Jesus, it’s not bad enough the rap city schools get? It’s not bad enough, lack of funds? Now the State’s Attorney General’s office has filed a lawsuit against a former chief financial officer to the Rochester City Schools, Henry Marini, for allegedly dirty deals with his buddies:

AG sues over city schools’ contracts || Democrat & Chronicle: Local News

The lawsuit claims that the Perrys and Spier, with Marini’s help, got 13 consulting city contracts under seven different company names. Twelve of those contracts were for amounts of $24,000 to $24,900 — just beneath the $25,000 threshold that requires school board approval. The state alleges that was done to evade review. District officials said, in a news release e-mailed to the media, that the district has assisted state officials during the 18-month inquiry.

Marini quit his $160,000 anual salary job with no severance just prior to the start of the investigation. I guess he figured he’d just be in the way. . . .

I don’t know a thing about the Rochester City Schools or their ills first-hand, though I know a few people at MJ that have been working on funding parity for the schools. I’m not sure what would make the situation better, though clearly, there needs to be some sort of genuine reform in the school before they add more money into the mix.

I do wonder what oversite measures the state has in place for these things. Certainly, the City could stand some security, itself, but this is state money. According to the article, this particular graft was caught by a local teacher. Kudos for him, but where is the oversite? $25,000 is a lot of money not to be paid attention to, how could the Rochester City School District let such large sums of money go unaccounted for and then bitch about teacher salaries?

Technorati Tags: Rochester, Schools, Marini

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Well, most of us have made it through another year. However, for those we have lost this week and last, I have decided to dedicate this vBlog to their memory. I know that, for a lot of people, the loss of a sea lion doesn’t seem like too much of a big deal, but for those of us who regularly visit the zoo, the animals there start to become familiar enough to be considered friends. Certainly for my wife, who worked at the Seneca Park Zoo, the loss was particularly difficult. This is also the third loss for the zoo this year, and I suppose there are many among the park’s employees and supporters that are happy to see this year pass by.So, my tributes to lost friends starts with Ariel the sea lion from Seneca Park Zoo. Moving on from there, I share my own personal impressions of the 38th President of our United States, Gerald Ford. I hardly knew ye. Literally.

Next up is James Brown, who I am very-much going to miss. It’s a shame that I’ve had at least two opportunities to see the man play, and missed out on both of them. Life is fleeting.

Click here to view the blog!

I promised to add some photos of Ariel to this post, so see below for those:

this blog, so see below for those.

This is kinda funny. It seems Microsoft has created a new sorta virtual reality bot-type thang search engine called Mrs. Dewey. The comely mrs. Dewey doesn’t necessarily add much to your searching, as you might expect a bot to do. Rather, she serves as sort of a cheesy, wouldn’t-it-be-great-if automated personality that says things in response to what you type in for a search.

If you’re tempted to type filthy things just to see what she says, let me assure you, you’re not alone in your juvenile pursuits. And in fact, speaking of searching for adult content, perhaps Microsoft should have done the same thing (perhaps on Google, where you get good results) prior to hiring Janina Gavankar to star as the lovely Mrs. Dewey. In doing so, they might have run across Cup of my Blood (FAIR WARNING! There be naked boobs ahead, matie!), the soft-core film of her past.

Not that I personally think that this should really invalidate her as a pseudo-sexual talking Widget, you understand. But I’m afraid that some folks in the upper offices in Redmond will likely not approve.

Enviro-Quotes is really just a minor alteration of the original Joe’s Quotes Widget along with some new icons and a new quotes list, but for those of you inspired by An Inconvenient Truth or who are of environmentalist mind-set, this may be of use.

The intent of this Widget is to allow Administrators to display helpful environmental tips for their users on a convenient sidebar, and also to allow Admins the option to link those tips to other resources for additional information. The current file includes everything from tips on keeping your car running efficiently to avoiding overuse of water when doing your laundry. Just helpful tips that perhaps your readers didn’t think of. To do this, I’ve changed a few things about the way the Widget works (for example, I’ve substituted the non-visible tab delimiters with the statistically-unlikely tilde [ ~ ] to better clarify the limits between the parts of each entry). But not much has changed otherwise.

The alterations to the original file are as follows:

1. I’ve altered the linking structure some. Whereas the original Widget simply made every quote a link back to Joe’s site, the new version allows you to define a link (or not) for each individual quote.
2. I’ve clarified the div id’s in use for this Widget and added a new one. Because I’ve removed the original link to Joe’s site, I added a div and allowed users the choice of either including the link or styling that part of the Widget to display:hidden; should they wish. Please see the advanced information in the README file included with the download.
3. The only file included with this widget is one called “efficient.txt,” and it includes all the tips printed in the final widget. I’ve also created some relevant icons which are also included.

Installation Instructions:

This one’s pretty simple, folks. Just extract the files from the download package (found here as a ZIP and here as a RAR file), upload the eqw.php and /eqw directories to your plugins directory (typically wp-content/plugins for most installations) and turn the bugger on in the Plugins page of your Admin panel. Once that’s done, you can go to your Sidebar Widgets page, slide your “Enviro-Quotes” file where you’d like, name it and you’re all set!

For additional options such as styling and creating/deleting/modifying environmental tips and tricks, please see the README.txt file included in the download package.

Additional features, bells and whistles will be considered upon request in the comments section. Also, if you’ve come up with some good tips and tricks you’d like to share with the group, feel free to either add the entries to the comments section or link to your complete file! The environment gets better when we all work together!

Warning!!! I’m going to express my unvarnished opinions quite clearly in the proceeding passages, and they’re quite a thing to see. If you’re a complete punk-ass, you might want to look elsewhere.

Of course, we all know that there is a wide rift between what we are taught in driving school about the rules of the road and what actually happens on actual roads. It’s not just a cynical statement; there are a number of occurances which might at first blush seem to be standard “written test” scenarios which for one reason or another simply aren’t. In those cases, it is the limit of each involved person’s sense of fair-play and etiquette which determines the outcome.

In this light, I suppose that many people would classify me as an “agressive driver,” though the adjective I feel is most appropriate is “authoritative.” I don’t tailgate and honk my horn, swerve back and forth behind someone I want to pass. I don’t steal parking spots, and generally, I’m fairly polite about letting people merge into my lane, or make that left-hand turn from the oncoming lane when the row of cars at a stop sign would naturally put me in their way. I simply believe that if people on the road would make their minds up and stick to their decisions, there would be a lot less accidents on the road. I won’t be at all ambiguous about where I’m going next or that I’m on the road for a reason, not simply cruising.

All of that being said, I wonder if any of you other liberals ever have this happen to you:

You’re driving down a busy street, bumper to bumper traffic all the way. Someone leaving a restaurant or store or whatever rolls up from the driveway of said establishment and angles their vehicle with the clear intent of merging into your lane, ahead of you, if possible. Under normal circumstances, you know that letting go of your clear right of way is not only the polite thing to do, but also a key component of relieving grid-lock situations, assuming others follow suit. However, the blinding flash of headlights that are perfectly parallel to your eyes tells you in no uncertain terms that the vehicle in question is an SUV, and a thought comes bubbling up unbidden to your mind.

“Fuck off, bitch.”

No? Well, you certainly don’t have to admit it to me, even if so. I’ll take one for the team and admit that, yes, indeed, I do have that feeling more and more lately. Or perhaps it is more correct to say that I’ve been feeling these sorts of things for the last few years, and just thought of a good title under which to publish them.

Why I behave that way is multifaceted. Yes, I’m complex. For one, there is something about the intimidation factor that makes me feel more agressive. Whether they realize it or not (and I don’t suspect most SUV drivers are anywhere near experienced enough large-vehicle drivers to fully cognate it), SUV drivers have a bad habit of tailgating and intimidation. I get sick of yielding to some jerk-ass who thinks the world is his personal playground where they get to bully others. In fact, I admit that on occasion I take their intimidation as something of a challenge.

But the other issue is that I’m sick of paying “petroleum welfare taxes,” for SUV drivers every time I go to the pump. I’m paying an additional penalty for people who simply cannot avoid spend conspicuously despite the ticking time-bomb of Global Warming, as is every other unlucky bastard going to the pumps these days. These crass fuckers have a far more direct impact on our lives than some fictional “welfare mama” in the here-to-fore unnammed ghetto so much a part of Republican fancy.

Allow me to turn the rhetoric of Republican anti-worker stereotype for one moment, and see if it makes any sense to you. Seriously, if you honestly have so many kids that you cannot manage to grocery shop without the aid of these gas-guzzling peices of shit, you don’t need an SUV. You need a condom.

“Oh! Was that out of bounds? Did I infringe on your freedom as a rich bitch? So sorry.”

Wrap that emaciated little fucker up and by a real car, already. The rest of us and our successive generations shouldn’t be obligated to pay for your phallic inadequacy. Ethanol and Biodiesel are not petro-phallic Viagra, they’re stop-gap measures. We need conservation, which means we don’t need your crap.

So I suppose you might say I’m starting to feel less and less sympathy for the SUV drivers of America. The favoured whippin’-bitch of American greed, the “welfare mama,” asks only for money, whereas the SUV driver demands nothing less than money, blood, oil and oxygen.

“The bum on the rods is a social flea who gets an occasional bite,
The bum on the plush is a social leech, blood suckin’ day and night.”

~ The Two Bums, a Wobbly song.

You will no doubt have noticed that things looked a little strange there, for a while. All is well, now.

. . . Is a good one.

Crimeny. I think at this point, I can safely say that I’m done shitting biscuits about the layout of the site. I’m going to go do another backup, though, before I jinx myself. Things have gotten close enough to “back to abnormal” that I can call this saga over with.

Remember, kids: backup, backup, backup. Nothing else matters in the computer world.

I completely deleted everything in my /blog directory and started fresh. I’ve thinned the herd in terms of plugins stored on my local system (there were a ton in there that I wasn’t using, along with some flatus that from previous, shall we say, “brain expulsions”), and uploaded fresh copies of WordPress and of a few necessary plugins for now. The last time I turned off my plugins, I got 30 new comments in ten minutes. Wanna bet they weren’t legit comments?

So, I think I’m done for at least the next two hours. I’ve got a ton of other stuff to do, and I’d like to let things ~ my brain foremost among them ~ mellow for a little while.

Needless to say, there will not be a video blog today. There may not be any blogs today other than status reports.

UPDATE:  OK, moving right along, now.  I think I’m going to blog on the other site (holisticnetworking.net) about the experience I’ve had.  The directions for the WordPress Widgets are not very exact at all, and do not stress enough the fact that you need an endif directive at the end of the Widget loop.  In any event, the base Template is installed, as is the Widgets Plugin.  Now, it’s just a question of getting all my stuff back in some semblance of order.  Thank the heavens that this didn’t get dragged into Christmas!

OK, so here’s the dillio:

I got sidetracked yesterday whilst looking for an answer to one question and found that there was a plugin that I might like to try.  I can’t say that this plugin is the root cause of the problem, but that did happen.  I installed the plugin fine.  It was working.  I went to style the plugin with the CSS doc, and whoa!  Did I screw that up.  I copied and pasted it into my editor program because I hate looking at it in the WordPress editor, then copied the whole thing back again.  What a freakin’ mistake that was.

So, the basics were that I’d screwed up the damned CSS file.  It’s large enough that trying to figure out what the problem was made me sick (it’s based on someone else’s stuff, and it’s insanely long as WP CSS is wont to be).  So, just go ahead and copy over a new Template and just start hacking away at the CSS till it looks right, right?  Wrong.

Somewhere in there, some PHP file or another got completely screwed up, how, I do not know.  I’m battling alternately between not being able to activate the Widgets or having the Widgets active but not being able to put them in my Sidebar Template without a parse error.  If I could only read the parse error, I’d be fine, but of course, it’s running off the page and I cannot.  I also cannot find the CSS directive that controls the overflow on that part of the Theme.

So, I freakin’ give up.  I backed up all my shit, and I’m getting ready to completely uninstall WordPress and reinstall from freshly-downloaded copies.  Before I do that, I’m going to need to go through my downloaded Plugins and determine what is and what is not going to stay in the new version.

Arg!  Merry Christmas!

Don’t ask me what the hell I did, but somehow I completely screwed up the CSS file for the WordPress Theme you are used to seeing at this blog.  Dangit!!!

So, you will no doubt notice that the current look of the blog is significantly different than it used to be.  Please bare with me.  You might even refresh the screen and see a completely different blog, depending.

Oh, well, I guess I thought it was time for a change.  It is, after all, the new year coming soon. . . .