Thursday, October 18, 2012

The Poet - a poem

The Poet (inspired by Dylan Thomas's reading of "Poem in October". Sorry Dylan.)

the poet who loves his own voice's song
waxes on and on about nothing.
charming women of a certain sort
their perfume stiff and cloying
as their flowered dresses
and unfriendly looks.
all poisoning my taste for poetry books.

~afn

Tuesday, September 25, 2012

Aliens (1986) as Political Metaphor

If you haven't seen it recently, Aliens (1986) is worth a look.

I mean, a corporate shill seeking profits at all costs. A former warrant officer who's been through hell, trying to make her way back to the world is called to a suicide mission under false pretenses. She's accompanied by a contingent of (Colonial) Marines slated to do the corporation's heavy lifting under false pretenses of their own: a pittance with the promise of greater glory and national duty. Only to be sacrificed as expendable in the face of an apocolyptic menace. The baddest among the heroes' ranks, two women and a little girl, all of whom are the embodiment of survival. And to top it all off, a faceless corporation acting as puppet master.

All I'm saying is when the hell did Wall Street and CEO's become the nation's heros? After this movie, I couldn't even watch "Mad About You", I hated Paul Reiser's character in "Aliens" (Burke) so much. I could hardly feel warm and fuzzy about a CEO, post-Union Carbide and in the midst of savings and loan bailouts. And in the balance, we have Ellen Ripley, Vasquez, and Newt. The working class mother, the soldier, and the future. Battered and bloodied but unbowed. There go you heroes! And in a final ballet of mecha-Tai-Chi who should arise as humanity's salvation? Ripley. Even when she's down, you can never count her out! We may not have Ripley yet, damned if we need another Burke.

And as the creepy skittering noises post-credits prove, even with Ripley on our team, we might not be able to "sleep all the way home", but at least we've got Hope.

Sunday, March 04, 2012

Drupal 7 + OpenID: First Attempt

So it worked, but with caveats. Here's what worked:
  • associating exiting account with Google profile for OpenID (e.g. https://profiles.google.com/profilename)
  • logging into existing account using Google profile OpenID
  • OpenID Selector module for logging into existing account
Here are the caveat:
New logins using OpenID did not create new account. My attempts to login were met with the message:
Complete the registration by filling out the form below.
Unfortunately, for said form...and for me, no form below to be found. I am using a custom theme, to which I've added a custom (very simple) maintenance page template. So at this point, I'm trying to figure out what variables and custom functions I need to add to get the registration working. No luck yet (and marginal incentive as there's other more pressing stuff to finish), but here are some links I'll be checking out when I have a moment:

Thursday, March 01, 2012

Drupal 7 Notice: undefined index node workflow_tokens()

Was getting the following messages on my Drupal 7 site:
Notice: Trying to get property of non-object in workflow_tokens() (line 189 of /var/www/drupal/sites7/all/modules/contrib/workflow/workflow.module).

Notice: Undefined index: node in workflow_tokens() (line 188 of /var/www/drupal/sites7/all/modules/contrib/workflow/workflow.module).
First I tried updating the workflow status for all the content I'd created for the site (about 12 nodes of sample content) to publish. Still saw the error, then remembered that earlier, I was getting notices from the Page Title module:
Notice: Trying to get property of non-object in views_page_title_pattern_alter() (line 47 of /var/www/drupal/sites7/all/modules/contrib/page_title/modules/views.page_title.inc).
I redefined the default for the page title settings to use the content page title token rather than the node title. Then defined the titles (using the node title token) for the custom nodes I'd defined on my site. This seemed to resolve the workflow_tokens notices.
Lookinig at the code it seems like the node argument required for the workflow_tokens function was not properly defined by the time lines 188 and 189 were reached in the processing. Not sure why this was occurring or how the Page Title module was impacting the function so if anyone can shed some light on that it could be helpful down the line.