When Sarah Palin was selected as John McCain’s running mate in 2008 I was interested. When she gave her acceptance speech I fell in love (politically speaking). Here was a sharp, principled conservative who breathed life into John McCain’s campaign. The more I found out about her, the more I liked her. I read her book and was impressed. I started to think that she might have a chance to run for president. She had a history of winning as an underdog and a political outsider and impeccable conservative credentials. This is what I wanted in a president. Could Sarah Palin be the next Ronald Reagan? Okay, I guess I’m getting a little ahead of myself.

This election cycle is revealing some things about Palin, though, that are giving me concern. First of all, she is supporting John McCain over J.D. Hayworth in the Arizona senate race. Now I understand the importance of loyalty, especially in politics. I don’t expect her to betray her friend, especially the one who was responsible for her big break into national politics. But she should recognize that John McCain is not very conservative. J.D. Hayworth is clearly the better candidate. She should state her support for John McCain and then stay out of the race. But that isn’t what she’s done. Instead, she’s actively supported McCain, campaigning and fund raising for him.

What has really soured me on Sarah, though, is her involvement in Idaho’s first congressional district race between Vaughn Ward and Raul Labrador. She met Vaughn Ward during the presidential campaign where he managed the state of Nevada for John McCain. Later on she endorsed him in the race against Labrador which wasn’t a complete surprise but was a disappointment.

You see, Ward seems to be a carpetbagger who moved to Idaho in order to campaign here. He owns a home in Virginia where he and his family live. More disturbing still, he’s received endorsements from much of the Washington elite and the “good old boy” Republican establishment here in Idaho. He doesn’t have a legislative record and has made one campaign blunder after another. So far, he has shown himself to be a poor politician who won’t stand a chance against Walt Minnick in November. (See Tea Party Boise’s Labrador endorsement for more details.)

His opponent, Raul Labrador, was one of the strongest conservatives in the Idaho house. With four years of legislative experience, Labrador has built a great conservative record and has made enemies of the political establishment because he hasn’t been willing to compromise on conservative issues. According to what she has said about herself, this is the kind of candidate that Sarah Palin should be supporting, right? Apparently not.

Still, I could understand Sarah Palin supporting her friend. This Friday, though, she will be coming to Idaho to campaign for Vaughn Ward and against Raul Labrador. She’s fighting against a “common sense conservative,” the kind of candidate she claims to support. It’s not just Idaho: she’s done the same thing in Arizona and California and this makes me question her reliability. Can I trust her judgment at all?

A political leader (and especially a president) is only as effective as the people with which they surround themselves. It would not appear that Sarah Palin has displayed very good political discernment and it seems to be a continuing trend.

Sarah: be a champion for conservative values and keep an open mind. Choose the best candidate every time. Your intense loyalty to your friends seems to be blinding you to political and ideological flaws that are pretty obvious to the rest of us. I want to like you, but I don’t trust your judgment any more and that is crucial.

Filed under: Politics on May 20th, 2010 | No Comments »

It’s easy to get the YouTube thumbnail for a video, but Vimeo is a little bit harder. I’ve run into a few situations where I was using PHP and needed to get the thumbnail pulled. Each time I have to go back and reconstruct code that I’ve found from the web. I’ve also run into fopen errors, so I rebuilt the code to use cURL and wrapped it in a handy function. This code will get you any data you need from Vimeo:

function getVimeoInfo($id, $info = 'thumbnail_medium') {
	if (!function_exists('curl_init')) die('CURL is not installed!');
	$ch = curl_init();
	curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, "http://vimeo.com/api/v2/video/$id.php");
	curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);
	curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
	curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 10);
	$output = unserialize(curl_exec($ch));
	$output = $output[0][$info];
	curl_close($ch);
	return $output;
}

To use this function, simply call it with the info you are looking for. By default, the function will return the medium thumbnail.


echo getVimeoInfo(644453);
echo getVimeoInfo(644453,"thumbnail_small");


Here are the values that you can get:

• id
• title
• description
• url
• upload_date
• mobile_url
• thumbnail_small
• thumbnail_medium
• thumbnail_large
• user_name
• user_url
• user_portrait_small
• user_portrait_medium
• user_portrait_large
• user_portrait_huge
• stats_number_of_likes
• stats_number_of_plays
• stats_number_of_comments
• duration
• width
• height
• tags

UPDATE: D.O. sent over an alternate function to use if you have multiple pieces of data you need to get from each video (so that you don't have to keep running the function over and over again).

function getVimeoInfo($id) {
                if (!function_exists('curl_init')) die('CURL is not installed!');
                $ch = curl_init();
                curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, "http://vimeo.com/api/v2/video/$id.php");
                curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);
                curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
                curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 10);
                $output = unserialize(curl_exec($ch));
                $output = $output[0];
                curl_close($ch);
                return $output;
}

$VideoInfo = getVimeoInfo($id);
$thumb = $VideoInfo['thumbnail_medium'];
$tags = $VideoInfo ['tags'];
$longdesc = $VideoInfo ['description'];

Filed under: Internet on April 5th, 2010 | 7 Comments »

Have you ever heard of The Five Love Languages by Gary Chapman? The basic premise of the book is that there are five different ways that all people give and receive love and that we need to give our spouses love in a way that they can accept it the most. It’s an excellent book and one I’d highly recommend.I recently had the opportunity to work on their website at www.5lovelanguages.com and got to build a really neat assessment tool which lets you take a 30-question test and discover what your “love langauges” are. Here’s an embeddable version of the test to take right here. Hope you enjoy it.

Filed under: Family on February 22nd, 2010 | 1 Comment »

One of the features in WordPress 2.9 that I was the most excited about was comment meta. This allows us to use the WordPress comment fields much more robustly and do some really cool stuff. Unfortunately there’s no documentation added on the WP codex and I found very little on the web. So after doing a lot of scrounging and testing, I’m submitting this guide for how I added some custom user content to each user comment.

In this tutuorial, we’ll be editing your comment template and functions.php. A healthy level of programming experience is required. I’d also like to note that there’s probably many ways that this code could be made more elegant. My goal is just to have some working code that gets the job done.

Step 1
First we need to solicit user input. For my purposes, I was trying to attach a custom user id generated elsewhere to each comment. This could be a user-entered field, though. Add this code to your comment submission form:

<input type="hidden" name="my_user_id" value="<?php echo $myid; ?>" />

Step 2
Next we need to add this field as a piece of MetaData attached to the new comment. We use the WordPress hook system to accomplish this. Add this to your functions.php file:

add_action ('comment_post', 'add_meta_settings', 1);
function add_meta_settings($comment_id) {
	add_comment_meta($comment_id, 'my_user_id', $_POST['my_user_id'], true);
}

Step 3
For the final step, we need to read our new data along with each comment. I’m using the callback method to display my comments. In your callback function add the following code:

$GLOBALS['comment'] = $comment;
$my_user_id_array = get_comment_meta(get_comment_ID(),"my_user_id");
$my_user_id = $my_user_id_array[0];
echo $my_user_id;

I’d note that the code on this last step is a little clumsy. It’s the only way I could get it to work but I’m sure that someone can come up with a better method.

I hope this will help get you pointed in the proper direction. Enjoy…

Filed under: Internet on February 11th, 2010 | 14 Comments »

If I were planning a conference to discuss the effects of global warming (and I wouldn’t since I think it’s all a load of bunk), I certainly wouldn’t plan it in the middle of winter. It seems to me that these conferences are always in the coldest months of the year and that there’s usually a snowstorm or blizzard as has been the case in Copenhagen this winter. I mean come on… they’ve got to know that this is at least as much about marketing as anything else. Why not schedule these conferences for the middle of summer — you’ll find the population a lot more liable to listen to global warming silliness in the middle of the sweltering heat, not when they are trying to stay warm in sub-zero temperatures.

Duh!

Filed under: Humor, Politics on December 19th, 2009 | No Comments »

I just finished up my first WordPress plugin. It’s a little app that uses Google’s caching servers to more reliably post your tweets in the sidebar. You can see how it works on the sidebar of this blog.

Here’s the plugin page: http://www.soapboxdave.com/reliabletwitter/

And the WordPress Plugin Page: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/reliable-twitter/

Filed under: Internet on September 16th, 2009 | No Comments »

Okay, first off, I’d like to say that yes, I am a dreadful blogger. I go months, months at a time without writing a post. So if anyone is actually paying attention to this blog, then they are very persistent. Either that or they just subscribed with RSS. Yeah.

Okay, so anyway I just wanted to rant for a very brief moment. This weekend we had a couple vaguely interesting things happen. Kanye West interrupts Taylor Swift at the VMA Awards to promote Beyonce’s video. The incivility of this on his part means that I could never, ever respect him again. Course I didn’t to start with so this isn’t much of a problem for him! This has spawned a somewhat entertaining internet meme.

Serena Williams (the tennis player) had a horrible melt-down and lost her match because of cussing out the line judge. She obvious has an anger problem and had better get it under control. It’s threatening to destroy what has been an incredible career.

I can’t believe what I just heard: Jimmy Carter says that Joe Wilson had a racist tone for yelling “You Lie!” at president Obama. Wow. Sure it was rude, but certainly not as rude or awful as the two things I just mentioned above. I just really take offense at anyone being labeled a racist because they disagree with a black man’s political views. Geesh people. It’s 2009, get over it already.

I think I’ve spent far too much time thinking about this. Back to real life for me.

UPDATE: Two more random, bonus thoughts. Had this pointed out to me on Twitter “RT @kanyewest YO PATRICK SWAYZE I KNOW YOU JUST DIED AND ALL&IMMA LET U FINISH.. BUT MICHAEL JACKSONS DEATH WAS THE BEST ONE THIS YEAR.” Heh heh heh…

And also: I noticed on Digg and the NYT that I’m starting to see a little more balance in terms of right and left commenters. For a while, there’s just been a wave of left-leaning comments that just bury any conservative thought and I think it’s starting to even out. That’s good for everyone.

Filed under: Politics, Pop Culture on September 16th, 2009 | 1 Comment »

Yeah it kinda makes fun of the president, yeah it’s pretty funny. I just like the Jib Jab sense of humor. Most of the time.

Filed under: Humor, Politics on June 24th, 2009 | 1 Comment »

This is a fun watch since I’m interested in politics and also kind of a geek. Not really a fan of the president, but very funny nonetheless.*

*I think it’s important to be able to laugh at this kind of thing and save policy differences for their proper place.

Filed under: Humor, Politics on June 23rd, 2009 | 1 Comment »

Five Guys Burgers and Fries just opened a branch in Boise and I decided to give it a try today after Mindi W.’s positive review. Cole and I dropped by on our way to the circus (that’s a whole other story right there!) and I had a burger and shared some fries with the little fella. Here’s my thoughts.

First off, the red and white tiles and simple menu really reminded me of In-N-Out Burger which was incredibly exciting. Being a picky eater I really like the fact that the burgers come plain and that they only put on what you request. I can’t tell you how annoying it is to find that a restaurant or fast food joint has snuck mayonaise or some dreadful condiment like that onto my burger, or even worse, forgotten the cheese. But I digress…

I agree with Mindi that the burger tasted like it came off a backyard grill which is quite a good feature in my book. I really enjoyed it quite a bit. I would go back for the burger.

I wasn’t so crazy about the fries. There certainly were a lot of them, but I just don’t like my fries so thick. I find them hard to eat that way and not as flavorful. Cole and I actually couldn’t finish all the fries and I had to bring some home. Probably wouldn’t go back for the fries.

The deciding factor for me, though, was price. I ordered a little cheeseburger (1/4 lb), a small fry (admittedly a lot of fries), and a drink and the total came to $8.65. That’s a lot of money for eating out at a fast food joint! If I was going to spend that much I’d go to Boise Fry Company (you know, used to be Idaho Fry Company) and get some mind-blowing shoestring fries and an excellent burger. Or Fuddruckers. But normally if I’m going to get some fast food, I’ll aim for something a little cheaper that will deliver comparable quality. Or I might just stop by for their burger which was reasonably priced at around $3.65 (if I remember correctly).

So my conclusion is the same as Mindi’s: it was okay, pretty good, but I won’t be in a hurry to go back unless to introduce someone else.

Filed under: Deep Thoughts on June 21st, 2009 | No Comments »