Povert

What a crazy day.

First of all — I’m now an uncle. Lisa and Pat have a little girl named Isabelle Marie. I can’t post any pics until Lisa’s updated her blog.

So, yeah. Pretty amazing.

Then there was the election, of course. Kelly and I were both very happy and excited, but it was tempered by the fact that we were watching the results come in with my parents, who are pretty conservative. So we couldn’t jump on the furniture while giving each other high fives.

As I’ve mentioned earlier, I’m not interested in discussing politics much here right now. I will say that I’m proud, that it was historic, and that both candidates’ speeches last night were inspiring.

Make your own Attack Ad

I have avoided politics on this blog for a while. I find day-to-day politics exhausting. It’s irrational, it’s ugly and it’s almost entirely unproductive. And I’m not about to start discussing much of it here.

That said, I do have something to say about the political climate. If my personal pick for president becomes obvious, sorry. Anyone who knows me won’t be surprised anyway.

Every 4 years, everyone proclaims this election to be the most important election in the universe. Ever. And it’s bullshit. Every election can’t be the most important. I could see the 2016 election (for example) being more important that this one. The 1932 election was probably more important that this one.

People say this because they’re trying to scare us. I don’t care who’s saying it. They’re trying to scare the shit out of us. And I’m sick of it. Our nation isn’t a delicate knick-knack. It’s not a fragile dish. We can weather terrible leaders. We’ve certainly done it before. We’ve weathered crappy Supreme Courts and crappy court decisions. Crappy Congresses.

I’m certainly not saying that we’re invulnerable. The question I’m asking is: How do we conduct ourselves in trying times? And a lot of us ought to be ashamed.

Western civilization is not in peril.

Support your candidate, be proud of your candidate. And don’t be an asshole.

Sorry. Just wanted to get that off my chest. I’ll get back to the humping dog videos without delay.

Look! A new skit!

Dog vs. Kitty.

Shot with my new Kodak Zi6. Probably not the best showcase of the camera. I was pretty sloppy with it. I was really just going for the joke.

That said, this is technically the first FC skit shot in HD. Or at least in HD resolution. The vid on the site, of course, is not HD. Subscribe to the feed in iTunes or whatever to get it in HD.

This probably isn’t news to anyone deep in JS/CSS land, but I thought these notes may be handy for someone who’s still figuring out the best way to approach some problems.

There’s a temptation, I think, to go overboard with JS when manipulating elements on a page. Many tasks can be more simply handled with a combination of JS and CSS.

For example, let’s say you have a simple unordered list:

<ul id="happyList">
  <li><a href="tacos.html">Tacos</a></li>
  <li><a href="burritos.html">Burritos</a></li>
  <li><a href="enchiladas.html">Enchiladas</a></li>
  <li><a href="tamales.html">Tamales</a></li>
  <li><a href="chalupas.html">Chalupas</a></li>
  <li><a href="antacids.html">Antacids</a></li>
</ul>


Let’s say that you only want 3 items to show by default, and you want a “More” link at the bottom that will expand the list to show the rest.

There’s a few ways you could approach this. People may be tempted to put an onclick event onto the “More” link, then have that call a function that toggles the visibility of each element after the third. Something like:


var happy = document.getElementById('happyList');
var items = happy.getElementsByTagName('li');
function showLinks() {
  for (var i=3; i < items; i++) {
    items[i].style.display = ‘list-item’;
  }
}
function hideLinks() {
  for (var i=3; i < items; i++) {
    items[i].style.display = ‘none’;
  }
}


That would work (though I haven’t actually tested this particular js), but it’s definitely the crappy way, for a number of reasons. First, there’s no need for two functions, though that’s beside the point of this post. Second, we’re running through a for() loop every time each function is called.

Instead of something like that, the way I’d do it is to first set up this CSS:


#happyList.collapsed li {
  display: none;
}
#happyList.collapsed li.alwaysShow {
  display: list-item;
}


Then, you put a class of ‘alwaysShow’ on the first three list item elements, either in the html itself or with javascript:


function assignShow() {
  var happy = document.getElementById('happyList');
  var items = happy.getElementsByTagName('li');
  for (var i=0; i < items.length && i < 3; i++) {
    items[i].className = ‘alwaysShow’;
  }
}


Now, when the ul has a class of ‘collapsed’, only the first three items show:


function toggleList() {
  var happy = document.getElementById('happyList');
  if (happy.className == 'collapsed') {
    happy.className = '';
  } else {
    happy.className = 'collapsed';
  }
}


Or, more succinctly:

function toggleList() {
  var happy = document.getElementById('happyList');
  happy.className = happy.className == 'collapsed' ? '' : 'collapsed';
}


Then, either in HTML or using javascript, you can add an element with the “More” text and attach an event to it that calls toggleList().

I’m being a little vague on details here. My main point is that it’s preferable to lean on CSS as much as possible. It helps to avoid micromanaging elements.

Yes, I’m a nerd. Shut up.

I’ll come right out with it: I’ve become obsessed with UNO on Xbox Live Arcade. I hadn’t played UNO in a long time. It’s an interesting game. Some poker skills actually transfer over nicely.

However, UNO is insanely random. Even more so than poker, someone who is “good” can often be beaten by someone who has almost no clue what they’re doing. That said, one should be able to increase their chances of winning any given four-player game to over 25%.

I should also point out that the games are a lot more fun once you’ve played a while and boosted your “TrueSkill” up into the 20s. Up until that point you run into a lot of, erm, morons. You’ll still run into morons, but at least these morons will typically stick through an entire match.

I titled this post “Part 1″ because I’m sure I’ll have more to say; not because I have some grand plan here. In this one, I’m going to concentrate on Wild Draw Four. This is some pretty common-sense stuff, but I wanted to write it all down. These are really just scattered notes.

Wild Draw Four is a pretty mean card. It forces the next player to draw four cards and they miss their turn. You’re only supposed to play it when you don’t have any card of the color that needs to be played. Note that I said color. If a green 4 is on the table and all you’ve got is a WD4 and a red 4, you can play the WD4 and win a challenge.

Anyway, if the victim challenges your WD4 and it turns out you were bluffing, you have to draw four cards and the victim doesn’t lose their turn. If you weren’t bluffing, they have to draw 6 cards instead of 4.

How can you tell if someone may be bluffing? It really depends, but generally, if they have a ton of cards in their hand and they play a WD4, they are likely bluffing. If they only have 4 or 5, they’re probably not. It’s also somewhat more likely that they’re bluffing it they’re playing it at a particularly convenient time, when you have UNO, for example. Careful with that one, though.

And if a player has 2 cards and plays a WD4, changing the color and leaving them with 1 card — don’t challenge it. I have no idea why people challenge in situations like that. They’re almost never bluffing, and have very little incentive to. The only time I can think of that this would make sense is if you played a wild card and called UNO, then it went around to the player who proceeds you without changing color, and that player has only a numbered card of that color and a WD4. In that or similar situations, it really would make sense for them to bluff — in fact, it’s the only reasonable thing to do.

But if you have a handful of cards and someone with 2 cards plays WD4 on you, they’re probably not bluffing. The only motivation they’d have to bluff is if they think they’re going out very soon and they want to fatten up other players’ hands. But if they’re close to winning, they’ll likely have few cards, which makes it less reasonable for them to bluff.

You won’t see this often in the 20+ TrueSkill range, but it does happen — The current color is (for example) red, and someone with a lot of cards plays a WD4 and chooses… red. I’ve seen this. Someone tried it on me. Of course I challenged it and won. If the current color is red and they play a WD4 and change it to red, that implies that they have red, and can thus be challenged. A few games later I saw someone do this to someone else and the other player didn’t challenge. I’m not sure why. Perhaps they assumed that the guy who played the WD4 was insane. At that point, even if the player is insane, you’re really better off challenging it.

As far as I can tell, most players don’t bluff with WD4 most of the time. The vast majority of challenges I see are lost. I think that most players like to hold onto WD4 for an appropriate time or something.

When should you bluff? WD4 is worth 50 points if it’s in your hand for another player when they go out. Sometimes you have to bluff, especially if you’re sure you’re about to lose. It doesn’t matter if they challenge you and win, since there’s a decent chance that the four cards you’d have to draw won’t be more than 50. You could draw three Reverses and you’re screwed, but hey. And if the player had UNO and didn’t challenge, then you might be ok for a while longer.

Finally, sometimes you can catch someone bluffing when they appear to being playing WD4 out of anger. If they recently were forced to draw a lot of cards and now have the chance to pay someone back, they’ll sometimes bluff a WD4.

It’s freaky how music brings you back to certain periods of your life. Movies don’t really do that for me.

I’ve been listening to all unrated songs on my work laptop. It’s a small subset of of full music collection, but it’s got some good stuff in there.

I don’t recall ever getting that weird déjà vu feeling in my early and mid-twenties. That’s probably because that’s when those associations were being developed. Still, I was listening to Dinosaur Jr., Sonic Youth and Nirvana in my teens, and when I was in my twenties hearing that music never took me back in time. Now it does.

The weirdest one is The Strokes’ “Room on Fire”. It’s odd because the memories are so recent. Any song I hear from that album puts me in my car driving between Eagan and the Twin Cities in late 2004 / early 2005.

Another big one is Smashing Pumpkins’ “Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness”. That usually puts me back to 1996-1997. Specifically in Las Cruces, NM, driving in my 1984 Buick Skylark to and from Scott’s house, where we’d often hang out, smoke cigarettes and play Magic.

Finally, the last major one I can think of is Beck’s “Sea Change”. Can you guess what one aspect of the memory associated with this is? Yep, driving in the car. This time to and from El Paso, TX from Las Cruces, NM. This was probably 2002 early 2003, after a particularly rough breakup. I would go to El Paso to buy clove cigarettes (this was me wanting to smoke, but purposely making it inconvenient). Someone had broken into my car and stolen my stereo, so I was listening to my music on a crappy little mp3 player. Listening with earbuds was probably not the safest way to drive.

I only mention all this for a couple reasons. First — WTF? Why is this happening now? Why wasn’t this happening 5 years ago? I think I know the answer to that, but it’s still weird. Second, and more troubling, is that these memories triggered because of specific music that I was listening to in the car. I don’t drive much these days — I live very close to work, and when I do drive, it’s brief. I also tend to listen to the radio. So I’m worried that I won’t have musical anchors to take me back when I’m, say, 40. I have a terrible memory, and music seems to be one of the few things that can jog it.

I take one thing back — Pearl Jam’s “Yield” was triggering that sorta déjà vu feeling as early as 5 years ago, I think. To this day, it reminds me of sometime around 1997-1999, rooming with Chris. We had a dumpy little apartment and my computer was in the kitchen. The specific memory is of modifying (I think) DikuMUD (?) to make a sort of “Poison Elves” MUD (if you know what Poison Elves was, congrats, welcome to the Nerd Club. If you know what both Poison Elves was and what a MUD is, then seek professional help). I remember adding an addiction element to the game — if your character smoked, he’d have to continue to smoke or suffer various physical consequences. I never made it public or did anything with it.

Testing the wordpress iPhone app.

Twitter has ruined my ability to write more than a handful of words at a time.

It’s probably been about a year since we shot it, but Swiffer is finally finished and on the site.

Watch it.

Why did it take so long? Because I’m both anal and lazy. Tragic combination. Also, it’s only been relatively recently that I got my editing computer up and going again since the move. Insert other interesting and compelling excuses here.

May have a new Flapping Crane skit up soon. Besides the new(ish) one there now.

Moved FC to the the host, by the way. Everything has been relatively smooth so far. Biggest problem was figuring out the various levels of insanity that have accumulated in the 4 years (!) that we’ve been doing this.