St. Ego's Ivory Tower :: Trip Like I Do

a world or atmosphere where intellectuals engage in pursuits that are disconnected from the practical concerns of everyday life. As such, it usually has a pejorative connotation, denoting a willful disconnect from the everyday world; esoteric, over-specialized, or even useless research; and academic elitism, if not outright condescension by those inhabiting the ivory tower.
~ Wikipedia

:: Randomized Wisdom
Bigger Words phylo - original Greek for tribal Quoted "If orbits are achieved through the tension between electro-magnetic force and strong nuclear force, and if that is the type of relationship between those two forces at any scale, then it seems there should be a feasible way to tap free energy out of the p [continued]" ~ St.Ego

:: Reminder

Please delete install.php and upgrade.php from your webroot.

:: Ego Merch

	The Enabler Because everyone wants permission to have fun...
	Moving Target Bumper Sticker I'm still here because nothing annoys God like a moving target...
	Natural "20" Superstring Theory Thong Save your geek the trouble of worrying about whether or not he is going to score...

:: Status

View History | Playlist | Follow on Twitter | St.Ego's Austin

St.Ego is bouncing back and forth between updates to TargetMatrex and the Annihilator... (4 hours ago)

While In a frenetic mood

St.Ego is waking up early to greet what should be a busy work week... (9 hours ago)

While In a complacent mood and Listening to Racoon feat. Rose Max E Luande - Jan Des Bouvrie

St.Ego is re-adding the Google tracking script to MirageLab, now that it's on the new theme... (15 hours ago)

St.Ego is putting away my work for the evening on the MonitorAnything conversion using DynamicData... (15 hours ago)

While In a exhausted mood

St.Ego is finally starting to recover from all the holiday activity... (1 day ago)

While In a relieved mood and Listening to Indigo Eyes - Peter Murphy

St.Ego is preparing to usher in the new year in Houston... (4 days ago)

While In a bored mood and Listening to Vertical Horizon - DJ Stephen Wiley

St.Ego is breaking fast at Bouldin and wishing there was an ellipsis key... (6 days ago)

While In a hungry mood

St.Ego is rockin the codehighlighter TinyMCE plugin, getting ready to start sharing some code with my visitors... (6 days ago)

While In a accomplished mood and Listening to La Femme Fin - Louise Vertigo

St.Ego is rolling a progressive upgrade from Xaraya 1.1.4 to 1.1.5 on Ivory-Tower... (6 days ago)

While In a nervous mood and Listening to Secret Agent on SOMA

St.Ego is upgrading TinyMCE so that I can finally take advantage of codehighlighting! (1 week ago)

While In a excited mood and Listening to Parrot Eyes - DJ Stephen Wiley

:: What's Hot

What's In: Rugby Shirts - What's Out: Polo Shirts

Today's businessman needs to seriously consider that the era of the Polo shirt has passed... along with that of the mullet and other disturbing trends. Polo shirts became popular because they had a collar and were made of enough polyester to virtually guarantee them wrinkle-free.

A Polo shirt says that you are into horses and playing with sticks and balls. Interpret as you will.

A Rugby shirt says that you are playful and don't know your own (considerable) strength.

It is time to make a stand in this cultural game of fashion mores.

:: Film Review

The Love Guru
Mike Myers outdoes himself in yet another brilliant satire. I started the film with modest expectations, but finished it in stitches. The movie is still pretty damned funny the second and third times through, so rewatchability looks good too.

Get your own!
Legend of the Seeker
Starting this Sunday, ABC will be airing this fantasy series based on The Sword of Truth series by Terry Goodkind. Either I spaced out hearing about it previously, or this is the first case of well timed publicity I've ever seen (they usually tell you about what is coming out way too early for my taste). You can visit the LegendOfTheSeeker website to view all of the details, and iTunes has two videos available for free that include snippets from the first episode and narrative by Lucy Lawless.

For those of you that have not read the series, this is high fantasy, and some of the best that I've ever read. It has become quite lengthy in volume since it first began, which should provide excellent fodder to write the show from.

I only hope that they stick with it for a while instead of dropping it after a single season...

:: Another Good Read

Vellum: The Book of All Hours
This book is the best fiction I've read in quite some time. I'm not ashamed to admit that I've reread it at least once, and was subsequently rewarded by noticing a host of additional details that I did not pick up on the first time through. A priceless work of literature, in my opinion. This novel affected me on a personal level.

All of that aside, it is NOT an easy book to read. The main characters exist in a state where time and place, even reality itself, is fluid and dynamic. Reading their story can be confusing when it periodically shifts into a different reality that is incredibly different while retaining the same or similar relationship between characters. Of course, that was part of what made it so enjoyable, for me.

I'm a big fan of stories that revolve around books of power, arcane tomes, or codexes of lost lore. This is the king of such books, hands down. A book about a book should be powerful grist for the blogging generation. The Book of All Hours is such a book.

What if, in the beginning, God dictated reality to his scribe, including the journeys and meetings of those with power. The Word of God, transcribed as a future map of history. And if the Word of God were to be changed...? How else would you propose to escape the fate decreed for you?

Of course, it is not an easy task to understand the written Word of God, if that is, indeed, what it is. But it is another matter entirely to learn how to speak it yourself. And then, would you not be as God, yourself?

Follow Phreedom Messenger and Seamus Finnan as they travel through mythology in a quest to escape fate, and to escape being forced to choose a side in a war between gods.

: : Latest Blog News

Gay Marriage Law Repealed in California
Nov 30, 2008

Just when we thought that the nation was finally headed in the right direction, California no longer supports gay marriage. California.

Apparently, while everyone else was focused on making sure that Obama got elected, the religious right used the shift in focus to as a sabotage opportunity:

"Yes side sent certified letters to major donors threatening to "out" them in a press release unless they also contributed to the marriage ban."

In retribution, the "No" side is fighting back, and they are slinging the "Yes" side's own tactics right back at them. I guess nobody told the fundamentalists anything about living in "glass houses" should they decide to throw stones...

Digital Convergence: Gaming Style
Nov 28, 2008

I found an incredibly cool graph illustrating the anticipated future trend of computing, gaming, movies and artificial intelligence. They graph things between Best, Worst and Base Case scenarios, showing a range of just how pleasant or unpleasant things could become. Regardless, it is all inspiring from a technology perspective. Some truly great ideas are listed across the graph; things that I had not previously considered and that the industries affected may not have either. Virtual cinema attendance was one idea that struck me as obvious in retrospect, but predicting the last human produced film and game on such short notice (10 years from now?) is not something that ever occurred to me.

No matter who you are, there is bound to be a few things that spark your interest. I will be using the graph as a repeated inspirational exercise going forward; it's just that cool.

Gas Heated Home? Make Sure...
Nov 21, 2008

If your home is heated by gas and it does not seem to be getting the job done very well as the winter months roll in, you may want to ensure that your hot water line into the heater is open (not to mention the line back into the hot water line, down-stream from the heater).

After being present at a neighbors while a leasing office rep came in to ensure the above was established correctly, I realized the reason that my apartment as been ice-fucking-cold over the past few weeks.

Oh, don't get me wrong, the "heater" was "running"; but that just means the fan was on. Lots of air has been recirculating in my unit for a while now, but absolutely nothing has been getting done to change it's temperature.

I opened the inlet immediately after witnessing the incident, but just now realized I'd left the outlet closed still and corrected THAT deficiency...

Maybe you like it cold, but I may as well be a lizard when it comes to maintaining body heat.

Good luck, and stay warm in there!

YouTube/Live Ad Kills YouTube Search On FireFox
Nov 18, 2008

FF3 FTW. Usually...

I was trying to look up the original video of Steve Ballmer going off about developers and sueting through his shirt in the process, but YouTube is featuring an ad for it's own new "Live" service that is poorly deployed and redirects my FF3 to a page with just that ad on it.

Way to go YouTube; I was looking for a reason to choose between you and Googles video search. Now I have one. =P

MS Office Hyperlinks And Secure Sites
Nov 18, 2008

After spending a great deal of time helping lock down file access for restricted areas of the Cobb County site, we began experiencing issues with pages that required login before accessing, even though the user was already shown as logged in. Troubleshooting narrowed down the problem to users of MS Office. It seems that MS Office doesn't carry cookies with it's links, according to this article by Lars Pind.

The workaround described by Lars Pind worked out rather well for us. I established a new webroot file to catch failed authentication attempts for the file system and redirect them back to the file system a second time to attempt getting the file, since the browser will carry the cookie that MS Office fails to pick up.

Due to the sensitive nature of the code in question, I cannot post snippets, but you should easily be able to discern your own workaround based on the above-linked article.

Getting Flash Into TinyMCE
Nov 16, 2008

While developing the PokerEnlightenment site, I was exposed to an issue with using the TinyMCE WYSIWYG editor to insert Flash when using IE. Apparently, IE likes to rip up OBJECT/EMBED/PARAM tag contents and restructure in funny ways. After some googling, I came across a post by Spocke, the main developer of TinyMCE. As specified in his post, I added the media plugin to TinyMCE in the advanced config and IE suddenly started to behave itself.

More News

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