Doug Daulton

Storyteller (Words & Images)

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Protect Net Neutrality!

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Net Neutrality is Under Attack.

The following represents the the email I just sent to President Obama, Senator Harry Reid (D-NV) and Representative Joe Heck (R-NV) regarding Net Neutrality.

I was disturbed by the recent District Court ruling on Net Neutrality. I understand the business concerns of AT&T, Comcast and the other Internet providers, but bandwidth consumption by their users … personal and professional … is a burden equally distributed across the system. No company is any harder hit than any other by increasing usage of the Internet.

The assault on Net Neutrality is a money grab and a recipe for corporate abuse. It gives corporations the ability to restrict the free flow of information on the Internet. The corporations in question say they information will still be free, but we have also been told that they would not dump toxic chemicals into our ecosystem, cigarettes do not cause cancer and a host of other half-truths intended at driving up profits at the cost of the common good, intended or not.

I am not a bleeding heart liberal or would-be communist. I believe in capitalism and the right of business to protect their intellectual property and deliver value to their shareholders.

Make no mistake, Net Neutrality is THE fundamental, First Amendment issue of the information age. The ability to freely share information should not be restricted by either government or corporate interests. It will stifle innovation and open the door to corporate abuse of the power inherent awarded by this ruling.

Corporate control over the free flow of information is fundamentally unAmerican and I expect my representatives to stand up for the American values, not corporate interests.

Respectfully,

Doug Daulton
Concerned Citizen

If you are content creator, parent, start-up business, poor person or just average, “Joe/Jane Lunchbox” average US. Citizen, the recent Federal Appeals court ruling that the FCC cannot enforce Net Neutrality should concern you.

No, it should outright frighten you and piss you off.

The future is online.

News? Check. Entertainment? Check. Education? Check. Business? Check. Shopping? Check.

All of these endeavors are fast becoming online first; bricks & mortar, traditional broadcast and print … second. This ruling means that the corporations can and will restrict access to your favorite websites based on their own bottom line, not the free and fair flow of information.

Democrat or Republican. Conservative or Liberal. It does not matter where you come down on the political spectrum, Net Neutrality is something you should be insisting on. Anything else is a fundamental violation of the principles on which this country was founded.

It is just that simple.

Do something about it. Let your voice be heard. Write President Obama today. Then, write your own duly elected representatives and let your voice be heard.

Instructions For A Bad Day

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A beautifully crafted short film. Bookmark it and return when life reaches out and punches you in the mouth, knocks you down and tries to keep you there.

Life might be short, but there is always tomorrow. There is always the next moment.

Hope endures.

Be Nice

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One comment I frequently hear is … “Wow. It takes a lot to get you mad. Don’t you have a temper?”

I do. If you really know me, you have probably seen it. That has not always been the case. In my early teens, my temper was pretty out of control. There was a year where I could have gone down a very dark path.

Then, I got involved in martial arts, which further enhanced the groundwork of anger management and other coping skills my parents had already established, but I had been ignoring. The discipline of the martial arts gave me control of my body which gave me more control of my mind.

In the years since, I’ve seen some pretty dark stuff, particularly in my early career. To be clear, nothing as dark as what is seen by combat veterans and many street cops, but far more dark and ugly than the vast majority of my friends and neighbors. More than once, I know life, mine or someone else’s, hung in the balance of the moment.

I am alive today and proud of my work back in the day because I learned to manage my passion and not allow it to be expressed as rage. Note, I did not say “anger”. Anger, properly expressed, is healthy. Rage, unchecked, is pure destruction.

Recently, I was asked for a quick way to explain my philosophy and immediately thought of the scene above from “Roadhouse“, one of the most gloriously cheesy action movies of all time. The film remains a guilty pleasure of mine, but this scene is a nugget of genuine wisdom which sums up the budo ethos very nicely.

For this, David Lee Henry, Hilary Henkin and Patrick Swayze will always have my eternal gratitude.

WordPress Shortcode for File Inclusion

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I have a project that requires a lot of complex, yet static Pages in WordPress … think lots of tabular data with heavy CSS styling. This sort of content is best written in an external editor like Zend IDE or Dreamweaver and then dropped into WordPress.

However, if you’ve ever done this, testing the page as you develop it is a huge pain in the backside. It involves cutting and pasting from the editor to WP … saving and refreshing … make changes in the external editor … rinse and repeat.

Not fun. Not efficient.

The solution is fairly straightforward — keep these files static HTML and simply include them somehow in the page. I researched the available plugins and they all seemed like overkill which added overhead. Then, in WP IRC, Fris suggested writing a custom shortcode to do the heavy lifting. 90 minutes later, I have precisely what I need and a renewed respect for WordPress and the community supporting it.

For those interested, here is the code:

 NULL,
    'file' => NULL
    ), $atts ) );

    // Set file path
    $path_base = ABSPATH."wp-content/inc_static/";
    $path_file = ($subdir == NULL) ? $path_base.$file : $path_base.$subdir."/".$file;

    // Load file or, if absent. throw error
    if (file_exists($path_file)) {
        $file_content = file_get_contents($path_file);
        return $file_content;
    }
    else {
        trigger_error("'$path_file' file not found", E_USER_WARNING);
        return "FILE NOT FOUND: ".$path_file."
SUBDIR = ".$subdir."
FILE = ".$file."

";
    }
}

add_shortcode('static_html', 'sc_static_html');

?>

USE CASE

[static_html subdir="testdir" file="dirtest.html"]