I’d probably have a real itchy trigger finger; blowing character’s heads clean off would cause me to ceaselessly cackle as i wheel about looking for more victims, and more nastiness to get into.

Soldiers, however, do not live in video games. They kill real people. Actual human beings, with lives and families and friends and day jobs – be they evildoers or just innocent civilians, caught in the line of fire. Sometimes, though, things go wrong. Horribly, horribly wrong.

Frankly, it’s getting a little tedious, hearing and reading about all the civilian deaths in Iraq. It has been going on for a long time, after all.

That’s why i put off reading this The Nation piece (alt.link.print) for about a week before i got around to reading it.

The Iraq War is a vast and complicated enterprise… Fighting in densely populated urban areas has led to the indiscriminate use of force and the deaths at the hands of occupation troops of thousands of innocents.

I can not and will not blame soldiers en masse or individually. It’s a real bad situation over there, and we need to get those guys out of there as quickly as we possibly can, before more soldiers crack under pressure and bring the whole damn thing down.

It’s ok to be against the war and NOT spit on returning soldiers. That kind of folly is for idiot hippies with misguided frustration. These guys need a lot of help, from many different angles. War does terrible things to a man’s soul. But we must have hope that these inner demons can be defeated, every last one of them, for every last soldier who was there and saw bad things happen.

The bottom line: we’ve gotta get out of that place.

In the four long years of the war, the mounting civilian casualties have already taken a heavy toll–both on the Iraqi people and on the US servicemembers who have witnessed, or caused, their suffering. Iraqi physicians… published a study late last year… that estimated that 601,000 civilians have died since the March 2003 invasion… [They] found that coalition forces were responsible for 31 percent of these violent deaths, an estimate they said could be “conservative,” since “deaths were not classified as being due to coalition forces if households had any uncertainty about the responsible party.”

“Just the carnage, all the blown-up civilians, blown-up bodies that I saw,” Specialist [Jeff] Englehart said. “I just–I started thinking, like, Why? What was this for?”

“It just gets frustrating,” Specialist [Garett] Reppenhagen said. “Instead of blaming your own command for putting you there in that situation, you start blaming the Iraqi people…. So it’s a constant psychological battle to try to, you know, keep–to stay humane.”

According to the Washington Post article above, ~20,000 pieces of people have thus far been found. ~2,749 died in the attack. This means that, statistically, every person who died at the World Trade Center that day was blown into an average of about 7 pieces.

Really brings it home, huh?

[youtube]jkft2qaKv_o[/youtube]

This is the new version of RuBot by Pete Redmond from Dublin, Ireland. It’s very different to the prototype but it has to be the coolest looking robot solver ever. There are cameras in the eyes of the head that scan the cube before the pneumatic arms solve it. It usually solves the Cube in a max of about 50 seconds (not including the scan) no matter how much it is mixed up.

The solving algorithm is taken care of by Herbert Kociemba’s Cube Explorer software and usually solves the cube in a maximum of about 20 moves. In this video, the cube wasn’t mixed up too hard so RuBot was able to find the optimum solution.

Thanks to all of those who think it is too good to be true. That is a real compliment!

And sometimes I just want to stab my fucking eyes out. O, how cruelly naive I can be!

Also at work today, i received an e-mail that gave me an idea for a new micro-podcast (which i’ve christened a nanocast; get it?), and the following, unrelated, e-mail (spacing, spelling, and complete and total obliteration of conventional rules of syntax and grammar intentionally left intact for humiliation):

Two thing return .  29.99  and   14.99   just one return no . Just two  things back to you .  Still owe me  14.99   that is correct and miss one   don’t say 14.99   I bet that you forget put on it .    Thanks  !

[sic]

(Translation: I also returned another item which I noticed you do not have listed on the return confirmation e-mail which I have received but failed to include for your reference. Can you provide further information on this issue? Is it possible that it could have somehow been lost?)

Q: What was the customer’s name?

A: If you guessed “Sharon Rogers,” you’d be sadly correct. Not only that, but she was from Arizona.

Bonus: If you can guess to whom those other names belong, you are not only smarter than “Sharon Rogers,” you are indeed worthy of being enshrined as a Thinking Person.

NOTE: names and places have been changed to protect the imbecile’s privacy.

What I’ve been doing the past couple of days is turning my CSS files into dynamic style sheets, renaming them with .php extensions and serving them up, after preprocessing, as CSS. Doing this allows me to use a thing called a sniffer which looks at the User Agent string browsers send when doing HTTP requests to servers, which allows me to see to what I’m delivering content, $Browser on $Platform (e.g., Safari browser on Mac OS X), so that I can send either PNG images or GIFs. The only real reason for doing this is just because PNGs can be semi-transparent, except that all but the very latest Internet Explorer beta have serious problems reading semi-transparency (called “alpha” transparency).

This is something of a specialty of mine. For those who know me online, my old site was one of the first wave of sites to use semi-transparent backgrounds.

Like I said, this is complicated stuff. So now I’ve got a sniffer going “if $browser equals ‘IE’ on Win, set $imgExt to ‘.gif’, otherwise set $imgExt to ‘.png’”. And then I’m making a PNG and a GIF for every background that I want to see through. Meanwhile, all three subthemes have got several places where they reference $imgFileXX.$imgExt for different backgrounds.

So I’m pointing, and I’m pointing, and I’m pointing, referencing this variable to get to that variable to get to an image file to put in an element. Up until this very moment, I was doing all this without a particularly coherent strategy. That changes. Now. Because I only just now realized that I had been rearranging things trying to come up with reasonable alternative GIF images to send to Infernal Exploiter versions less than 7, and I’ve turned around at noticed that I have left one hell of a wreck in my wake. I now have way too many unused background images (failed experiments), and have tossed the variables standing in for the filenames like so much salad, resulting in a chaotic mess for all the good browsers out there who actually know how to deal with PNG images!

Guess you’d have to be there.

So tomorrow, I’m going to sit and think and make a god damned chart, so I can have a set pattern across all subthemes (e.g., Image5 is for alternate comments, Image10 is for the post background).

As they say, hindsight is 20/20.

Oh, btw, I’ve named the first three subthemes “Leather” (brown and tan spaceship interior), “Saturn” (white, black, and dark teal; very clean and high-contrast), and “transmothra 3.0″ (black, smoky indigo, and blue) (this last being a bit of an homage to the final version of my very nicely done old site, thankyouverymuch).

Now that I’ve said all that… it’s probably going to be another week before this thing is actually ready enough to be unveiled. It’ll be worth the wait, I promise.

Sigh.