The Ultraviolet Garden

The house feels empty as hell without Lucky. We’ll always remember her sweetness. She came with her own sound effects. Sometimes she sounded like General Cornrow Wallace! She’d roll up on you like that.

Ptttttttdddddddddrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!

That’s when she felt playful.

*sigh*

Onward.

I’ve been piddling around with wordpress themes. I’m using “LightWord” now.

I modified it slightly. I’m actually quite satisfied with it. It meets all of my requirements now. I still don’t understand why so many ppl place the comment section in the byline area.

In this case the theme didn’t even have a byline; it was easy enough to add.

I’ve also added a “like/dislike” plugin but only the comments are showing the rating. I need to figure out how to make it work on posts. If you use wordpress, maybe you’ll find these useful:

Like/Dislike Comment Rating worked for me.

Like/Dislike Post Rating didn’t work for me. I’ll figure it out eventually. Probably something minor.

I never know which plugins I’ll end up keeping. Usually I just play with things, if they are useful they’ll be kept. I liked “The Wall” plugin, but since it had to keep refreshing to load the most recent wall items it made my logs practically useless.

Although a simple filter would fix that problem. I’m just too lazy to do that. Maybe later.

Right now I’m working on the RWA Scale (see “Altemeyer’s Authoritarians“). I can’t use his questions. But if I come up with my own questions it should be fine. Check out his book if you haven’t. (It’s free. Also he prefers that ppl be introduced to his RWA Scale via the book. In this way, they learn that it may—or may not—be useful for individuals; it’s more geared toward getting average trends in groups of persons.)

When he asked me to remove the RWA survey, of course I complied. Nothing to do with copyright it’s just general courtesy. But, as his own survey predicted in my case, I have my own opinion on this.

Given that, do I even really need to take the survey myself? (Of course, I did. I scored very low, obviously.)

I’m also interested in doing an equivalent of the Social Dominance Scale as well. I can’t use his exact questions, but again you can’t copyright an idea, only the expression of it. And as long as I’m not using his questions, I should be okay. I’ve actually got a good idea about this but we’ll see. What I’d like to do is use actual things authoritarians or their followers have said—quotations, in other words—as the items on the survey. Looking at many of these, I could easily come up with quotations from “The Georges”. (Of the Bush persuasion, of course.)

There’s not exactly a shortage of folks who are quotable in this respect.

Have a good day all.