It’s a cop out to avoid thinking When someone kills a bunch of people or does something else horrible that normal people can’t understand, the natural reaction from many of us is to say “he was just crazy”. But I don’t buy this. First of all, this attitude seems like a mental trick to avoid thinking about the rationality of what the person did, to avoid sympathy for the person and to distance yourself from them. Sure, many people are quote-unquote “crazy”, but we’re all crazy in some little way, and…
Read MoreAuthor: Kalin
Dual Perspectives
Dual Perspectives The power and weirdness of simultaneously holding two opposing viewpoints I watched a couple episodes of Hoarders the other day, the documentary show about those people who refuse to throw things away and find themselves buried in trash, and found myself rather shocked. I didn’t know this psychological issue was so common. If I remember correctly, they claim that it affects 3 million people. That’s more than what the experts claim is the number of people in America addicted to cocaine. It’s strange that hoarding isn’t a criminal…
Read MoreHow Our Governments Have Failed to Manage Currency
They’re using the modern equivalent of sea shells I was exploring a neighborhood where I was considering buying a condo and found myself in a BBQ restaurant that looked like something out of an episode of In Living Color. As I stood in line I read all the crazy signs and looked at the random junk they had tacked to the walls, and noticed a sign that said, “In God we trust. All others pay cash.” and somehow I read this sign and yet it just didn’t click in my head…
Read MoreWhen You Just Kinda Decide that Someone is Guilty
It’s how we choose some of the most important things The other day I heard someone talking about a time when he was on a jury. He said, “It was one of those cases where we all knew he was guilty but just couldn’t find the evidence.” This frightened me because everyone else seemed to nod as though they know the situation… but I’m wondering how is that even possible? If you don’t have evidence, isn’t that just a modern witch hunt? During the real witch hunts, the persecutors felt…
Read MoreUnfair Tickets
I originally wrote this article in 2010 when I lived in Seattle. Now I live in Pittsburgh and have realized that it’s a whole other ballgame on the east coast when it comes to driving safety. People just don’t seem to care about safety the way they do in Seattle. Stand at a red light in Pittsburgh for five minutes and you are practically guaranteed to see someone run a red light. A few months ago I visited New York and witnessed more traffic crime in nine days than I…
Read MoreOn Being an Anarchist but Still Going Corporate
I’m fraternizing with the enemy Here is another article I wrote in 2010 on my WordPress blog when my career was really just getting started and I was sorting out how I felt about working for a big corporation and making lots of money. I actually went corporate years ago, but now I’m moving up again in the corporate world. I got hired on full-time at the agency where I’ve been working the last six months. Before this I was making more money than I felt I deserved, and now I’m…
Read MoreMy Definition of Anarchism
As of 2020 I no longer identify as an anarchist but I still hold a lot of the same values so this article is still valid. When people think of anarchism, they think of Mad Max and Timothy McVeigh, because that’s the vision that’s been drilled into them. But putting an end to people like Timothy McVeigh is exactly the reason I chose anarchism, because ultimately McVeigh was out for the same justice that our government taught us to seek, and saw the horrible things the government has done in…
Read MoreThe Final Season of Roseanne
The final season of Roseanne from the 90’s is one of the best in television.
Read MoreScience vs. Faith — a few examples
Science vs. Faith — a few examples Science VS Faith — A few examples When a surgeon removes a tumor from a patient, and saves the person’s life, did he look at the situation scientifically, research prior surgeries, run tests based on real world results, and compare them logically with other similar cases in an attempt to systematically narrow down if the patient has cancer, where the cancer was located, and what the most appropriate treatment might be?… …or did he pray really, really hard and God told him where to cut? — — — — — — – When a…
Read MoreThe Complexity of Equality Between Men and Women
So I have about fifty unpublished or incomplete posts and pages sitting in my queue for this blog and I feel like I need to clean things up a bit, so here is one that I found sitting around that I think has some decent points. I had a bunch more stuff to say on this subject, but my mind has wandered in the year since I wrote this, so I’m just going to post it as-is. I once had an argument with someone about gay marriage and he claimed…
Read MoreThou Shalt Not Lie
This is a commandment that I actually agree with. I’ve heard atheists argue that this can be a problem because occasionally telling a lie is the right thing to do, such as if you were hiding a Jewish person in your attic in Nazi Germany. This is one of the few cases where I tend to agree with the Christians instead of the atheists. I would make a few exceptions for if you’re lying to a government entity or a selfish corporation, but I believe that it’s never okay to…
Read MoreNonsense Waffle with Meteor
Demo: nonsense-waffle.meteor.com Repo: github.com/kalinr/nonsense-waffle Nonsense Waffle is a word game that I started building as a personal project in February of 2015 using the new real-time Node.js based framework called Meteor. In this game, players compete by compiling randomly generated words to create funny phrases then try to sell their ideas in the most humorous ways possible, in sort of an advanced like button and popularity challenge with a lot of role-playing elements that’s all based on silly nonsense. The game is in its infancy right now, but I do have a working demo up and running…
Read MoreSamsung's Milk Music at Smartek21
In December of 2014 I joined a small team at Smartek21, JavaScripting for Samsung’s Milk Music web player. We used jQuery, Backbone.js, Underscore.js and Require.js, in an MVC structure to communicate with a custom API which interfaced with Slacker’s API to get most of the data. Milk Music is basically Slacker Radio but is Samsung branded and has a better user interface–at least in my opinion. The application was mostly complete when I began but I helped solve many bugs and added a few minor features that were necessary for production release. We worked with…
Read MoreCSS Playtime
I wanted to get some practice with CSS and Sass and learn CSS animations, so I started fiddling around in a gihub repo. I didn’t set out to create anything specific but wound up making a simple JavaScript animation engine that cycles through a list of objects representing a series of animations, initializing each one on a timer. I made a jQuery and a vanilla JavaScript version. This plunker uses the vanilla version.
Read MorePDF Creation Station v4.0
In October and November of 2014, I had some time to work on my own personal projects, so I returned to my WordPress plugin Kalin’s PDF Creation Station. You can see the older version in an older post. I have rewritten the client side to use Angular.js and Bootstrap, almost entirely eliminating jQuery from the equation, and added a couple new features such as widget and custom menu support, a new sorting and pagination system for the lists of available posts and generated files, and the ability to generate .txt and…
Read MoreAccretive Tech, Streamate.com
From August 2011 to July 2014 I worked for Accretive Technology Group, maintaining their flagship product, a live streaming adult entertainment platform, duplicated over 1500+ websites. I started as a Flash ActionScript developer, maintaining and adding features to their performer client, of which I don’t have any screenshots, as well as the user client shown in this first image. You can also see the user client by going to Streamate.com in a desktop browser and clicking on any performer. Warning: this is an NSFW site. The screenshots on this page…
Read MoreOpposing the Department of Education Doesn’t Mean Opposing Education
At first glance it seems that getting rid of the department of education would be insane. Your first reaction is to think “oh, he doesn’t think people should be able to get an education,” but this judgement isn’t fair. Somehow it seems like we’ve gotten to a point where in order to support something people are required to support it on a massive scale and in an absolute fashion. However, for some of us we just don’t see our federal government handling our education better than the average state. For…
Read MoreAtheist Quotes
Atheist Quotes Here’s a few quotes I had lying around that I felt kinda applied to atheism or at least my views on spirituality. I have probably skipped over most of the good ones and after looking over these quotes again, it’s kind of a sad list, but there it is. I can’t guarantee they’re accurate and whatnot. I figure I’ll post them anyway since I’m trying to start just writing and posting without thinking and debating so much about what I say and not worrying so much about what…
Read MoreHappiness Is A Choice
This Is Scientific Proof That Happiness Is A Choice. This is an article I found that sparked my thinking about this concept. I don’t like the idea of ‘proof’ since I don’t think there is such a thing as proof since there is always the chance something in our reasoning is incorrect and I think it’s dangerous to think of things in absolutes like that. However, I do truly believe that happiness is a choice. Furthermore I believe many other things in life that people believe they are stuck with…
Read MoreWacky Words Facebook MMO
A comedy word-based Facebook massive multiplayer game built on Flash Builder and Google App Engine.
Read MoreAS2 Slot Machine Number Scroll Class
An AS2 class that allows you to easily create and animate a slot machine style number scroller with two simple function calls.
Read MoreGame Landing Page
This is a landing page I built with JQuery and CSS for Big Fish Games.
Read MorePDF Creation Station WordPress Plugin
This WordPress plugin allows you to build highly customizable PDF documents from any combination of pages and posts, or add a link to any post to download a PDF of that post.
Read MoreKalin's Post List WordPress Plugin
This WordPress plugin creates a shortcode, PHP snippet, or widget for placing highly customizable lists of posts, pages, or attachments into your post content or theme, built in PHP and JQuery.
Read MoreEasy Edit Links WordPress Plugin
This is a simple WordPress Plugin written with PHP and JQuery that adds a convenient little box to your page/post edit screen that contains a list of all pages, posts, tags, categories and links, with edit buttons for each and a link to the actual live page for easy copying and pasting.
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