Brandon Probst

morning glory

I woke up at 4am after going to bed at 12am. I slept straight through, which is unusual, but I still felt groggy, which chips away a little bit more f that hope that I might eventually be capable of a “good night’s sleep.” I took a caffeine pill, since it’s easier than drinking the equivalent four cups of coffee. I got dressed and brushed my teeth and everything, still sleepy and wanting to go back to bed.

I go to the kitchen and start preparing my step-dad’s breakfast as well as my own. Not even considering the caffeine pill from when I got up, I drank two and a half cans of Rockstar energy while I was making the coffee and washing dishes and all that nonsense.

From an early age, I’ve been consuming caffeine. How early? Well, Pepsi from a baby bottle. I prefer Coke nowadays, but that’s bordering on irrelevant. My point is, I have a considerable constitution when it comes to caffeine, so a hundred or two milligrams of caffeine doesn’t do much more than keep my eyes open.

So I’m kicking back these delicious cans of Rockstar. After about half an hour, it all starts to kick in pretty well. I stick to the task at hand, which is get 70% of my cooking done for the week. Muffins, breakfast, boiled eggs, so on and so forth. But those periods of inactivity while waiting for something to preheat, or something to bake are killer. I cleaned the living room during that downtime, but I still had time left, so I just stood there watching chicken cook while I twiddled my thumbs.

Finally, that came to an end, and I thought I would do what I usually do, sit and listen to my radio shows and do a few word puzzles. That wasn’t cutting it. So I got the laptop and fixed several long-unsolved bugs on something I’ve been working on, as well as set up a means of editing my stuff over the network in eclipse, which is more efficient than how I’ve been doing it.

Okay. What now? I go for a walk. Made a couple laps around the neighborhood. (fantastic weather, 61 degrees, still mildly dark out) I get back in, and lift weights for about 45 minutes. Normally after that, I just wanna sit and rest for a few minutes. Not today.

I head to my bedroom

I hope the internet is censored, and government takes complete control of our lives.

I’m an American. I’m from “the free country,” the country founded on the idea that the citizens should be free.

In recent years (some would say decades, I think I would too) we’ve lost touch about what this country is about. We’ve forgotten that “free country” isn’t just a slogan or a buzzword, it’s supposed to be the summary of what this country is. Instead, we’re more concerned about keeping ourselves safe from nonexistent threats, or having the government serve our personal interests. I like pizza. I know a lot of people who like pizza. As it is now, I have to go earn money so I can buy pizza. This is terribly inconvenient. Let’s all get together and force the government to provide us with pizza. Oh good, now the government gives me pizza, so long as I pay my taxes. Well, actually, if I make a convincing case that I can’t pay my taxes, then I don’t have to do that either. Am I implying that taxes should be sky-high? Absolutely not. In fact, I think we could eliminate most taxes, and focus on the sales tax, and we could prosper, so long as the government didn’t have to buy pizza for the whole country. Imagine your paycheck being about 30% bigger, depending on what tax bracket you’re in. I’ll admit, that’s something of an appeal to emotion. But am I really wrong in thinking that if you put in a dollar’s work, you should get a dollar’s pay? Leave it to me to pay my dues to the government, and if I don’t, I’ll be left to deal with the consequences accordingly. That’s part of that whole “innocent until proven guilty” thing. But I’m just a dumb greedy American.

Using the government as a tool to enforce your personal morals (those which infringe upon the rights of others, particularly), make your personal life easier to live, and your agenda easier to carry out, might do all of those things for a while, but in the long run, it grants the government power. And you may have forgotten that the government is made up of human beings, just like you. All those selfish, short-sighted concepts that you’ve had? So have they, and you’ve given them the power to execute them. Now we’re here: a short-and-curly away from calling the president Dear Leader. Our founding fathers had experience with this, and as such, they drafted up a few documents called The United States Constitution and the United States Bill of Rights. Constitution is defined by Merriam-Webster as “the basic principles and laws of a nation, state, or social group that determine the powers and duties of the government and guarantee certain rights to the people in it”. But it was ignored, and nobody did anything about it, in favor of having their own personal ideas enforced by the government.

And what are we doing now? Instead of taking what I’ve just said (not to imply that I’m the first to have said it; hardly the case) int account, and chucking D-cell batteries at our elected officials (or, I don’t know, not electing them in the first place), we protest those individual bills that annoy us on a personal level. Not even for the right reasons. Most people didn’t protest SOPA and PIPA because it’s the government doing something unconstitutional, but because it would inconvenience us. We wouldn’t be able to look at cat pictures with references to copyrighted material! So enough people cried loud enough that it went away. And that fixed everything, didn’t it? The American government will never again impede upon our constitutional rights, right? Sure. But back here in the cold and ugly real world, the symptom is suppressed for 6-to-8 hours, while the virus is still growing and spreading and a rapid pace.

Let’s look at this on a smaller scale. America Inc. has a chain of shops in 50 locations throughout the country. When Store #1 was opened, the founders made up a set of rules that would apply across the board. The individual stores could add rules if they wanted, as long as they didn’t impede upon those original across-the-board rules. In this setting, if some manager even attempted to set up a rule that would put a big black box over original rule #1, he, and all the other managers who signed off on it, knowing it violated across-the-board rule #1, would be fired. This isn’t what happened. Instead, the proposed rule was swept under the rug, only to be brought back later when the angry customers aren’t looking. But instead of instead of protesting this shop, they shrug it off, pay for their bread and milk and go on with their day.

tl;dr: Chocolate milk is delicious even when it’s warm.

Placeholder/Dummy-text helper for CodeIgniter

https://github.com/brandon-kp/CodeIgniter-Placeholder-dummy-text-Helper

I apologize in advance for whatever I may screw up, I have the flu, and tissues jammed in my nose, enough NyQuil to make Rush Limbaugh’s liver collapse. and Suffocation playing at volumes normally reserved for nuclear warfare alarm systems.

This little drop-in helper doesn’t require any configuration, just load it and use it. There’s currently two functions. The first one is basic lorem ipsum text, with parameters for various forms of return. You can choose whether you want back paragraphs, list items, a certain number of characters, words, basically the configuration you see on lipsum.com, minus the sneaky advertisements.

lipsum()

Examples

placeholder_img()

Examples

I think that’s all. The Github link is at the top, in case you missed it.

Recreating Tumblr’s Tag Box

http://d0p.us/mirrors/tumblrtags/

I’ve always been pretty fascinated with the design of Tumblr’s tag box. you know, the one on the right when you’re putting in a post. First off, it looks like a standard textarea, with standard placeholder text. To the user, it’s just another place to type. Then when you enter a tag, something that isn’t supposed to happen, happens: A styled element containing your tag is added to this “textarea.” Most users by now know that textareas contain text, and developers know that textareas don’t contain styled elements without some form of wizardry being pulled off.

Out of sheer boredom, I decided to recreate it. CSS+HTML+Javascript (excluding jQuery framework), it all comes out to ~123 lines, depending on how you format it, and about an hour of total time.

After finishing/uploading this, I decided to look at the page source for tumblr’s tag editor. The script is obfuscated, so I won’t post the unobfuscated version. But it’s mainly the same process as my script, but a little more complex in that it implements things like character limits and has a little more redundancy.

Calendar/wallpapers - 1920*1080

(not in order)

hubblesite.org

On Puking:

I don’t puke often. I did when I was a little kid, though. At that age, I would puke if one part of my biscuit was more cooked than another, or, if I bit into a piece of fat while eating a chicken nugget, you better have a bucket ready and in front of me. Because I wasn’t moving. When I felt that wave of nausea, I froze, because I felt like if I stood really still, I could prevent it. I couldn’t articulate that to my elders, though, so people just yelled at me “Why didn’t you at least TRY to make it to the trash can?”

Though, in recent years, I’ve barely puked at all. From 2004 to 2011, it was a total of 0 times. Then something hit me a little earlier this year. It was about 5am, and I was eating two delicious buffalo chicken sandwiches. Immediately after, I was walking toward the kitchen to clean up my dishes, as good people do after they eat, and that feeling I mentioned before hit me, and I froze, talking in my head: “Swallow enough saliva and it’ll weigh down everything that’s trying to come up, stand still enough, and it’ll all fall down into your stomach. Stand like a statue, have you ever seen a statue puke? … Okay … I think it went aw-HOOOOOOAUUUGH” I projectile vomited across the kitchen into the sink so much that my pants almost fell down. “Alright, I feel okay now. Better go brush my teeth.” After brushing my teeth and swooshing so much mouth wash around that my gums began to recede, I still had another problem. Whatever satanic bile my body had just ejected was apparently too thick to go through the drain, so the sink was literally half-way to the brim with vomit. So, I turned on the faucet, thinking the water would thin it out and it would go down. Nope. The water was floating atop the puke, while the puke was sitting undisturbed at the bottom. Thinking it has to give way at some point, I let the water keep running until it’s all the way up to the rim of the sink. At this point, I’m contemplating how I can remove the sink to carry it outside and give the birds something to feast on. In a stroke of genius, I go to the toolbox, and find this long chisel. I stick it down in the middle of this mess, and try to stir. Suddenly, I’ve dis-conglomerated the situation, and big balls of puke are floating to the top. I stir more and more and keep the water running, until it’s all in small enough pieces to be carried down the drain by the water. That’s that.

That should be a situation like “Never forget dd/mm/yyyy” but I can’t remember when it was aside from in 2011. Anyway, tonight, I wake up about every thirty minutes because of a burning in my throat. Heart burn. Nothing unusual for me, but it’s worse tonight. Well, the last time, I wake up because of that burning feeling and sit up really fast simply because of the severity of it. At first, I’m assuming whatever it is that’s burning will fizzle out and fall back down into that cesspool that must be my stomach, but it isn’t… Actually, it’s getting higher. This can’t be a situation where I should be sitting in bed, under the covers, so I sit on the edge of the bed. Still doesn’t go away, then that state of suspended animation and nausea hits me. So, with every ounce of willpower I have, I stand up and walk across the room and stand above my trash can. At that point, I’m really proud of myself for making it to the trash can. Proud of being awesome. I’m too awesome to puke. Then I puked. Then I waited for the feeling of relief, and it never came. Instead more puke did. Then the relief. So, I go brush my teeth, drink a glass of milk, and come back to clean up. And my room smells like somebody put a dead body in a vat of acid. I take the trash can outside so I can scrub it down when there’s daylight. Then I try to mop the bit that splashed on the floor. But it isn’t being absorbed, despite its liquid appearance. It’s just being moved around, like a big layer of Jello. To look at it, you would think I were on a diet of boogers, which would probably be healthier than my current diet of salami and crackers, and Mountain Dew. Anyway, I roll up this layer of boogers and slide it into one of those rolls used to ship posters and prints and stuff, and left it on the neighbor’s doorstep. Actually, enough Pine-Sol finally did something to it and made it go away somewhere.

In conclusion, I’m hoping for another seven years without puking, happy with the knowledge that I am not bulimic.

Dear Leader is dead.

And this will now be, potentially, one of the most dangerous men in the world.