They get to be angry. And it feels amazing.

Generic, inspirational platitudes are shat out across the social networks du jour. Avatars are changed (for a few days) in protest of the thing that everybody pretends to care about. Gobs of people get to spend a few fleeting moments relishing the good that they’re doing for the world. They sit in air-conditioned offices and at granite countertops and clumsily spread a gospel of “why can’t we” and “if everybody would just” while quietly congratulating themselves on doing their part to make the world better.

It’s almost cute, in a way, but it’s really just sad.

Among the filthiest ailments to plague western culture is the idea that making tiny, effortless gestures in opposition to [choose your favorite horrific incident or societal oppression] makes even the tiniest sliver of a difference. 

Frankly, I’m more than a little surprised at how few people have figured this out, but these half-hearted expressions of solidarity and sympathy are ineffectual and embarrassing.

And I’m literally beg of you to stop. Stop talking. Stop pretending.

If you really, truly care, then there are two things you can do:

1. Give (like, the money kind of giving)
2. Work (like, more than your regular job)

We’re not so much with the grains and whatnot these days, so I like to turn my Double-Double into a delicious burger salad. Sort of.

Anyway, apropos of nothing in particular, I give you my favorite low-brow burger salad recipe:

1. If you don’t have some kind of salad-appropriate leafy something at home (lettuce, spinach, etc.), go get some from somewhere.
2. Drive to In-N-Out. If there isn’t an In-N-Out location within driving distance of you, seriously consider moving.
3. Imagine how many Double Double burgers you ordinarily eat—this will be one for most folks—and order that number of Flying Dutchmen (it’s not on the menu). The staff of In-N-Out will likely refer to multiple Flying Dutchmen as "Flying Dutchmans." Resist the urge to slap these people, as they are preparing your food, after all.
4. Go home. This is an important step.
5. Grab a handful of leaves for each Flying Dutchman you’ve got and throw them on a plate. Put the Flying Dutchmen on top of the leaves.
6. Douse the entire mess in your favorite hot sauce.
7. Cut it up and toss it together.
8. Enjoy.

If you don’t have a favorite hot sauce, you need to get to work on that because having a go-to way to church up a meal is downright required if you ask me. Here are a few that I like:

• Gringo Bandito (this is my current favorite by a good margin; do try it if you have the means)
• Dave’s Gourmet Hurtin’ Habanero
• Brother Bru Bru’s Chipotle Pepper Sauce

I buy most of these at our local hippy grocery store, so you may be able to get them without having them shipped to you.

Of course, you’d do well to stock old favorites like Tabasco, Tapatio and Cholula since they can be tasty and are generally easy to find in grocery stores. But, there’s a whole world of boutique hot sauces out there and some of them are pretty damn good.

As far as I know, this is the easiest, fastest way to excise a good chunk of the guilt out of an otherwise decadent meal.

Common objections follow.

"Why don’t you just order the burger protein style and use the lettuce they provide?"

Because it’s nutritionally vacant iceberg lettuce; normally wilted and generally not appetizing. Though, it will (barely) do, in a pinch.

"Something something Five Guys SPLORP."

Five Guys makes a decent burger and would probably make a suitable replacement if it’s an accessible option to you. I’m happy you think it’s better than In-N-Out and have no interest in discussing it further.

"I don’t like hot sauce."

You’re missing out, but you could also do far worse than a good mustard.

"I don’t like you."

Understandable.

"I make my own hot sauce from the earth and the blood of conservatives and my own Serrano chilies that I grow in the ground and I still don’t like you."

Perfect.

In a web page I’m building, I’m using jQuery’s $.get ajax function to pull some data from a remote site. This function takes an optional callback function as a parameter, like so:

function myCallback(data, textstatus) { 

// do stuff with the data returned from the server 

} 

$.get('/foo.php', someData, myCallback); 

Now, in Webkit-based browsers like Chrome and Safari, the data parameter is passed to the callback function as a JavaScript object that can be queried directly:

data.someMember['someIndex']; 

What I now know is, when using Firefox, the data parameter is passed as a JSON string, not a JavaScript object. Ergo, you need to convert it to an object using jQuery’s $.parseJSON function before attempting to do stuff with it:

if(typeof(data) == "string") { data = $.parseJSON(data); } // carry on 

This will be useful to almost nobody, I’m sure, but there you go. Happy JavaScripting.

A couple of hours ago, I took my seat at a table onstage at New Media Expo (NMX). Bookended by Leo Widrich, Craig Jarrow and Mike Vardy, where we would talk about productive blogging.

Needless to say, I was pretty freaked out. I’ve only done a couple of things like this in the past and, despite kind comments from attendees and friends, I’m convinced that I stunk up the place each time I’ve spoken. I know, though, that the only way I’m going to become comfortable speaking publicly is by speaking publicly, so I accepted the invitation to be part of today’s panel (which also meant that my conference pass was upgraded to an all-access ticket and it would be comp’d by the promoters – that helped).

What follows is a random smattering of thoughts and reactions to the talk we gave. You have my apologies in advance for their disjointed nature.

Preparation

The previous couple of times I’ve spoken to a group of people, it was just me on stage. I put together the material myself and did my best to hobble through it. Mr. Jarrow-who has done this before and is quite comfortable with it-took the planning reins; he chose the topics, the time we would spend on each and was generally in charge of keeping the thing moving.

We met beforehand and talked though the various points we’d be covering and clarified much of what we’d say regarding each. This made the task less intimidating, certainly, but I still felt crazy anxious.

The Room

Our session would be held in a room that, according to my rough calculations, could comfortably seat about 75 people. As our start time approached, people began filing in until every seat was filled along with just about every square foot of floor space that didn’t violate some sort of Fire Department crowd code. I’m horrible at guessing things like this, but I’m confident there were at least 100 people in the room and several more crowded around the door to the room.

So, yeah, freaked out.

The Session

For the ten-or-so minutes before our session started, I joked around with my compadres and we did some last-minute planning for the session itself. We were introduced and we started talking.

(Quick aside: one of the myriad things about myself I would like to change is how I speak, particularly when nervous. I talk *way** too fast and stumble over my words and, for some reason, feel the need to qualify everything I say to avoid confusion (even when what I was actually saying was perfectly clear). It’s a maddening set of behaviors and, on multiple occasions, I’ve considered finding professional help to correct them.)*

After a couple of yammering moments, I made a couple of marginally-amusing comments which got some chuckles from the audience. That really helped chill me out.

I have to say that I think the session went really well. We gave really great info (I need to stop hating the word “content” as vehemently as I do) and lots of people approached me afterward to thank me for presenting. That felt really good.

If anything, I wish we would have had more time to speak, believe it or not. We had a lot of ground to cover and we weren’t able to dig into the subtopics as much as I would have liked, but that’s really the only bad thing I can think to say.

Decompressing

I’m writing this on my iPad, sitting in a bar-which, unsurprisingly, is the only place I could find in a Vegas hotel lobby where I could have a whole table and not be bothered to order food or place a bet-and enjoying a nerve-calming beer.

I overheard one of the coordinators talking about having a sequel to this panel next year, which got me kinda fired up. I hope it happens and that I get to come back, but I’m glad I got to be here.

Theo frickin’ Huxtable just [replied to my toot]( http://storify.com/inkedmn/conversation-with-inkedmn-and-malcolmjamalwar).

I win because that’s awesome.

A friend and I just returned from seeing the sequel, Taken 2 -like, in an actual movie theater, which is something I almost never do for a variety of reasons-and I have some thoughts on it.

First, one of those qualifying statements I’m famous for among my friends:

I’m not a movie anything. I don’t watch many movies and the vast majority of the modern movies I watch tend to sort of bore me (or worse).

Oh, and if you haven’t seen Taken or Taken 2 yet and are planning to see them, there will be spoilers below so maybe don’t read this now.

Now then.

The Plot

More so than its predecessor, Taken 2‘s plot is little more than a vehicle for Bryan Mills (Liam Neeson) beating the hell out of a large number of people. I didn’t go to see this movie because I expected a compelling narrative. I wanted some action (which we’ll discuss in a second).

The plot, in a nutshell, is that Bryan killed a bunch of Albanian human traffickers who had kidnapped his daughter, Kim, in the original Taken and now the family of one of said Albanians is looking to exact a bit of revenge on old Bryan.

I do, despite that earlier paragraph, want to address what I felt were some pretty lame plot points in Taken 2:

1. The story seemed to stutter a bit around the redemptive events. The dramatic rescue of Kim (Mills’ daughter) in the middle of the story felt very premature and totally overshadowed the dramatic rescue of Lenore (Mills’ ex-wife).
2. Given how cold and unforgiving Lenore acted in the original, her rediscovered affection for Bryan feels goofy, even in light of his heroic rescue of Kim in Taken.
3. Right before Bryan aces the “Bowser” of this movie, there’s an annoyingly obvious open parenthesis regarding Bowser’s sons who, as he plainly said seconds before getting his ticket punched, would certainly seek revenge against Bryan. Look out for Taken 3 sometime soon. Feh.

The Dialogue

The dialog in action movies is generally pretty awful. Taken was, if you ask my uneducated derrier, an exception. The dialog wasn’t awesome, but it didn’t suck either.

Taken 2 is a different story. As with the annoying unclosed thread regarding Bowser’s sons, this movie is lousy with obvious and contrived throwbacks to Taken and they sound stupid.

Probably my least favorite part was when Bryan gives Lenore an impossibly long list of steps to take toward escape, which she-at the end of a car chase wherein she is pursued by murderous thugs-manages to remember while I-sitting pudgily in my theater seat-could not. And I wasn’t even in danger.

The Action

This is what puts the asses in the seats. Its certainly what put mine in mine.

First, you can tell that Liam ain’t the spring chicken he used to be. As I type this, he’s 60 years old. He looks it in Taken 2. Not that he’s not a terribly handsome bloke and all that, but watching him fight was a lot like, well, watching a 60-year-old fight.

• The cameras, for most of the close-quarters combat involving Neeson (which was pretty much all of it) were close enough as to be within blood spatter range. It was hard to get an idea what was happening, other than that blows were being exchanged and guns deflected. Knives were also involved, somehow.
• On at least two occasions, Bryan dirt-naps some guy and you have literally no clue how he did it. One second something’s happening, the next minute the guy’s toast. UPDATE: Upon further reflection, the logical reason for this might be that certain gruesome death strokes were edited out so the movie could wear the PG-13 rating. Just a guess, though.

The Miscellany

• Whenever the sequel to a popular movie is released, my brain automatically imagines some Hollywood fat cat physically wringing out a branded hand towel that magically emits cash. Sequels, in my cynical brain, are about dough more than anything else. Taken 2 felt sorta-but not completely-like that.
• Goodness me, that Famke Jannsen is quite the looker.
• What made Taken so great was how emotionally driven Bryan was to save the kidnapped Kim. You could see it in his frickin’ eyes. It was one of the only believable facets of an unbelievable story and another thing noticeably absent in Taken 2.

Actually, I didn’t hate it

I know this sounds like a litany of complaints that would culminate in my saying “it was a big turd – skip it.” I don’t think that, to tell you the truth.

I actually enjoyed it, aside from what I’ve mentioned here. It didn’t hold a candle to Taken and probably won’t be something I re-watch-at least, not as many times as I’ve seen the original-but it was alright.

That’s all, though: just “alright”.

• A — App.net, the other white meat.
• B — brettkelly.org, this very site. Also narcissism.
• C — citibank.com, my bank.
• D — Daring Fireball, a blog I like a lot.
• E — E-junkie, the site I use to sell my ebook about Evernote.
• F — Facebook. Yes, I use it (sparingly and for a very particular purpose). Don’t “friend” me or whatever.
• G — Github, where much of the code that I write for work and play is stored.
• H — Hover, a place that sells domain names. I browse more than I buy, typically.
• I — iCloud, presented without comment.
• J — join.app.net; not sure why this is, other than because, for a good while, that’s the URL I had for App.net stored in 1Password.
• K — Kung Fu Grippe, a weblog (or “blog”) by Merlin Mann.
• L — localhost, which is probably true of anybody who does any reasonable about of web development.
• M — Marco Arment’s blog; this surprised me, but only a little.
• N — nerdgap.com, my other blog which you might like. Narcissism?
• O — One37.net, my friend Matt’s blog.
• P — Paypal because entrepreneur or something.
• Q — Quora, which I don’t visit very often, but apparently more than any other site whose domain begins with the letter ‘q’.
• S — store.apple.com; shut up.
• T — Twitter.
• U — UnF**k My HTML, a site my friend PJ made that nice-ifies unruly markup. This one is rarely opened, but useful.
• V — Vardy.me, the blog of one Mike Vardy who is a friend of mine.
• W— www.tumblr.com which, assuming you’re logged in (and because Tumblr’s login cookie expires roughly every twelve years, you probably are), this redirects to the Tumblr Dashboard. I go there sometimes, but mostly in fits and starts.
• X — This didn’t produce anything.
• Y — Yammer, a Twitter-like service for businesses.
• Z — Nothing here, either.

I had a few minutes and I’ve actually wanted to do this for awhile. Sorry if you hate it. If you decide to undertake the same bullcrap exercise, leave a comment here or just link back to this post and I’ll see it. Happy hump day evening!

Know that I’m incredibly jaded when it comes to politics and, more specifically, politicians. They’re all liars and, despite all of the inspirational (and slanderous) messaging, they want to be re-elected more than anything else they’re saying they want.

Now then.

1. Pretty sure 90+% of the people watching the debate had already decided where their vote would be cast before the debate started.People feed upon opportunities to be righteously (in their opinion) indignant and this is their regularly scheduled four-year binge.
2. Irrespective of who is in office, somebody always gets straight-up [coitus]ed. This is 100% inevitable.
3. Nobody’s completely correct. Not you and not the person with whom you so vehemently disagree. You just really don’t want to be the group (or you deeply sympathize with the group who could potentially be) described in item #2.
4. I’m hardly a political guy and I haven’t been around as long as some, but I’ve not personally seen anything so effectively divide these “United” States quite like a presidential election.
5. Screaming about what you don’t like on the Internet, like, totally helps.

It’s a big circus. All of it.

I believe the government should help the truly helpless. Everybody else needs to quit bitching, grab the tool they’re best with and get to work.

Fix your family and community. Expecting the government to do that is, let’s say, ill-advised. Because they can’t. Not really.

I’ll shut up now.

Oh, we (myself included) like to posture as though this isn’t true, but we all know it is. About ourselves and others.

With that said, I think it would be prudent to do the following:

• Assume that this is true of every single person you meet in every conceivable context (because it almost certainly is).
• Give them a healthy measure of grace commensurate with this assumption.

This is certainly how I’m going to try to operate going forward. Not that I won’t screw up, of course (see the first paragraph of this post), but I’ll try.

We’re all stupid, confused and insecure in our own ways and to varying degrees. And nobody is immune, if you ask me.

This kind of stupidity, confusion and insecurity will, at first blush, smell a lot like the opposite: smartness, clarity and confidence. That’s sorta how we roll because, well, we hate how inept we are and we try like hell to keep others from finding out what-frankly-they already know.

Secret: it’s the same thing that ails them.

So maybe we all just admit it. I can’t help but imagine that things would be better with less fakery and more empathy.