I discovered the technique
of using functionality plugins several months ago and was reluctant at first.
When building a site with WordPress using my own theme, I usually just dump any
custom functionality I want into the functions.php file. But the idea
with functionality plugins is that you put non-theme-specific code into a plugin
instead. This prevents your code from being overridden when changing themes.
It’s been a long time waiting for a lot of red tape to clear up and a surgery to undergo (one year and four months, to be exact), but today my brother and I finally got our first dose of Spinraza (nusinersen), the first drug approved to treat spinal muscular atrophy.
In this riveting biography of Dennis Rodman, Wolf Blitzer details the quest of the NBA star of ‘90s fame to save the future, a future where all Americans speak Korean and worship the God of Olympia (Rodman himself), second only to the Eternal Leader, Kim Jong-un.
One of the first things I had to do as a newly minted web developer was make elements on the page reactive beyond what I could do with my months of study of JavaScript and jQuery. I was introduced to Knockout and Vue at around that time, and I’ve tinkered a little with React.
I haven’t been updating this blog much for the last two years, partly because it’s a blog and that’s what you do with blogs, and partly because I’ve spent the last two years doing a lot of things and making a lot of changes to my life, personal and professional.
The late French philosopher Rene Girard was known for his theory of mimetic desire — that we desire something after seeing someone else desire it, then fight over it, then find a scapegoat to blame all the aftermath on so that we can go back to being at peace with one another.
Lately, I’ve been reading The Harvard Classics when I get a chance, and I am currently on Volume 10, which is The Wealth of Nations, the foundational treatise spelling out the classical principles of free trade and commerce. Written between the years 1766 and 1776 by the English philosopher Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations is one of those classics that remind you why you read the classics.
I have a confession to make. Back when I was a rather young and ignorant intern at WLBT in Jackson, the only things I was trusted with besides eating donuts was writing the simple, one-line teasers before the commercials and an occasional filler-story summarizing a national news piece from the “wire” (love saying that).
There’s an inside joke about the big Methodist church on the corner of Henderson and Siwell, just a couple of minutes from my family’s house in Byram, Mississippi. A friend of mine, with her usual sarcastic New Jersey sense of humor, called it Six Flags over Jesus when we passed by it one day. The name stuck despite its irreverence.
This is a question that comes up often between my friends and me. In fact, it has come up twice with two different friends just this past week.
I know just enough about computers and programming to be dangerous. My brother would correct me and say I don’t know anything about programming, because HTML and CSS doesn’t count, he says. It’s markup. Nevertheless, I like to fancy that when I write these posts and when I make HTML ebooks, I am programming.
I’ve got a lot of projects in the oven right now, including learning French, preparing for what I want to do for a proposal/dissertation, working a content management job, doing creative writing, learning Chinese, going to church like I’m supposed to, etc. I’m not very organized, and some projects and commitments seem to slip slowly but surely to that dark place known as the Great and Terrible Back Burner.
“I well know what temptations are, and that one of the greatest of them is to put it into a man’s head that he can write a book and have it printed, and thereby earn as much fame as money and as much money as fame.” — Miguel de Cervantes (Don Quixote II, prologue)
They say aspartame can kill us. I’ve always loved the blue packet myself, especially after I came down with diabetes in the summer of 2010.
It sounds like a cheapskate move. I am aware of this, but let me explain.
Back years ago, my grandparents used to reminisce about the days when Pawpaw was a traveling ironing board salesman. I’m not sure about the details, since I wasn’t around back then, but apparently one of Pawpaw’s first jobs as a married man was to go around door to door selling ironing boards. It didn’t last long, and it doesn’t seem like my grandmother, whom I call Mimi, ever took it very seriously and was glad when he finally got off the idea.
I hope you like my blog. I will post periodically and share on Facebook things that I am doing with my life and some creative writing.