little frustrating for us. Luckily we had a resourceful bus driver who ducked around off r...
More About: Life , Justice , Look , Some

Wrath of God
2007-06-14 20:33:00
Yesterday morning I sold out. I decided to put Google Ads on my blog in hopes that it might be able to pay the hosting costs every year. Yesterday afternoon we had the longest earthquake I've ever felt here or anywhere. The ground steadily shook for about 20 seconds. The water jugs were shaking, the fan was wobbling, trees were shaking, etc. If that weren't a big enough sign, my web server went down and when it came back it had been replaced with an old backup before I put the ads up so they were effectively erased. Today I tempt the fates and put them back. The earthquake turned out to be a 6.8 magnitude one off the coast of Guatemala near El Salvador. I was kind of surprised to find out it was that far away. Normally our earthquakes are local to the volcano here. Yesterday afternoon Christine and I went for a walk up this pretty road along the volcano and saw some fairly large fallen rocks but nothing much besides that. Most earthquakes here happen during the rainy se...
More About: Life , Wrath

Built this City on Rock and Roll
2007-06-09 22:47:00
Last Wednesday the city held an Earth Day parade. It was really a march for action to do more about protecting Berlin from disasters, specifically landslides. I was pretty impressed that people were marching with signs saying "Protect the Environment" and wearing costumes as flowers, armadillos, whatever they could think of. It all seemed very out of character as I've never lived in a place where the people take their environment as much for granted. Sure, the U.S. has its problems but people value their parks and are at least mildly informed and concerned about the environment. Needless to say it was refreshing to see here. The parade went all the way up to Brisas Del Sol(Sun Breezes), the little community where the most of the damage and deaths occurred. We marched into the provisional hospital area set up at the school where several speakers delivered their calls to action. Mostly they said that the government isn't doing its job to protect them and its an outrage. The...
More About: News , Rock , Roll , City , Rock and Roll

Mini Mitch
2007-05-30 22:45:00
I had been planning a blog entry about how we ate sushi in the capitol a few days ago, and how beautifully ironic the heavily graffitied Sherwin-Williams plant is, and how I'm learning this fantastic web framework that's going to enable me to make some incredible sites, but then something actually blog-worthy comes along and makes that all seem meaningless. Christine and I went for a jog/walk for the first time in awhile last evening. We made it back just before the rain rolled in, but had left our key in the house. I Spider-Manned my way across the neighbors roof and slid down a post in our backyard fireman style. Within minutes it was torrential downpour. We've gotten into the habit of downloading movies that are subtitled during the rainy season because of the deafening roar of the rain on our aluminum sheet metal roof. We cuddled up and watched the single most boring movie I've ever seen this side of Warhol's 8 hour fly on the wall video. It was called "Taste of Cher...
More About: News , Mini

Put your Music where your Mouth is
2007-05-24 23:28:00
It torrentially downpoured all night last night. It might finally mean the rainy season is here, it's a little late this year. It seems like it's very easy to blame global warming on every weather related quirk, I don't think this is part of that though. As I understand it central america will be having increased rain. I finished up David Rovics' site a couple days ago. I'm sure there's more I could do, but I spent well over a week working on it and now I've got a backlog of stuff. I think it all turned out really well, although I wouldn't have made some of the changes David wanted, but thats how it always seems to go. In case you're interested, this is a before picture of his site, and yes, he was using frames (gasp). Here's how the new one turned out: Somehow the name of this entry just popped into my head when I was thinking about David's music. It sounded like a pretty good description of what he does. Plus I like it's multi-edged meaning. I put my we...
More About: Music , Web Sites , Mouth , Where

What If You Knew
2007-05-14 06:43:00
In my time here in El Salvador, I've come to more clearly see the results and causes of the sickness in the world. I knew when I signed up for Peace Corps that I wasn't going to save the world. I even knew the expectations of how effective I would be were probably exaggerated. Still, it has been a frustrating experience, rewarding in ways different than I'd expect, but still frustrating. I often find myself angry at the people here. The way they always assume I've got a treasure chest in my backyard. How they tell me "yes", they'll do something, and then simply not do it. The way they know exactly what they ought to do and will tell me in detail, at the very same time doing the opposite right in front of my face. How they don't want me to help them to help themselves, they just want me to do it for them. My anger is misguided of course, and I realize that. If I were here, with their situation, their childhood, I would be exactly the same. I know that the real cause ...

The Have-Somes
2007-05-02 19:07:00
In honor of May Day and El Salvador's Labor Day I've decided to voice my thoughts on immigration. I had almost anticipated having a more pro-immigration view after having lived here, but I've come to an altogether different conclusion. It seems to me that immigration is having an altogether negative effect on El Salvador and I'm sure it's just the same in just about every other third-world country. I believe it's positively impacting the U.S. economy, but causing societal fractions at the same time. So here's how it plays out in my mind. El Salvadorans benefit in the short-term from immigration by having remittances, or money sent back to them from relative in the U.S. However, the money coming back is a crutch. Little of that money goes to infrastructure. In fact, most El Salvadorans are more likely to buy a TV than to invest in their home, clean water or even in another way for them to make income of their own. So they're not developing anyway to replace their dep...
More About: Rants , Some

The Holy Week in Berlin
2007-04-12 21:03:00
We celebrated our 1 year anniversary in Berl in last week. Actually, the entire city celebrated with us although some of them may have been under the impression they were celebrating the holy week. We know what was up though. As is custom to honor us, the townspeople created elaborate "rugs" of colored salt, sawdust, beans, fruit, and whatever else they could find. You may remember one of my first entries from Berlin was about this. Below is a picture of the Oscar our friend who helped us find a place to rent when we got here. He has also been the winner of the best "rug" for the last 7 straight years. He's the one with his hands raised in success. We passed on the parade this year, which goes two steps forward one step back all around the city and over the "rugs" which are offerings to God. Last year we probably only made it 1/4 of the way in an hour and a half. They did the whole thing this time in about 4 hours. Christine and I think we may have inadvertently revolutio...
More About: Life , Week , Holy

Give Peace $285,000
2007-04-08 00:54:00
I was just looking at the news today and I saw something that indirectly had to do with me. I found this article called Crawford Peace House Hit by Strife. You see back in 2005 I was going to UT and I had to do a report on a protest. So I went up to Crawford where some people were protesting Ariel Sharon meeting with Bush on his ranch. I ended up making "The Crawford Report" mini-documentary you can find in my video portfolio instead of a written report. After the protest the Peace House asked if anyone could volunteer to be their web designer. I felt like I could help them out so I volunteered. I didn't do much for them, mainly because they only asked me to update the page a couple times. That is until Cindy Sheehan busted onto the scene and started protesting in front of Bush's ranch. They e-mailed me and asked me to set-up a PayPal donation link on the site. So I got it all set up and stuff and my jaw basically hit the floor when I looked in the PayPal account. Almo...
More About: News , Give

Let it Go
2007-04-01 18:23:00
Lately I've been angry. I haven't been able to pinpoint the cause if there even is one. It's almost a disembodied anger, just looking for someway to vent itself. Upon venting itself it undoubtedly makes the situation worse and leads to more anger and a self-sustaining cycle. Today I stop that. I feel like I've known how to fix myself for a long time, I've just always put it off. I believe the first time I came across the method was in a book called The Fourth Way by P.D. Ouspensky about the teachings of G.I. Gurdjieff. I'm not sure how it came into my possession, probably by way of my Dad. Fundamentally the system it talked about was very near to Buddhism. It says that emotions are like instincts, we can not stop them from happening. However, we can be on the look out for negative emotions and recognize them before they manifest themselves in our actions. To do that however, we have to train our mind to be much more aware of itself and its surroundings. If I can se...
More About: Life

Loco for Coconuts
2007-03-30 19:28:00
Our neighbors love to come by and drop off random fruits and foods with us. This morning I woke up to find a shelled coconut on our food table. I don't ask questions and being too lethargic to actually cook something I ate it for breakfast. It was surprisingly satisfying. Our typical breakfast is usually oatmeal or fried plantains, but sometimes I get crazy and make plantain oatmeal. I have yet to get tired of oatmeal, the only reason I don't eat it more is the small hassle of actually cooking it and then washing the pot. I've got a lot to do today. I recently finished building the city of Berlin a web page. It's not up yet and they haven't written all of the content yet, but I'm going to meet with my friend Oscar who was the one has been pushing for it. He told me this morning that he thought the mayor had lost interest in doing it. Seeing as how I spent most of last week working on it, that's not going to happen. Period. The other thing is that I just got a new ...
More About: Nuts

Give them some credit
2007-03-22 16:20:00
I think I mentioned in a previous post that I'd recently read "Banker to the Poor" by the latest Nobel Peace prize winner. It's about making loans to the very poor so that they can break out of their cycle of poverty. Really most people just need enough for the initial supplies for their product and they're off and running. The only people that would lend such a small amount do so at exhorbitant interest rates and banks won't even touch a loan that small with no collateral. Well, last night I had an idea. It's strange because it really came to me out of the blue. It seems that a lot of times my ideas come from a long chain of different thoughts, but this one really just hit me. Let me lead into it a little though. The other day my Peace Corps friend, Darren, was over writing an e-mail to his friends and family for donations to build latrines in his village. Personally, I find it ridiculous that he should have to do that. The government sends them out to these places a...
More About: Dreams , Credit , Give , Some