Posts from — August 2008

Position: 28.1 N 89.6 W. [1 AM CDT]
Movement: West [270°] near 9 mph.
Maximum sustained winds: 50 mph.
Wind Gusts: 55 mph.
Tropical Storm Wind Radius: 35 miles.
Minimum central pressure: 1005 mb.

About 75 miles South Southeast of the mouth of the Mississippi River.

This the Invest 91L that popped up in the Gulf yesterday.

There is now a Hurricane Watch from Intercoastal City to Port O’Connor, Texas.

The BBC has a video report on a 13-year-old guitarist who makes £70 per hour [$140] playing on a pier.

He’s worth it, he really is.

Sitemeter has an announcement on their blog that they have worked around the weird, non-standard behavior of IE6 & IE7.

I didn’t have the problem because I put the Sitemeter code in a neutral place on my template, as opposed to the places that freaked out the garbage browser from MS.

The real solution is to get a browser that conforms to the standards that everyone else uses and doesn’t screw up peoples’ designs.

While Invest 90 [11.5N 29.6W 30mph moving West] and Invest 99 [18.6N 44.5W 35mph moving West] are messing about in the Atlantic with not a lot of real vigor, there is a new area of interest on the map.

Invest 91 [29.5N 87.0W 30mph moving South] popped up in the Gulf of Mexico. It is due South of Pensacola and in a decent environment for gaining strength.

Louisiana and Texas need to start watching the weather.

After Friday’s little foray into the power of profiling with computer algorithms that resulted in a whole lot of annoyed people and little progress in the War On Terror Spam I think more people now understand why I don’t hold out much hope for getting anything worthwhile from all of the data the Hedgemony is hoovering up, and a need to set up back-up blogging locations for all of the hardcore addicts who went cold turkey for approximately 24 hours having been reduced in rank from bloggers to commenters.

One of the things that occurred, it that while no new posts could be written, people had access to their templates. This allowed people like skippy, Elayne, Roy, et al. to tell people what had happened. That was enough for most people, but the hardcore bloggers needed to let the words out.

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Obama doesn’t have to worry about sacrificing principles, he doesn’t have any. CNN reports Obama shifts on oil drilling?

ORLANDO, Florida (CNN) – Barack Obama said Friday that he would be willing to compromise on his position against offshore oil drilling if it were part of a more overarching strategy to lower energy costs.

“My interest is in making sure we’ve got the kind of comprehensive energy policy that can bring down gas prices,” Obama told The Palm Beach Post early into a two-day swing through Florida.

“If, in order to get that passed, we have to compromise in terms of a careful, well thought-out drilling strategy that was carefully circumscribed to avoid significant environmental damage – I don’t want to be so rigid that we can’t get something done,” Obama said.

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There are a lot of people complaining about Sitemeter and problems.

Guys, they said they were moving to a new platform on May 1st and talked about possible anomalies as this occurs.  They are in the middle of that transition and depending on your server number [mine is S20, the first three of the account number] you will be affected on a rolling basis.

Sitemeter isn’t down, and IE7 gets to my site fine, but if your server is being moved, there will probably be problems.

You can disable Sitemeter by commenting out the code in your template and reactivating it later.

Server moves and updates are part of the business, and three months of lead notification is extremely generous.

I first heard this in Deborah Tedford’s NPR piece, Scientist In Anthrax Case Dead Of Apparent Suicide, but The Smoking Gun has more details about Dr. Ivins’s mental history as revealed in an application for a “peace order”, Maryland’s version of a restraining order, filed by a mental health counselor.

Someone is going to be required to explain what Dr. Ivins, with a long history of talking about “homicidal actions, threats and plans” going back to his graduate student days, was doing with a security clearance and working in a bio-weapons lab.

When you are being investigated for a major security clearance one of the first things you are required to do is sign releases giving investigators access to all of your records, including medical records. How could something like this be missed?

If the Feds weren’t ready to arrest him on the anthrax charges, he was facing a forced commitment hearing, that he had avoided in July by voluntarily checking to a clinic, and then checking himself out.

He did the Feds a big favor by going for suicide, because he had a solid insanity defense available.

Blue Gal and Ellroon at Rants From The Rookery have been tracking the “victims”.

alicublog, The Impolitic, Plush Life, Dawg’s Blawg, skippy the bush kangaroo, Guys from Area 51, Pen-Elayne, Hootsbuddy’s Place, Monkey Muck, Phydeaux Speaks, Blast Off!, Frieda Bee, SteveAudio, Roger Ailes, and WTF is it now? were all reported affected.

Ellroon also discovered the culprit: it was Google in the Server Farm with an Algorithm. “Even though it’s a Friday” they are working to clean up the mess they created. Well, maybe if you tested the software a little more rigorously and didn’t deploy changes on a Thursday night, you wouldn’t have to work late on Friday.

Major league congratulations are in order.

The title of her post, Bob Newhart Names “Mad” Kane Winner of 2008 Robert Benchley Society Award for Humor, pretty much says it all.

She has a scan of Bob Newhart’s note up with the post. Being compared to Robert Benchley by Bob Newhart is as good as it gets for a satirist.

The BBC reports US anthrax ‘suspect’ found dead

A top US scientist suspected of anthrax attacks in 2001 has apparently killed himself just as he was about to be charged, a newspaper reported.

The Los Angeles Times said Bruce Ivins, 62, had taken an overdose of painkillers. It said he had recently been told of the impending prosecution.
…

The FBI focused more on Dr Ivins after the leadership of the investigation was changed in 2006.

Another scientist at the Fort Detrick laboratory, Dr Steven Hatfill, who had been named a “person of interest” in the case in 2002, was exonerated of any involvement.

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Update: OK, skippy the bush kangaroo can get snarky, and the Guys From Area 51 can be downright weird, but Elayne’s Journal‽

Segments of blogtopia™ are Bloggered, or, more accurately, blocked from posting including the marsupial master of minuscule who coined the word.

Corrente has the list of those who have reported in as blocked for spamming.

It isn’t clear whether this is a Google fault, some cretin tagging people as spammers, or possibly the result of the new ‘Net attack redirecting people, which is very possible if Blogger uses the AT&T backbone out of the Bay Area, which still isn’t patched.

I would note that WordPress.com doesn’t seem to have these problems, but they aren’t as large, and if everyone shifted who knows how it would scale to the demand. This is one of the reasons I have my own site, for my hobby. I have enough frustration that $3/month is not a lot to avoid any more.

Chilling Out

Doesn’t everyone sleep like this?

[Editor: An oldie because we have had a series of thunderstorms through today which means the ferals and the insiders are hiding. As flashes of light have been followed by loud bangs all day, inside pictures were not happening. Oh, Sox sleeps like this whenever it’s hot to maximize belly exposure.]

Friday Ark