Great article over at Vandelay Design for anyone interested in hacking WordPress categories. Really helpful.

Just a heads-up announcing a benefit concert for the March of Dimes that will be Friday, August 28th at 7pm at Coffee Break near UMKC. Here’s a map and directions or visit the Coffee Break Facebook page!

Coffee Break is providing space for us to have kids’ music and entertainment from Dino O’Dell and Dennis Porter and try to spread the word about the March of Dimes’ mission. In addition to great drinks, Coffee Break also offers great sandwiches and snacks.

A small donation is asked for at the door to help the March of Dimes fight for every baby to be born healthy.

Was looking into Kindle publishing at Amazon for a friend and discovered that it’s a real pain in the neck. Here’s a thread breaking down the basic “what do I have to do to my Word doc to make this thing work” questions. Also, forget about simply uploading your existing PDF files or anything with tables. Buh buh formatting. Here’s a thread listing all the formats that Kindle “supports.” Problem is, it really only supports HTML. They use a special page non-HTML break tag, which explains some things. Headers, footers, and page numbers need to be removed. The forums are chocked full of complaints about the lack of publishing tools, and I couldn’t agree more. What a mess.

Been tinkering around with custom Joomla 1.5 component development. Here are some helpful getting started links with “Hello world” -level tutorials:

1. vojtechovsky.net
2. softmarket.ro
3. packtpub.com

The health care fight has turned ugly, fast. So the gang at MoveOn.org put this handy dandy list together (with sources) rebutting the key lies and misinformation circulating about the proposed plan. See below…

Lie #1: President Obama wants to euthanize your grandma!

The truth: These accusations—of “death panels” and forced euthanasia—are, of course, flatly untrue. As an article from the Associated Press puts it: “No ‘death panel’ in health care bill.”⁴ What’s the real deal? Reform legislation includes a provision, supported by the AARP, to offer senior citizens access to a professional medical counselor who will provide them with information on preparing a living will and other issues facing older Americans.⁵

Lie #2: Democrats are going to outlaw private insurance and force you into a government plan!

The truth: With reform, choices will increase, not decrease. Obama’s reform plans will create a health insurance exchange, a one-stop shopping marketplace for affordable, high-quality insurance options.⁶Included in the exchange is the public health insurance option—a nationwide plan with a broad network of providers—that will operate alongside private insurance companies, injecting competition into the market to drive quality up and costs down.⁷

If you’re happy with your coverage and doctors, you can keep them.⁸ But the new public plan will expand choices to millions of businesses or individuals who choose to opt into it, including many who simply can’t afford health care now.

Lie #3: President Obama wants to implement Soviet-style rationing!

The truth: Health care reform will expand access to high-quality health insurance, and give individuals, families, and businesses more choices for coverage. Right now, big corporations decide whether to give you coverage, what doctors you get to see, and whether a particular procedure or medicine is covered—that is rationed care. And a big part of reform is to stop that.

Health care reform will do away with some of the most nefarious aspects of this rationing: discrimination for pre-existing conditions, insurers that cancel coverage when you get sick, gender discrimination, and lifetime and yearly limits on coverage.⁹ And outside of that, as noted above, reform will increase insurance options, not force anyone into a rationed situation.

Lie #4: Obama is secretly plotting to cut senior citizens’ Medicare benefits!

The truth: Health care reform plans will not reduce Medicare benefits.¹⁰ Reform includes savings from Medicare that are unrelated to patient care—in fact, the savings comes from cutting billions of dollars in overpayments to insurance companies and eliminating waste, fraud, and abuse.¹¹

Lie #5: Obama’s health care plan will bankrupt America!

The truth: We need health care reform now in order to prevent bankruptcy—to control spiraling costs that affect individuals, families, small businesses, and the American economy.

Right now, we spend more than $2 trillion dollars a year on health care.¹² The average family premium is projected to rise to over $22,000 in the next decade¹³—and each year, nearly a million people face bankruptcy because of medical expenses.¹⁴ Reform, with an affordable, high-quality public option that can spur competition, is necessary to bring down skyrocketing costs. Also, President Obama’s reform plans would be fully paid for over 10 years and not add a penny to the deficit.¹⁵

P.S. Want more? Check out this great new White House “Reality Check” website: http://www.whitehouse.gov/realitycheck/ or this excellent piece from Health Care for America Now on some of the most outrageous lies: http://www.moveon.org/r?r=51729&id=16778-3566365-cNUWWix&t=1

Sources:

1. “More ‘Town Halls Gone Wild’: Angry Far Right Protesters Disrupt Events With ‘Incomprehensible’ Yelling,”Think Progress, August 4, 2009.
   http://www.moveon.org/r?r=51733&id=16778-3566365-cNUWWix&t=2
2. “Fight the smears,” Health Care for America NOW, accessed August 10, 2009.
   http://www.moveon.org/r?r=51729&id=16778-3566365-cNUWWix&t=3
3. “Palin Paints Picture of ‘Obama Death Panel’ Giving Thumbs Down to Trig,” ABC News, August 7, 2009.
   http://www.moveon.org/r?r=51728&id=16778-3566365-cNUWWix&t=4
4. “No ‘death panel’ in health care bill,” The Associated Press, August 10, 2009.
   http://www.moveon.org/r?r=51747&id=16778-3566365-cNUWWix&t=5
5. “Stop Distorting the Truth about End of Life Care,” The Huffington Post, July 24, 2009.
   http://www.moveon.org/r?r=51730&id=16778-3566365-cNUWWix&t=6
6. “Reality Check FAQs,” WhiteHouse.gov, accessed August 11, 2009.
   http://www.whitehouse.gov/realitycheck/faq#i1
7. “Why We Need a Public Health-Care Plan,” The Wall Street Journal, June 24, 2009.
   http://www.moveon.org/r?r=51737&id=16778-3566365-cNUWWix&t=7
8. “Obama: ‘If You Like Your Doctor, You Can Keep Your Doctor,’” The Wall Street Journal, 15, 2009.
   http://www.moveon.org/r?r=51736&id=16778-3566365-cNUWWix&t=8
9. “Reality Check FAQs,” WhiteHouse.gov, accessed August 10, 2009.
   http://www.whitehouse.gov/realitycheck/faq#r1
10. “Obama: No reduced Medicare benefits in health care reform,” CNN, July 28, 2009.
    http://www.moveon.org/r?r=51748&id=16778-3566365-cNUWWix&t=9
11. “Reality Check FAQs,” WhiteHouse.gov, accessed August 10, 2009.
    http://www.whitehouse.gov/realitycheck/faq#s1
12. “Reality Check FAQs,” WhiteHouse.gov, accessed August 10, 2009.
    http://www.whitehouse.gov/realitycheck/faq#c1
13. “Premiums Run Amok,” Center for American Progress, July 24, 2009.
    http://www.moveon.org/r?r=51667&id=16778-3566365-cNUWWix&t=10
14. “Medical bills prompt more than 60 percent of U.S. bankruptcies,” CNN, June 5, 2009.
    http://www.moveon.org/r?r=51735&id=16778-3566365-cNUWWix&t=11
15. “Reality Check FAQs,” WhiteHouse.gov, accessed August 10, 2009.
    http://www.whitehouse.gov/realitycheck/faq#c1

Sources for the Five Lies:

1. “A euthanasia mandate,” The Washington Times, July 29, 2009.
   http://www.moveon.org/r?r=51732&id=16778-3566365-cNUWWix&t=12
2. “It’s Not An Option,” Investor’s Business Daily, July 15, 2009.
   http://www.moveon.org/r?r=51743&id=16778-3566365-cNUWWix&t=13
3. “Rationing Health Care,” The Washington Times, April 21, 2009.
   http://www.moveon.org/r?r=51742&id=16778-3566365-cNUWWix&t=14
4. “60 Plus Ad Is Chock Full Of Misinformation,” Media Matters for America, August 8, 2009.
   http://www.moveon.org/r?r=51734&id=16778-3566365-cNUWWix&t=15
5. “Obama’s ‘Public’ Health Plan Will Bankrupt the Nation,” The National Review, May 13, 2009.
   http://www.moveon.org/r?r=51744&id=16778-3566365-cNUWWix&t=16

As previously mention here, we had a library CD stuck in our kids’ 20″ iMac (Intel). You can see the previous post to get up to speed if interested, but the bottom line is that is has been removed. It took four suction cups, a TORX 8 and TORX 6 driver, along with various other jewelers-type Phillips heads, two people, a bright flashlight, and about an hour and a half on a clean, padding tablecloth. Whew.

The instructions I mentioned in the previous post were designed to open a similar unit up and remove the hard drive, so our proceedure was slightly different but not on the points that mattered. The key, in the end, was that even once you expose the optical drive and remove it from the plastic housing that holds it in the unit, you still won’t be able to get the CD out without physically dismantling the optical drive… which, as it turns out, is a simple matter of remove 3 or 4 eyeglass-style Phillips screws, removing the top casing, and voila… the CD is just sitting there waiting to be removed. It was this particular step (the removing of the top casing) that Apple was wary of; the Genius had told me that if their policy is not to use/trust optical drives once this has been done. I’m not sure why, though, since the unit is not hermetically sealed like hard drives, and there was basically nothing that could be broken in the operation, provided you simply removed the CD and closed the thing back up.

Anyway, mission accomplished! We’ve tested the unit with blank discs (that we didn’t care about) to see if the eject mechanism is working, and all seems well. What a relief! Mental note… get AppleCare whenever possible. =)

A month or so ago we checked out some CDs from the library and popped them into the kids’ slot-loading iMac at home. The first CD didn’t eject. It has some sort of metal security strips affixed to the top, and is covered with a thin layer of clear plastic to keep the metal strips down. On top of this are also some other library labels. Bottom line: it’s too thick to come out of the optical drive on its own. There’s no manual eject button, and the usual means to trigger an eject “work” but fail to provide enough force to eject the CD. The powered eject mechanism inside the drive just isn’t strong enough.

What to do? A trip to the Apple Store didn’t help. At the Apple Store they confirmed by fears that there’s no way to get it out short of removing the optical drive from the iMac and dismantling it to extract the CD. Apple doesn’t trust dismantled optical drives to be put back together (can’t say I blame them) and so charges for a replacement optical drive. In the end it would cost around $300+ to get the CD out and have a workable optical drive. Ugh! I asked the Apple Genius about getting the thing apart and mentioned my success with a Mac Mini and the “putty knife method.” He let me know that it was much more complicated than the Mini and involved… wait for it… suction cups. Yes, suction cups.

Stupid library CDs.

After the success of my MacBook Pro upgrade, I’m going to attempt this repair myself. Don’t have much to lose. =) cNet has a great set of instructions on getting the iMac unit apart. I have all the tools ready, so it’s just a matter of getting the time. There’s also a brief video about the process.

HR’s Industrial Strength Portal has a great round-up of settings/conditions you can check inside Joomla 1.5 templates in order to dynamically adjust your layout. Outstanding! =)

Out of the box, Joomla 1.5 is a powerhouse of functionality. But as with any stock system, there are a few things that may need to be tweeked in order to get the result you want or expect. Take Joomla menu controls for instance. They’re fine and functional, and 90% of the time no additional work is necessary. But a common practice with menus is to output them as unordered lists (ul) and then style them with CSS instructions. So, say you want to have your menu display on a horizontal line, with pipe separators between each menu item. Easy enough to define a style for this by specifying a right- or left-side border for list items in the menu. But since that rule would apply to all the list items (including first and last), you’ll have an extra pipe (at the end or the beginning). With manually constructed menus you can simply add a special class to the last (or first) list item that will style it differently (to remove the unwanted pipe). But with Joomla menus, each list item is the same, so there’s no ability to tag one with a special class. What to do?

That’s where Joomla 1.5′s new drop-dead simple module override functionality comes into play. Jisse Reitsma explains it very well over at his tutorial on Joomla module overrides at Open Source Network. In his tutorial, he explains how to alter the menu module to automatically tag the first and last list item with “first” and “last” classes. The short version is that Joomla 1.5 allows you to define a module override by simply making a folder named the same as the module you are modifying, copying the output template of the module into this new folder, and adjusting as necessary. So in essence, you’re copying a part of the module into a new location (see tutorial for specifics), modifying it, and Joomla automatically uses your modified version instead of the stock version. This prevents your mod from getting overwritten by Joomla upgrades. Brilliant!

I’ve already got this technique working on a couple of my own installations, and plan to add this mod to every theme from now on. That is, unless the Joomla devs go ahead and just build it into into the core at some point. Hint hint.

Well, I must confess that this WordPress plugin for Joomla would rock if it works as described. Comments on the page are hit and miss, so looks like I’ll have to try it out for myself to get a better idea. Groan. =)