April 2009
28 posts
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Essay 3.0
William Blake was a poet and artist who lived in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. He was a very spiritual man who found inspiration for his art through Christianity. Even at an early age he spoke of having spiritual visions, causing his parents to notice that he was special. His interest in art grew but financial hardships forced him to become an apprentice engraver to further pursue his...
More htaccess fun
More trouble from the Observer hosting change. The wordpress blog gave me the same “No Input File Specified” error and this time adding the ‘?’ and forcing the queries didn’t work. There wasn’t too much about it either on the searches.
Our Wordpress installation formatted URLs like this:
http://www.texasobserver.org/blog/index.php/2009/04/09/post-title/
...
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Deep Attention Paper 3
The mysteries of the University of Texas have fascinated me for as long as I have been a student. As a freshman, living in Jester West, I would go on late walks around campus and just explore all the nooks and crannies. After a few trips out I started to notice large vents in the ground with light coming out of them. When I looked through the vent I saw the tunnels for the first time. I told some...
htaccess file problems :/
We’re moving our hosting for the Texas Observer and I chose GoDaddy because it’s reliable and I know how to use it. Plus, all the people I trust in the tech industry seem to use GoDaddy. We’ve been using Expression Engine for our new blogs and Expression Engine and GoDaddy don’t like to work together apparently.
EE URLs are formatted like
...
WatchThe Aquarium
Fun With Don McLeroy →
A controversial figure if there ever was one, State Board of Education Chairman Don McLeroy has been accused of, among other things, trying (and to some extent succeeding) to crowbar religion into Texas’ public science classrooms. He appeared before the Senate Nominations Committee this afternoon to argue for his job.
Along with a statement expressing his belief that McLeroy “is not qualified to...
Longhorn Hellraisers →
It’s finally back up and it got a new facelift! I still have content to add but it’s done!
Texas Bound: A Books Blog →
New to the Texas Observer. It’s a soft launch right now but the main launch should be coming in a week or so.
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Einhorn is a MAN!
FAQ about Hypertext was very interesting indeed. After my first reading of the poem Hypertext I had no idea what it was supposed to be about. The Popular Interpretation in FAQ 4 makes the most sense to me although it just seems to be made up by fans of the poem. The connections that are made between the poem and pop culture are very definitely there but it feels like they’re being forced and...
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You gotta come into the bathroom and look at this!...
This clip from Futurama reminded me of my topic for essay 2.0. I argued that the androids in DADoES were aware of themselves and that they were treated as objects. At the beginning of the clip Bender says “I’m beginning to have some second thoughts,” which is really interesting because how can a robot have thoughts? It also shows what might happen if an adroid all of a sudden...
Terrorists take over North Texas →
One morning in February, more than 2,000 cops, fire marshals, and public health officials in the Dallas-Fort Worth area received a memo—stamped “For Official Use Only”—that contained shocking…
Ratatat; The benefits of being 21
The show last night was pretty awesome. We got there pretty early but there was a handful of kids there. I walked up to the door and the guy was real intense and said “Left wrist. No drinking any alcohol. If you leave you can’t come back in,” and he put a wristband on me.
I thought “damn, that sucks” and went into Stubbs and immediately saw the bar right there and...
bad twitter
twitter lost all my tweets :(
WatchDigg founder Kevin Rose interviewed Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails (NIN) and posed the most popular questions as submitted and voted upon by the Digg Community.
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Essay 2
Life for an android is difficult in the universe Philip K. Dick has created for them. “The schizophrenic subject evolves as an interplay between an alienated ‘I’ and an alienating ‘not I’.” This means that the android constantly rides the line between a world where they autopoietically create and control everything and a world where they are allopoietically ...
Innocent man goes to prison for arson he didn't... →
Curtis Severns is serving 27 years for an arson he almost certainly didn’t commit. Sloppy fire science put him there. Part one of an Observer investigation by Dave Mann into faulty forensics and…
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Why did he give that kid a spoon?
Mike took me to work this morning and we had to stop and get gas. He goes in to pay and I’m just sitting there watching this tool looking kid fill up his SMART car. He got premium but probably only took like 4 gallons. And for some reason he left the car door open so cars couldn’t get through between his car and the store.
Then this other car pulls up and an old guy gets out holding a...
WatchEating Fireballs