Looking Backward: The Twelve Firsts Of 2006

I’ve seen this meme here and there this month. I can’t recall where now. The idea is to re-print the first sentence of the first post from each month in 2006. With the New Year approaching, this seems like a good time to do so…and I’m curious.

(If the “first post” fell on a “Quote of the Day” or similar, I skipped it to one of my own posts.)

• January 3, 2006: History Repeating Itself?
  

  So, four years ago, the hospital I was at went through lay-offs and an administration change.

• February 2, 2006: I Am Alive & Going To England
  

  I appologize for seemingly abandoning this blog.

• March 1, 2006: Forgotten New Orleans
  

  Gulf Coast Reconstruction Watch has put together a document analyzing how much progress the city of New Orleans with the promised State and Federal help has made since Hurricane Katrina struck in 2005.

• April 1, 2006: Lowest Poll Rating Ever?
  

  Is it me or does it seem like every week or so this year there’s been a headline that announced Bush having his “lowest poll rating ever” and they’ve all been between 34 and 37%?

• May 1, 2006: What I’ve Learned Since My Puppy Came Home
  

  I admit I’ve been too busy with the new puppy to post.

• June 1, 2006: Stomach Acid & Pink Eye
  

  When it rains, it pours.

• July 4, 2006: Why I’m Almost Embarrassed To Be An American…
  

  Here are a few things I’ve overheard while in England:

• August 1, 2006: The Next Step In Man-Made Miracles
  

  When you think about the possibilities…when you consider what lives might be helped…when you consider that in hundreds of labs around the world unused, unwanted embryos are never going to become anything more than lifeless chemical waste…when asked, if you did your part, however little for stem-cell research, what will you say?

• September 1, 2006: Discombobulated Thoughts - 09/01/06
  

  Pugly loves that credit theft commercial where the woman voice-over sings “Unbreak My Heart” really badly.

• October 2, 2006: Monday’s A Bitch: Random Joy
  

  It’s that time of week again…

• November 2, 2006: Thursday Thirteen Discombobulated Worries This Week (#11)
  

  My brain is way too scattered and full of anxiety to focus on one particular nifty topic this week.

• December 1, 2006: My Brain May Explode
  

  I wonder why my brain doesn’t explode from the sheer insanity of contradictory messages I get from my parents sometimes — mainly from my mother.

Hmmmm…

I’m tempted to go through and write the first sentence of the last post.  Or the last sentence of the third post.  Or the twenty third sentence of every month.  The possibilities are endless.

Of course, this is only worth the time if it actually intrigues anyone to go back and read something old.  Seems far too random.  I think my posts from memory lane in the right margin at the top would be better for that, but I don’t think that’s all that successful either. Hmmmm…

If you do find yourself wandering back through my memory, please leave a comment there, or here, to let me know if this sort of this is an effective use of my time.

Tags: memory lane, past, 2006, meme, comments, Blogging & Other Blogs

Guilty Or Not Guilty

got this from kay who borrowed from Teena who borrowed from Izzy who stole it from Holly

1. Dated outside your race? Guilty
2. Singing in the shower? Guilty
3. Spit in someone’s drink? Not Guilty
4. Played with Barbies? Guilty
5. Made someone cry? Guilty
6. Opened your Christmas presents early? Guilty but only after I moved out on my own
7. Lied to a friend? Guilty but only to spare their feelings
8. Watched and cried while watching a soap opera? Not Guilty…I’ve never cried
9. Played a computer game for more than 5 hours? Guilty
10. Ran through the sprinklers naked? Not Guilty…I’ve always been a prude.
11. Ate food that fell on the floor? Guilty … Three second rule

More

Tags: guilty or not guilty, meme, bloghopping, blogs

2 comments See also in My Life, Geekery, Blogging & Other Blogs, Memes

Ideas About Getting More Commenters

I’ve been trying to figure out how to get the people who come here to comment more often on posts — you know, have more open dialogs, etc. So, when I come across this sort of post on one of my regular reads, I’m intrigued. However, for me, she was preaching to the choir, but I thought I’d like to pass along her tips edited with my own opinions. I’m hoping you fellow readers and passerby will add your own suggestions and thoughts to the comment section. (ah-ha!) Mind you, I’m basically going by why or why not I leave comments on other blogs.

Ideas About Getting More Commenters:

1. Eliminate anything on your blog that might send new arrivals immediately toward the “back” button, such as:
• Music or video that starts playing automatically. Not only is it not work safe, but some of us already have our own life soundtracks playing; perhaps we’d like a choice before having yours blaring over ours.
• Any sort of automatic file download will be assumed to be a virus. Again, don’t share without asking first.
• Requiring a special plugin to play your files; I’m tired of having to click through messages asking me if it’s o.k. to download this or that plugin just to see what’s on someone’s blog. I like gadgets at home, but I don’t want them forced on my blog surfing experience.
• Text that’s hard to read. If your font is too small or in a glaring color combo with the background, don’t expect people to risk eyestrain to read your posts. Those red or neon colors on black may be nifty -looking designs for all of two seconds but if you want anyone to stick around and read your content longer than that, you might consider something that doesn’t trigger a migraine. I prefer light colored backgrounds for where the content is myself and if you must have a black background, then go with a white text, but even that gets hard to read after a while. “Also, if some people’s fonts sizes seem too big, but yours looks just right, you might have your screen resolution too low; if so, the other blogs are fine, and yours has too small of a font size.”
2. Make sure the general public is actually able to comment on your site.
• If your blog only allows registered users to comment, most folks can’t post there and few people will take the time to register just to post a comment or two, which means they won’t be back to check on the responses either; to increase comments, move to a more visitor-friendly site, put in Haloscan or some other flavor of commenting that doesn’t require registration. If your blog is somewhere that allows for anonymous commenting, such as Blogger, and you’ve turned that feature off to reduce the likelihood of trolls and spam, why not turn it back on and see what the ratio is of increased comments to “bad” ones? This is a biggie for me; It irritates me to no end when I come to a site that requires a Blogger or Google sign-on just to leave a comment. There are more bloggers out there than just on Blogger and Google, folks and we’re not all bad people. And, it’s particularly irritating when the blog is in a meme and asking for comments and “link backs”.
• If you’ve got cutting-edge code, be aware that some of that stuff only works on newish PC’s with recent versions of Windows and browsers; potential commenters on Macs, or with older computers, operating systems or browsers, or browsers other than the major ones, might not be able to get your links and scroll bars to work (the latter being very important if you have a postage-stamp-sized embedded window with your posts in it)… if you want to be sure that everyone can comment, either test your site on a wide range of machine and browser combos or just stick to tried and true, if less glamorous, template designs.
3. Post content that people will want to comment on. “If you’re posting about how many eggs you had for breakfast, the only person who’ll comment is your mom warning you about your cholesterol level; to affect folks enough to engender in them the urge to respond to you, your posts should be funny, emotional, controversial, insightful, sexual, or about famous people.” I guess I need to work on that. Note to self: no more posts about egg-eating.
4. Treat anyone who does comment with courtesy. The bulk of your comments should be from repeat visitors, but people won’t come back if they don’t feel like they connected with you in a positive way, which means that you should:
• Welcome 1st-time commenters. (I need to work on that too.)
• Respond to every non-trivial comment that’s posted. If all someone says in reaction to your post is something like “Me too,” she probably doesn’t expect you to reply, but most folks comment because they want to be part of a dialogue, and if you deny them that there’s plenty of other blogs they can go to where they can feel more involved. This is a major complaint of mine on other blogs. I often feel that my comments go unnoticed by regular commenters so that some blogs feel cliquish. It’s important to make everyone feel welcome and included.
• Even if there’s an intense debate going on, as long as a commenter hasn’t stooped to name-calling or personal remarks you need to remain polite when you address or refer to him; also, resist the temptation to argue with someone who’s posted a reason for disagreeing with you without asking you questions to prompt you to rebut him… there’s no chance you’ll change his mind, and it just looks like you’re being a bully.
5. Keep control of your comment areas. If you let trolls, or people who can’t discuss issues without getting nasty, run rampant, no sane person will want to bother posting a thoughtful comment, much less become a regular commenter; unless all you want are a few belligerent types spewing on each of your posts, delete comments from and if possible ban trolls in a timely fashion, and threaten to do the same to those who get too heated if they refuse to abide by your request that they keep it civil.

I think the reminder Omni gives that’s most important about blogging and seeking comments is this:

In general, though, the most important thing about comments is that you don’t get so hung up on them that you lose sight of what makes your blog special; YOU, and your unique perspective on the world.

Comments?

Tags: bloghopping, blogs, commenting, blog traffic, trolls, spam

Calling All Maine Bloggers

I’m stilling looking for Maine Bloggers to join my Maine Bloggers webring. I’d love to read blogs from other folks in the area!

Here’s the webring code and how it looks:

Hopefully, I’ll see some fellow Mainers joining up so I won’t be all lonesome.

Tags: blogging, blogs, bloghopping, webrings, Maine

Baghdad To Amman

Some of you know that I’ve been following Treasure in Baghdad, the blog of an Iraqi who has been living in a Sunni-dominated part of Baghdad despite not being Sunni.  He has been blogging about his life there, about the dangers, and about lost friends and neighbors, and I worry when he is silent, though I’ve never met him or spoken to him.

His recent posts indicate that he has now fled Baghdad to Amman and I feel his sadness but I must admit that I am relieved for him.  I feel that my prayers at least were answered, though I wish that it hadn’t had to come to this.

I never thought that one day I will restore my real youth smile. I didn’t know that there is still hope of living normally even if it is away from my own country. I gave up hoping that my beloved country may be safe and normal again.

My life has changed now. I can breath, walk, laugh, joke, cry, run, have fun, and meet with friends and relatives. I missed these things for years. For the last three years, I was like a robot. Living and working for the sake of work and nothing else. No kind of life was represented in my previous life. Fear was my companion. Wherever I go I feel worried and whatever I do I feel cautious. I thought about each step I walked in Baghdad several times before I took its risk.

Tears, lots of tears bid farewell to Baghdad. When I was leaving, I felt my tears were falling like rain on the shoulders of my mother, father, sister, aunt and friends. We were all crying. My parents were crying of happiness because finally I am going to be safe. But where can I get the feeling of peace from while they are still there in the middle of killings and explosions?

Since I arrived in Amman, I felt that I am still alive. WOW! I am still alive. I don’t know how, I don’t know why but I am alive and breathing. “Back to life” became my slogan. Yes, I was dead for the last three years. Death does not necessarily mean you die physically.

I have lots of friends and relatives in Amman. However, I didn’t stay with anyone of them. I shared an apartment with a friend of mine whom we both pay for its rent.

Iraqis are everywhere in Amman. Maybe it’s funny if I say that there are Jordanians in Amman now! Wherever I turn my face, I see an Iraqi. They invaded Jordan as Zeyad said in his Amman posts. Few months ago, one of my best friends who works in the ministry of displaced and migration said that there are more than a million and a half Iraqis in Amman alone. Add to this the number of millions of other Iraqis who fled to Syria, Egypt, Dubai, and other European countries. Sometimes I don’t feel I am a stranger from another country because even most of those who come to the internet café I go to are Iraqis. Each Iraqi I talk to says life became impossible in Iraq under the failure of everything there.

Iraqis here are not the poor ones or the uneducated. Most of them are the educated and well raised young men and women who feel their dreams were being killed slowly in a country run by vulgar people and extremists. Most of those I saw and met were graduates of the best colleges and universities in Iraq who most of them were threatened to death if they continue their progress in rebuilding their destroyed country. If not them, their parents and relatives were threatened to death. Even the Iraqi satellite channels started interviewing Iraqi intellectuals, authors and scientists in Amman or other Arab or foreign countries. None of the good people are left in Iraq. Militias formed of Shiite hateful avenging backwards people and Sunni insurgents are the ones whom Iraq is left for. They took it by force like Saddam.  [“Back to Life”]

To read about other Iraqis who’ve fled to Amman, check out these blogs:

• Morbid Smile’s From Me With Love!
• Zeyad’s Healing Iraq
• Nabil’s Blog

Tags: Iraq, blogs, Baghdad, Amman

Treasure of Baghdad — Another Nameless Iraqi

Every day we here in America are bombarded with the news that more Iraqis and Americans have been killed. Usually we’re just given a number, a total dead for the day.

37. 12. 53.

If one of the American soldiers happened to be local, in a few days, we might hear his or her name on the radio and television as well as the unit he or she served in.

But over here, we never hear the names of the Iraqis.

I kind of get the feeling that for the most part, Americans don’t really get that the Iraqis are actual people, that they have names. Yes, in case you didn’t know, the Iraqis have lives and families and friends. They live in houses and go to work or school. They worship. They dream. They have hopes. They fear. They want. They grieve.

Every Iraqi who gets killed over there is not a combatant. In fact, most of the Iraqis dying over there in their own country are not combatants. They are innocent people just trying to get on with their lives after the United States invaded univited. They are innocent people who are caught up in chaos and a mixture of holy war and civil war and the United States is in the middle of it stirring the pot. Our own soldiers don’t only don’t know who the combatants are but they don’t always apparently care, shooting at whoever they feel like just because they aren’t Americans and why not? After all, they’re just nameless Iraqis, right?

I’d like to introduce you to an Iraqi blogger, Treasure of Baghdad, whom I’ve been reading. Every day when I check his blog, I almost always hold my breath in hopes that there is a post, meaning that he’s survived another day. Peope he knows are dying. People he spoke to yesterday are dead. People he can name, friends, their relatives are gone. He grieves; he lives in fear; he is just trying to survive.

Tags: blogs, Iraq

Homeland Stupidity & Republican Evil

Homeland Stupidity has been expanding since, well, the real Homeland stupidity has been growing. The blog has added two new writers to it’s mix; Mark Jaquith’s first post is up today and he admits that he voted for the Republicans “as the lesser of the two evils” much the same way, I suppose, that I tend to vote for the Democrats. What I appreciatied about his article is that he has the actual intelligence to point out that there is in fact a difference between what the Republicans claim to be (on paper) and what they have actually been doing, something I think that most of the country seems to be missing big time.

Here’s an exerpt:

The reason I can no longer vote for Republicans as the lesser of two evils is that I’ve begun to seriously doubt that they are the lesser of two evils.

I’ve come to see that Republicans are two-faced. On paper, Republicans are easily more favorable than Democrats to a libertarian-minded person such as myself. On paper, they support lower taxes, less socialism, limited government, a rigid interpretation of the Constitution, property rights, parental rights and gun rights. In practice, they do little to permanently relieve the tax burden, they support wealth redistribution in a variety of forms, they’ve bloated the government to an unprecedented degree, they’ve made a mockery of Amendments One, Four, Six, Eight and Ten, they’ve been slow and inadequate in their response to the Supreme Court’s eminent domain decision. That leaves parental rights and gun rights. So if all you want to do is to teach your kid that God created the world in seven 24-hour periods or shoot empty beer cans for fun, the Republican Party has your back. Otherwise, it’s time to wake up and realize you’ve been duped.

It’s largely the Republicans [who] have vamped up the Drug War, and who have regretfully expanded it even into doctor’s offices, where drug warriors now decide what courses of treatment are and aren’t acceptable. Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez [sic] recently stated that under his watch, eradicating pornography will be a priority on par with fighting terrorism. And several members of Congress are now pushing to expand FCC regulation to include cable TV, satellite radio, and perhaps even the Internet, all in an effort to protect Americans from bad words and dirty pictures. — FOX News

Not only do they abandon their principles and encroach upon American freedoms, Republicans have also shown themselves to be active members of the culture of political corruption.

One of the things I like about Homeland Stupidity, even if I don’t always agree with the slant, is that there’s always a link to support the facts.

Tags: blogs, politics, Republicans

Death Works For Halliburton

In Colorado no less.

Or so he claims…

Tags: Halliburton, blogs

Things That Look Like People

I saw this website posted in the Wordpress forums and I wanted to share because it’s really neat: Things That Look Like People.

Tags: blogs

Believing Absolutely Is A Dangerous Thing

Glenn Greenwald, author of the new book How Would A Patriot Act? Defending American Values From a President Run Amok, has written an excellent post on the anatomy of the thought process of Bush defenders today.  I often find myself reading message boards, comments and blogs with my jaw agape when confronted by the particular creature of Bush defender Greenwald describes, which is why I found myself relieved to know I wasn’t the only one who’d noticed that there seems to be a whole species of humankind out there (and mind you, I’ve noticed some liberal “moonbats” out there with similar traits) that seem to live in a world without facts or a world where the facts that conflict with their version of reality seem to bounce off of the fantasy-based rose-colored invisible field auras.

As much as anything else, Bush defenders are characterized by an increasingly absolutist refusal to recognize any facts which conflict with their political desires, and conversely, by a borderline-religious embrace of any assertions which bolster those desires. It’s a world-view which conflates desire with reality, disregards all facts and evidence that conflict with the decreed beliefs, and faithfully embraces any assertions and fantasies, no matter how baseless and flagrantly false, provided that they bolster the mythology.

Thus, things are going really great in Iraq - just as we predicted they would. When we invaded, Saddam had WMD’s and he was funding Al Qaeda. Oil revenues will pay for the whole thing, we will be welcomed as liberators, the whole war will be won quickly and easily. A large military presence is unnecessary because there is no insurgency. Bush is a popular and beloved President. All but a handful of radical fringe subversives in America support the war and believe terrorism is the overarching problem. Americans want to militarily confront Iran, want illegal warrantless eavesdropping, and are happy with how the country is being governed.

It never matters how much evidence arises demonstrating the falsity of these beliefs. They are not susceptible to challenge or reconsideration because they are the by-product of faith and desire and not a critical or rational assessment. They believe these things because they want to believe them, they have to believe them, because the whole world-view on which their identity and purpose has come to be based — the brave, heroic President leading the great conservative nation in glorious, epic war-triumph over the evil Muslim enemy — depends upon believing these myths. No facts can shake these beliefs because they aren’t grounded in facts and aren’t the by-product of rationality.

[…]

Doesn’t that pretty much capture the whole sickness? “There are facts that suggest that what I am saying is not actually true. What is my response do that? ‘What-ev-eh.’” As in: “Some people claim there are facts that show that things in Iraq are not going really great. Something about civil war, sectarian hatred, anarchy, widespread violence, a total lack of security. What-ev-eh.”

Don’t they have somewhere lurking in their brain any critical faculties at all? For the sake of one’s own integrity and reputation if nothing else, who would read an undocumented assertion on Drudge — no matter how much of an emotional need they feel for it to be true — and then run around reflexively reciting it as truth, writing whole posts celebrating it and analyzing it, without bothering to spend a second of time or a molecule of mental energy trying to figure out if it’s really true?

This intellectually corrupt syndrome goes back a long way and has been festering for a long time. Nuggets of deceitful, fact-free fantasy get planted in some cesspool like Drudge and then mindless followers who want to believe it start repeating it as fact, and then it gets ossified forever as conventional wisdom and can never be dislodged from their minds. That’s how Al Gore came to “claim that he invented the Internet,” how Howard Dean became a far left radical pacifist, how Jessica Lynch had a heroic shoot-out with Al Qaeda and was then rescued by gun-blazing Marines, how Moveon.org produced commercials saying that Bush was Hitler, how Saddam funded Al Qaeda and personally participated in the planning of 9/11. It’s even how the lesbian, Hillary, killed Vince Foster in order to ensure that their affair (or whitewater crimes or drug-running landing strip) would be kept quiet and, to this day, it’s how Bill Clinton was a wildly unpopular president.

Soon after 9/11, the Bush movement became driven by much more than a set of political beliefs. It provides its adherents with much more than just a vehicle for political activism. It gives them purpose and a feeling of strength and power that they otherwise lack. In that sense, it is not dissimilar to a religion, and it is therefore unsurprising — but nontheless ugly and destructive — that their beliefs and convictions are not grounded in facts and reality but in a resolute faith that cannot be shaken by facts. Every event is interpreted so as to bolster the faith, facts are disregarded which undermine the faith and fact-free assertions are embraced which confirm the faith. [“The anatomy of the ‘thought’ process of a Bush defender” (unclaimed Territory)]

I’ve often thought the last few years that politics is the new religion or the new racism.  Certainly I think that on either side of the political fence, it’s feeding into a need to believe absolutely in something or someone.  This is definitely a very dangerous thing for those of us in the middle, particularly those of us smart enough not to believe in anything whole-heartedly and to take everything with a grain of salt.  We may just get crushed or pulled apart in the resulting tug-of-war.

Tags: blogs, George W. Bush, moonbats, rightwingers, Faith, Glenn Greenwald

Save The Internet

Now here’s something that isn’t making headline news and should be. This will affect everyone if it makes it through and probably people either think no one will be able to enforce it or it’ll never happen in their life time. This is real Big Brother type stuff.

If you’ve ever been frustrated because you were using a library, campus, military, or work computer and couldn’t get to a website because it was blocked, imagine if your phone company or service provider could do that to you just because they want more money? Imagine that your service provider could charge you extra to go to ebay or Amazon.com or bloglines or cnn.com. Imagine that your service provider could decide whether or not you could read Air America’s site or Rush’s or Fox News or NPRs based on their politics not yours.

Just think about it.

Congress is pushing a law that would abandon “network neutrality.” Network neutrality prevents companies like AT&T, Verizon and Comcast from choosing which Web sites open most easily for you based on who pays them more. Your local library shouldn’t have to outbid Barnes & Noble for the right to work more properly on your computer.

If the public doesn’t speak up now, Congress will hand control of the Internet to companies that want to decide what you do, where you go and what you watch online. Politicians are already trading favors for campaign donations from these companies. They’re selling us out to people like AT&T’s CEO, who says “the Internet can’t be free.”

Internet freedom could soon be fenced in by the phone and cable companies. If Congress turns the Internet over to AT&T, everyone will be affected.

How does this affect you?
More

Tags: COPE Act, Congress, net neutrality, blogs, iTunes, web hosting, politics, Internet

More Snubbery Blogging

O.K. I know I’ve whined about this before and it’s probably not going to do any good to mention it again here, but I’ve been annoyed all day and I just want to spit it out and cleanse it from my mind so I can get on with my life.

Seriously, how do people get noticed out there in blogland?  I don’t mean, how do I get more blog traffic?  I’m not fishing for advice on how to become famous overnight or anything.  Heck, I don’t know that I’d want to be a famous blogger anyway.

What I’m talking about is that I read some fairly high trafficky blogs and some that aren’t necessarily high trafficky but are high commenty/high conversation blogs.  They have regulars obviously.  It’s like Cheers maybe.  Everyone’s kind of hanging out voicing their opinions, conversing, sharing their life stories, etc.

On both kinds of blogs, I’ve discovered, it’s hard to get a word in edgewise.

Oh, I can add my comments.  I can comment to my heart’s content.

Yet, like yesterday where I posted on multiple blogs on the same subject, no one acknowledged my comment.  Ever.  It was like I wasn’t there.  Like I’d never said anything.  Even though I’d definitely added something new to the conversation.

Interestingly enough.  In some cases, some of those blogs, added whole new posts on the subject later confirming what I’d commented on but no mention that maybe they’d got the info from reading my comment.  Not a one of them.

Which probably means they all ignored me and someone else happened to figure it out too.  I admit I’m not the only one who could have had the same thought.  Duh.

Still…what do I got to do to get attention out there in blogland?  I want to participate in the convercations too.  I want to share in the life stories and the politics and the opinions and the snarky remarks.  Is there some sort of hazing thing or secret handshake I’ve missed?

You know, the really funny thing about all of this is that what really annoyed me about all of this is how high schoool it all seems and how little patience I really feel I should have for it.  We are all adults, right?  I mean, I know on the net it’s sometimes hard to tell because anyone can be anyone these days.
Maybe it’s just me.  Maybe I’m just the invisible blogger.

Tags: blogs

I’m Nekid

Well, apparently, there’s a whole “nekid” website day out there; who knew?  As the Naked Truth blogger, I couldn’t resist joining in when I found out; plus it’s got a geeky cause too!

Today (April 5th) is the first annual CSS Naked Day — in the spirit of promoting Web Standards along with good semantic markup and proper hirarchy structures, today will be a day of nekidness for all webmasters to remove their css style sheets from their website just for the day.

It’s kind of fun wandering about looking at all the sites that have stripped down to their bare necessities for the day.  To see a list of participating sites or to play along, check out the above link.

I kind of feel like I should be playing a cheesy 70’s porno midi on here today.

Tags: CSS Naked Day, blogs

Bloglines And BlogExplosion

O.K. So, I’ve finally stopped dragging my feet about being old fashioned about internet surfing and tried the whole RSS/Atom feed thing through Bloglines.  I set up all but one or two of my reads who apparently are even more stubborn than me.

O.K.  I’m addicted.  How cool is it to be able to just go down the list and see what’s new every day?  Plus, I’ve got Dilbert in the list and my news sites all right there!  I’m still adding stuff, but you can view it here if you are actually interested.  Feel free to use my comments area to suggest blogs, news, comics, etc.  I’m always interested in expanding my reading.

Also this weekend, I signed up for BlogExplosion.  I’m not sure why.  I kind of noticed the “rent my blog” ads on several websites I’ve been frequenting lately and they caught my eye.  Now, I’m kind of addicted to their surf to earn credits script.  I’m more curious about the random websites that come up than earning the credits.  I’ve tripped on a couple of blogs that have some potential and one really bad one that looked very professional but mispelled “lose” four times in the first sentence.

Anyway, I thought I’d share my new discoveries though I know they’re old web news to everyone else.

Tags: blogs, BlogExplosion, Bloglines

Internet For Soldiers

Bill in Portland Maine on The Daily Kos reprinted this local letter from a local outraged parent, who’s son is serving overseas, and no matter what you think about the President and his policies and how he got us into the war and how he’s running the war, you have to agree that American soldiers deserve some sort of compensation for the risks they’re taking so we can sit in our comfortable chairs in the safety of our homes. I’ve always believed that American soldiers deserve that something extra — like in ancient Celtic times when the best warrior of the hunt or battle got first choice of the kill. And yet, it seems, we really don’t seem to be doing much for our brave soldiers but sending them over to risk their lives. But what can you expect from a government that didn’t adequatedly supply it’s military with appropriate armor or armor-covered vehicles?

I would like to ask Sens. Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe to please help my family understand why my son, Pfc. Matthew Deister of the Maine Army National Guard’s 172nd Mountain Co., has to pay for basic services while in Iraq and Kuwait.

Matthew has been deployed for 18 months and left home Feb. 1 with his unit.
Matthew and our family understand the reason for the deployment, as he enlisted during this war. But I, his father, can’t understand why we are charging our soldiers for Internet and telephone services, food and even haircuts!

Did we not ask these fine men and women to go? And yet, we continue to charge them for simple services that should be provided at no cost.

Matthew has to pay $5 per hour for Internet service. Anyone who knows about the pay structure of the service can understand why this is such an outrage. Matthew makes Pfc. wages while overseas.

If you deduct what he pays for the Internet, telephone and haircuts, you can see the reason I am very angry right now. I have never been so angry about any situation. We require them to go overseas and yet continue to allow people to profit off their needs.

Richard Deister
Buxton, Maine
Maine Sunday Telegram

[“Cheers and Jeers Tueseday” (Daily Kos)”]

Bill in Portland Maine is taking up a collection to help pay for the 172nd’s internet. You can email him at bipm04103ATyahooDOTcom and he’ll tell you where to send it. He’s starting things off by donating 10-hours-worth himself.

Hat tip to Susie at Suburban Guerilla.

Tags: blogs, Maine, Iraq, American soldiers

Random Blog Stuff

So, O.K. I moved all of the personal stuff about myself like what books I’m reading, what’s on my Neflix list, the countdowns to when Pugly comes home and when I go to England, and my general status to that Most Current 411 on N. Mallory link on the right. I will update that page fairly regularly for anyone who actually is interested.

I added those Technorati tags on the bottom right too, but those are only the tags that appear like at least 3 times in the blog or something. If you want to see every tag I’ve ever used, you have to go to my Technorati Cosmos page. Oh, and I finally gave up on trying to tag every single post. I did do 99% of the ones under My Life and The World though.
Now, if I could just figure out why it takes this version of Wordpress a full minute to save/publish, I’d be happy.

Tags: blogs

9/11, Conspiracy Theories, Unanswered Questions, And Scary Stuff

“At first, we widows didn’t want to be seen with conspiracy people. But they kept showing up. They cared more than those supposedly doing the investigating. If you ask me, they’re just Americans, looking for the truth, which is supposed to be our right.”[“The Ground Zero Grassy Knoll” (New York Magazine)]

September 11, 2001. I don’t think any of us can forget where we were or what we were doing that day when we heard the news.

I still see it in flashes. Flashes of the people who were with me that day, of the things that happened around me that day, of the things on the television that day.

Mind you, I’m the “conspiracy theorist” of the circle of friends, but really that just means, I’m the conspiracy collector. There were folks far more paranoid and with far more interesting theories than mine in that group. I like to think I collect and analyze and only believe the ones that actually have facts to back them up. Even then, they’re just theories.

More

Tags: blogs, Conspiracy Theories, George W. Bush, 9/11

We’re Dedicated Now

Well, all of the websites hosted by exit-23.net were moved to the dedicated server last night.  I shut a couple down permanently for non-use or because they were just attracting spam hogs.  Turns out I have a lot more space and a lot more database priviliges over here on my own, so I’ll be offering some more of my friends some space to get them started.  Might as well.  I hate to ask for money from them though.  However, I am going to be hard pressed to afford to keep up with the cost of these sites now.  They’ve increased in cost by 12 times overnight.

Anyway, I think the click-through at least on this blog appears to be much faster, though the saving of posts is still a bit slowish.  Let me know what you think.

Now I can go back with trying to add Technorati tags to my old posts.  I was about half way through.  I’m fairly sure that’s what caused all the fuss at Lunarpages — “OMG!  She’s adding Technorati tags and it’s using up CPU resources!  She must be stopped!”   :P  I’m not entirely sure what use Technorati tags are anyway.  I don’t really think many people come here.  I mean, a surprisingly lot of folks come here to find out about how to change a nose screw but I don’t think many people actually come here otherwise — though I most certainly do appreciate the ones that do.  However, back to the technorati tags, I was adding them into my old posts, as I was saying, which I think is what triggered this whole thing.  I think that systematically going through 700+ posts and resaving them stressed out Lunarpages’ CPU’s resources or at least they thought it did according to whatever rules they have set up for users.

Do please let me know if you find something is broken.  I’ll be playing around with stuff and upgrading all of the Wordpress engines and plugins to the latest and greatests over the next few weeks.  I might even try to figure out how to separate the three current blogs that are intermingled in one MySql DB into their very own MySql DBs since I have this big playground for the time being.

Tags: blogs, Lunarpages, web hosting

Disruptions In Service

Well, if you’ve been by in the last 24 hours, you probably didn’t see anything. I mean, it was a virtual cyber-wasteland over in the exit-23.net hosting-land.

And it’s not a pretty story either. And it’s not over either.
It started yesterday morning actually. I woke up late because the power had been out at my house and when the power comes back on, my microwave makes this horrible screeching sound, which is way better than any alarm clock at waking up the masses at the Mallory abode anyway. When I left for work, the internet at my house wasn’t working, and I assumed that was because of the power outage; I figured it would be straightened out by the time I got home.

Besides, I can access all things exit-23.net-ish like email and web-stuff via the intenet from anywhere which is the beauty of the setup. After all, that’s why I bought into having my own domain and web-hosted space all those many years ago when people were still dilly-dallying on Geocities.
I checked my email before I left work and everything was dandy…or so I thought. I do recall an odd email from a freind from down South who said she’d tried to send several emails that day and they’d bounced, but, well, she’s in Katrina-country and they’re always having problems, so I didn’t think much of it.
When I got home however, the internet was still not working. A call to internet tech support got that worked out, but for some reason, all of my exit-23.net accounts wouldn’t download. I of course blamed my internet provider because they’d changed settings in the past that had caused problems downloading before. They had a history.
This began several hours of going back and forth between the internet tech support and Lunarpages tech support — Lunarpages is the service I use to host exit-23.net and have for years and haven’t really had problems with before.

Mind you, the Lunarpages tech support guy insisted that he could download my email so therefore it must be the internet provider’s fault, especially since I could access my email via the web. This is important. It’s important to note that I spent actual time working with this guy. I spent enough time to not only get his name, but learn his voice. You’ll see why.

So eventually, I used up every last tier of tech support with the internet provider, all the way to India and there was nothing I more could do. So I was sitting there toying with it all on my own and very near tears because it was just plain frustrating when suddenly I couldn’t even log into the webmail. Heck, I couldn’t even log into the cpanel anymore!

Well, panicking now, I called Lunarpages back and got the same tech guy. With 5 minutes before Lunarpages “official office hours” closed despite their “24/7″ tech support advertising on their website, he put me on hold and then came back and told me that my account had been suspended. He said that they had tried to send me an email but it had been bouncing — probably because they had shut off my email account! When I asked why, he couldn’t tell me but asked me for a valid non-exit-23.net email and said that they would email me there and if I answered quickly enough, everything would be resolved that night.

Basically, he brushed me off.

No email came.

I eventually, opened an urgent ticket under their 24/7 online help desk.

I was told by the online tech support that someone had tried to email me but my email had bounced - surprise! However, it appears that Wordpress 2.02 and all of my tweaking was causing a lot of CPU suckage on the shared server and they didn’t like that. My choices were basically

• get lost
• pay for an expensive dedicated server

Supposedly, other people are normally given seven days to decide before their account gets shut down but since exit-23.net has a dash (-) in it, they couldn’t move it to a temporary server and since they couldn’t contact me because my email was bouncing, it became a critical condition. So they just plain shut me down without warning.
Anyway, I decided for the time being to go with the Dedicated server, but of course, they’re dragging their feet and they can’t just discuss this over the phone and get it over with and have it done and they may have turned my email back on but it’s still bouncing all over the place and half of my domains still aren’t up as I typed this in notepad at 9am.

Of course, what really pisses me off is that I was on the phone with tech support while they were shutting my account off and one hand didn’t know what the other was doing and if they’d just talked to each other and me, everything could have been resolved right then and there instead of dragging it out and becoming the nightmare it did.

So, almost 24 hours later, no one, including my mother could get in touch with me because despite the fact that I had email access, my emails are still bouncing all over the place…

Right now I’m wondering what it takes to have my own webserver in my own house…

***When I finally did talk to someone on the phone over there after waiting on hold for 20 minutes and then being hung up on and then waiting on hold again for 30 minutes, the person wasn’t able to give me any information. When I said that my website wasn’t up and running, he said that it was. When I said that my email was bouncing, he denied it, though family members had told me so. He could not tell me when the move would be made or how long it would take. When I asked to speak to someone in the department who would be working on the move, I was told that they don’t speak on the phone. WTF???!! I was told that I would be contacted via email when it was done. That’s it.That’s bullshit.

I work in I.T.

Communication with users is key.

You do not run a business like that.

I am so pissed off.

***Hours later…They sent me an email finally telling me that everything was back up and they are just about to start the move to the dedicated server. WTF were they doing all that time?

Well, guess what? Nothing was back up!

Meanwhile, I’ve been reading up on what it takes to run a webserver out of your home and it’s not as big a deal as one would think. At the very least I wouldn’t have to deal with asshats in California who can’t be bothered to talk to me on the telephone. If I have a problem with tech support, I can just deny myself lattes until it’s fixed.

***

As you can tell, I finally did get back on the blog. They have not moved the websites to the dedicated server yet, as far as I can tell, so expect another down when that occurs because I will need to update the DNS once that happens. I’ve been looking around their online forums and it looks like Lunarpages has pulled this stunt a couple of times lately. Maybe it’s less about setting up a dedicated server of my own and more about finding a better webhost. I don’t know, it kind of seems like an interesting challenge.

Tags: blogs, Lunarpages, web hosting

Running In Place

The last couple of weeks, I’ve been revamping my website, tweaking things here and there, and most recently I’ve been going through and adding technorati tags, which interestingly enough has given me an interesting look back through the way back machine.

It’s kind of a weird deja vu, kind of a “haven’t I seen this tree before”?

What I’ve come to realize is that a year ago we, meaning bloggers, Democrats, Republicans, this country, etc., were all doing pretty much all of this same bullshit but in last year’s fashions and with last year’s technology.

Basically the White House and Bush were doing whatever the heck they wanted and refusing to explain anything or even offer an excuse. They were pretty much thumbing their nose at Congress and the judicial system too. Go ahead and check the news records for back then, I can wait if you want.
The Republicans were still cow-towing to whatever Bush and his cronies wanted, marching instep and voting the party line whether or not it was good for the Average Joe or not. They were still claiming that anyone who didn’t agree with them was unpatriotic and helping the terrorists.

The Democrats were still pointing figures and, yet, still managing to sit on their hands and doing nothing. They were all talk and no real action even back then.

And liberal bloggers were bipolarly flipping back and forth between extreme excitement every time something “new” would come to “light” that should damage the administration and extreme disappointment when no one did anything with the new information. (Hey, I was right there with you!)

And conservative bloggers were preening and attacking and trolling and acting like thugs and bullies for the most part.

What I realized is that nothing has changed and a year from now nothing will have changed even after the 2006 elections.

Unless.

Unless someone does something other than whine and complain and point figures and circulate all this negativity. Actually, it needs to be a whole lot of someones…and they need to be doing more than blogging too.

You can’t expect a change if you keep doing what you’ve always done. That’s just crazy.

Tags: 2006 election, politics, blogs