Officially Lucky ❡ a blog by Clint Ecker

BLDGBLOG: Artificial caverns expanding beneath Chicago

Wed, 08 Sep 2010 15:27:16 -0500

BLDGBLOG: Artificial caverns expanding beneath Chicago

My Top 5 Artists (Week Ending 2010-9-5)

Tue, 07 Sep 2010 13:57:23 -0500

My Top 5 Artists (Week Ending 2010-9-5):

Imported from Last.fm Tumblr by JoeLaz

"[L]abor Day originated in the labor movement and was conceived of by socialists. The first Labor..."

Mon, 06 Sep 2010 21:37:47 -0500

“

[L]abor Day originated in the labor movement and was conceived of by socialists.

The first Labor Day was celebrated on September 5th of 1882 in New York City. The Department of Labor claims on their website that the holiday was originally imagined as an innocuous celebration, with “[s]peeches by prominent men and women…introduced later, as more emphasis was placed upon the economic and civic significance of the holiday.”

However, the fact is that the first Labor Day saw 10,000 workers march from City Hall, past Union Square to 42nd Street as part of an “unpaid day-off” to give speeches and voice their discontent with the bosses. This was not simply the “festival for the recreation and amusement of the workers and their families” that the Department of Labor website claims. Its origins lie clearly within the militant labor tradition of this country and of the international working class.

”

- US: The History of Labor Day

“What happens when you place a small pinhole camera on the...

Mon, 06 Sep 2010 14:16:20 -0500

“What happens when you place a small pinhole camera on the top of a turntable and expose the film for the length of L America by The Doors (which is 4:35, by the way)…”

via KN | Kitsune Noir

Facebook conversation between Tim Ravndal—Montana tea party leader—and his buddies

Mon, 06 Sep 2010 13:45:45 -0500

Tim Ravndal: Marriage is between a man and a woman period! By giving rights to those otherwise would be a violation of the constitution and my own rights
Keith Baker: How dare you exercise your First Amendment Rights?
Dennis Scranton: I think fruits are decorative. Hang up where they can be seen and appreciated. Call Wyoming for display instructions.
Tim Ravndal: @Kieth, OOPS I forgot this aint(sic) America no more! @ Dennis, Where can I get that Wyoming printed instruction manual?
Dennis Scranton: Should be able to get info Gazette archives. Maybe even an illustration. Go back a bit over ten years.

Uh all of them? fuckyeahladygaga: Which cover of Hommes Japan...

Mon, 06 Sep 2010 11:38:30 -0500

Uh all of them?

fuckyeahladygaga:

Which cover of Hommes Japan Vogue will you be picking up?

"The Liberty City Seven, the Fort Dix Six, the Detroit Ummah Conspiracy, the Newburgh Four —..."

Mon, 06 Sep 2010 11:28:34 -0500

“The Liberty City Seven, the Fort Dix Six, the Detroit Ummah Conspiracy, the Newburgh Four — each has had their fear-filled day in the sun. None of these plots ever came close to happening. How could they? All were bogus from the get-go: money to buy missiles or cell phones or shoes and fancy duds — provided by the authorities; plans for how to use the missiles and bombs and cell phones — provided by authorities; cars for transport and demolition — issued by the authorities; facilities for carrying out the transactions — leased by those same authorities. Played out on landscapes manufactured by federal imagineers, the climax of each drama was foreordained. The failure of the plots would then be touted as the success of the investigations and prosecutions.”

- Essentially every homegrown terrorist plot that surfaced through the media during the Bush administration were largely orchestrated and ultimately “foiled” the FBI—most likely to scare voters & citizens, make it look like our Government was winning the war on homegrown terror when it largely never event existed.

The FBI: Foiling its own plots since 2001

Cat. Пиз”ец мне! (via THTTB)

Fri, 03 Sep 2010 11:23:24 -0500

Cat. Пиз”ец мне! (via THTTB)

Put This On • Don’t make old-timey Omar kill your ass.

Fri, 03 Sep 2010 11:21:38 -0500

Put This On • Don’t make old-timey Omar kill your ass.

Yes, this happens. It is the stupidest shit. Street Harassment...

Thu, 02 Sep 2010 15:22:06 -0500

Yes, this happens. It is the stupidest shit.

Street Harassment | Progressive Political Cartoon by Barry Deutsch

"Many of us have grown up thinking that if we are properly self-punishing then we are somehow being..."

Thu, 02 Sep 2010 14:05:06 -0500

“Many of us have grown up thinking that if we are properly self-punishing then we are somehow being responsible. “What, I’m a nervous wreck — how could I possibly take on more?” On the other hand, if, God forbid, we are feeling carefree, we have this nagging sense that we’re being downright irresponsible, certain that if we don’t get right back to self-flagellation then the other shoe is going to drop. And hard. We don’t correlate our sense of responsibility with what we are actually producing. We correlate it with how hard we are being on ourselves.”

- Worry Isn’t Work - Dan Pallotta - Harvard Business Review

Architectural Digest’s Editor-in-Chief talks about the new...

Wed, 01 Sep 2010 09:07:48 -0500

Architectural Digest’s Editor-in-Chief talks about the new Oval Office redesign.

Designers Won't Lend Dresses to Mad Men's Christina Hendricks

Wed, 01 Sep 2010 08:59:50 -0500

Designers Won't Lend Dresses to Mad Men's Christina Hendricks:

“People have been saying some nice, wonderful things about me. Yet not one designer in town will loan me a dress,” Hendricks said. “They only lend out a size 0 or 2. So I’m still struggling for someone to give me a darn dress. This has always been my size. I’ve worked on other shows with this same size but Mad Men celebrates it and that is nice.”

Penn and Teller on Vaccinations

Wed, 01 Sep 2010 08:56:16 -0500

Penn and Teller on Vaccinations

My Top 5 Artists (Week Ending 2010-8-29)

Tue, 31 Aug 2010 12:12:29 -0500

My Top 5 Artists (Week Ending 2010-8-29):

Imported from Last.fm Tumblr by JoeLaz

Cider - A Development Environment for Macs

Tue, 31 Aug 2010 09:39:01 -0500

Cider - A Development Environment for Macs:

Cider is a fully managed development environment for open source hacking on Mac OSX. It’s powered by rvm, homebrew and chef. You only need Xcode to get started.

Cider builds everything up in ~/Developer. It won’t stomp on any of your current installations so you don’t have to commit your entire machine immediately. It’s simple to rollback if you really want to.

On iOS PhoneGap Notifications

Sat, 28 Aug 2010 16:18:00 -0500

The documentation for this in the PG docs are a little anemic when it comes to this topic for some reason, so I’m putting this out there.

Some of the time when you present a modal dialog like ``alert'' and almost always when your present a ``confirm'' you want to perform some action when the dialog is dismissed.

The ``alert()'' and ``confirm()'' calls in normal web development are blocking and thus you do not use the typical “callback” event-driven method you might be used to in the mostly event-driven world of web development. In these cases the main-thread is blocked until the dialog is dismissed and you’re passed back some sort of data on which button was pressed (in the case of a confirmation dialog).

The call for showing an alert in PhoneGap looks something like this (and this is how it is presented in the documentation):

navigator.notification.alert(message, title, buttonText);

What isn’t documented at all is that this method returns what Obj-C/Cocoa developers call a “delegate” (checked into master on May 10, 2010). A delegate is just an object which has various known method names which the Notification object can call when the dialog is dismissed. This is pretty much like a callback, except instead of just passing in a named or anonymous callback to the ``notification.alert'' call, you are returned this delegate which you can plop your callback into, like so:

delegate = navigator.notification.alert(message, title, buttonText);

delegate.onAlertDismissed = callback;

When the user clicks the button on this alert, the ``callback'' method will be executed and passed in two bits of information, an ``index'' and a ``label'' which correspond to the button you pressed.

If you looked at the docs, you might wonder why this is useful when you can only show an alert which only has a single button. Well what is also not in the docs is that there is a parallel ``notification.confirm'' method which can display multiple buttons (two, really). What’s also not explained is that this just calls out to the “notification.alert” method with a ``buttonText'' which is just a comma-delimited string with your button labels, like so:

delegate = navigator.notification.confirm("You done goofed!", "Back traced!", "Crap,Lulz");

This is exactly equivalent to the following:

delegate = navigator.notification.alert("You done goofed!", "Back traced!", "Crap,Lulz");

The only advantage of the ``notification.confirm'' call is that it makes your code more understandable and if you just want “OK” and “Cancel” you don’t have to pass in any parameters for buttonLabel.

Hope this helps anyone out who is looking for this information!

Ask a real musician: 5 classic male metal singers

Sat, 28 Aug 2010 14:12:07 -0500

Ask a real musician: 5 classic male metal singers:

Super cool analysis and 5 (or 4) really awesome singers:

If you’re a singer, you should be following Claudia Friedlander’s blog. The classically-trained, New York-based voice teacher provides sage advice not only for singers for all types, but also for musicians and people in general.

Although at least one of her students sings metal, Friedlander knows virtually nothing about it. I wondered what she would think of some of metal’s most classic male singers – the foundation of the artform. It’s rare to find someone who isn’t familiar with any of these singers. Her perspective would be a fresh one, free of cultural baggage. I sent her five completely unidentified songs. Her comments are below. I have also included initial reactions she sent me immediately upon hearing the singers.

Whoa.

Sat, 28 Aug 2010 13:35:31 -0500

Whoa.

Hungover Owls

Tue, 24 Aug 2010 16:59:54 -0500

Hungover Owls:

chartier:

A great new Tumblr blog. Twice I laughed out loud in Argo Tea.

via Cesar Torres