RKNet Blog... Thing

More on this later, honest. There’s so much in this set of clips to ruminate over. I am not in 100% agreement with Runyon on these matters. I am also rather obstinate when I choose to be.

In the very broad strokes that I have always heard, the Christian calendar period referred to as Lent is about giving up things that are bad for you, to spiritually improve yourself by ditching nasty habits, etc. A laudable goal, but for those of us who aren’t Christian, it seems redundant in the light of New Year’s Resolutions, because there simply isn’t the church-based motivations to make it worthwhile.

Thankfully, someone has come up with an alternative: Discardia.
Discardia sounds delightfully like Discordia, and feels as though it has roots there, though it is unclear from the text on the matter whether it is indeed truly Discordian in nature. Either way, it is non-denominational and is strictly for personal growth, rather than personal growth for the sake of a religious precedent.

The premise behind Discardia is very simple.

Discardia is celebrated by getting rid of stuff and ideas you no longer need. It’s about letting go, abdicating from obligation and guilt, being true to the self you are now. Discardia is the time to get rid of things that no longer add value to your life, shed bad habits, let go of emotional baggage and generally lighten your load.

As a person who has a hard time letting go of tchotchkes and knick-knacks and guilt and obligation, this is precisely the kind of regular ritual I could really get behind. It happens multiple times a year, unlike traditional religious cleansing periods, which typically only occur during one day or period of time each year. The founders of this concept were kind enough to provide a calendar by which to prepare yourself.

This provides an opportunity for more than just a “spring cleaning” or a singular religious internal cleansing. It is a chance to inject some much needed clarity into a cluttered, hectic life at multiple times during the year. It’s really like an ultimate lifehack holiday.

Today is the first day of Discardia for this portion of the year. As the moon wanes to the position of new, and as spring draws ever closer, you can shake the stagnant air from your home, the pine needles from your rugs, the catalogues from your bathrooms, and take a nice deep breath.

Let it never be said that Twitter is a useless web app. Thanks to Twitter friend doshdosh, I’ve discovered an article which may assist me in refining my goals for this website, such as they are, and increase readership and hopefully feedback as well.

The article on problogger.net is titled From 0 to 2000+ Subscribers in 120 Days. The guest author, Tina Su, writes a blog called Think Simple Now and her passion is helping people improve their lives. The article details the steps she took to make her website successful, and they are all very positive, realistic and easy to remember.

With the assistance of this well written guide, I would like to take this blog, this site, this project and really turn it into something worth visiting, bookmarking, and subscribing to within the next 120 days. I have touched upon this goal before a few months ago but never really followed up. It’s one of the challenges with A) not having concrete goals and B) maintaining a more than full time job.

Hopefully with the help of some of my other authors, and friends who desire to do creative things and use the web for distribution, this site can become a bustling hub of super fun times for all who pass by! Won’t you tag along? It will be quite the wild ride.

Earlier today I posted the following question:

Incidentally, if anyone can help me figure out how to get my panel display to look like the one shown at the Breeze skin creator’s site, please let me know. I’ve poked around and haven’t found anything like what they’re talking about.

And then I answered my own question by downloading the Kestrel Alpha! The positioning of Panel shortcuts above the mini-browser area is a 9.5 feature, not a hack that I couldn’t figure out. Scratch that! It was merely a feature I had overlooked until now.
To get the Panel display to look like the one below, do the following:
1 - download one of the Breeze skins for Opera
2 - go to Tools > Appearance
3 - in that menu, go to Toolbars and click on the area which contains your panel links.
4 - Select “Placement” as Top
5 - select “Style” as Text Only
6 - Select “Wrapping” as Wrap To Multiple Lines

Hit OK and suddenly you have nearly 25% more width to your panel viewing area!

So the links shown here, like “bookmark”, “mail”, “contacts”, etc are all panel shortcuts, and can all be displayed above the panel display area by a simple display change in the new Opera! It’s a really nice way to conserve screen width, and it doesn’t really cut into the vertical view at all, except on the mini-browser area. Since panel content is generally designed to fit in small spaces anyway, this shift doesn’t hurt at all. If anything, it helps for certain sites which aren’t necessarily meant to be panels, like BugMeNot.

More feedback on Kestrel as I have a chance to play with it. Edit: Hopefully with better information, and not just gross oversights!

Moving up in the del.icio.us ranks is a little site called Cork’d. The concept? “Review, Cellar, and Share Wine”. Internet savvy dipsomaniacs rejoice! Now you have a place to chat about your maddening obsession with fermented grape juice of various ages, with all the charms that only a Web 2.0 named site could provide.

They’ve got a 100 point rating system for wines, and a handy price scale of 1-4 dollar signs to indicate general cost of wines.

They seem to have dozens upon dozens of different wines, but they’re lacking the one that really pops my cork: 2004 Georges Dubeuf Beaujolais Villages.

Had I the means to maintain a cellar, I’d probably be all over this site. Just like any other lifehack/organizer tool, this one’s looking pretty good at what it’s all about. Even though I’m not ready to make an account and start going all ga-ga over my perfectly preserved, carefully selected wines, I’ll definitely use this site as a reference for buying bottles of special occasion wines. Always handy to know if that bottle with the pretty label in the store is delicious or junk.

Lokesh Dhakar has produced a great visual representation of how all those fancy pants drinks you order from real coffee houses (Note: Starbucks and Dunkin’ Donuts do not count) are made. Mm…. delicious coffee.

He used wikipedia information to fuel his research, and it looks like they’ve got a pretty robust article on the subject of espresso and related beverages.

So while you’re sitting there, swilling your foul office coffee, take a gander at Lokesh’s article and plot your next escape to a house other than Maxwell House. I myself am sipping at a delightful, black-as-night cup of Kenya AA. It pays to keep your own supply on hand. Especially when you’re a jerk about coffee like me.

This has to be one of the best treatments I’ve seen thus far on the “grape plasma” experiment. It’s short, sweet, and neatly edited. Our host is also kind enough to remind us that this is not at all a safe experiment.