Posted onBlahg

Drupal, maybe we should just be friends

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Recent­ly I fin­ished read­ing a book and went to put the book in my blog. I don’t have the book report writ­ten but want­ed to at least get a place­hold­er in the data­base with the vital sta­tis­tics: title, author, word count, my rat­ing, and so on. After enter­ing the infor­ma­tion, I hit sub­mit and was greet­ed with the less-than-use­ful mes­sage, The web­site encoun­tered an unex­pect­ed error. Please try again later.

Frankly, this sort of thing is the rea­son I don’t write. … Read the rest

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Posted onOpinionated Junk

Freedom is the freedom to say that fewer is fewer

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Unit­ed States Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump signed a pres­i­den­tial mem­o­ran­dum1 today insti­tut­ing a hir­ing freeze on Fed­er­al civil­ian work­ers. White House Press Sec­re­tary Sean Spicer said the mem­o­ran­dum «coun­ters the dra­mat­ic expan­sion of the fed­er­al work­force in recent years.»

This comes as wel­come news to mil­lions of peo­ple who believe that the Fed­er­al work­force has been expand­ing dra­mat­i­cal­ly under the Oba­ma admin­is­tra­tion. The White House Press Sec­re­tary has said it, and Pres­i­dent Trump would nev­er have tak­en such bold, … Read the rest

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Posted onOpinionated Junk

I hope you’re right

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As the old chest­nut goes, there are three tiny words that every mar­riage needs to be suc­cess­ful. I’m not talk­ing about I love you. I mean, maybe you’re right.

We are on the precipice of a high­ly divi­sive elec­tion. I fear that the nation is fac­ing an exis­ten­tial threat no mat­ter who wins. I’m more wor­ried about what hap­pens to the nation because of the elec­tion than I am about what any can­di­date might actu­al­ly do in office. … Read the rest

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Posted onOpinionated Junk

The New World Order Series

by 3 Comments on The New World Order Series

Back in 2008, Barack Oba­ma made a com­ment com­par­ing the long­shot odds of an African-Amer­i­can win­ning a pres­i­den­tial elec­tion to the odds of the Boston Red Sox win­ning the World Series.1 Famous­ly, the Red Sox had won in 2007 for the first time since… well, OK, since 2004. But before that they had­n’t won since 1918.

Oba­ma took some (admit­ted­ly light-heart­ed) jabs for root­ing for the Red Sox, and since he is cur­rent­ly root­ing for the … Read the rest

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Posted onWordsmithery

What’s in an alien name?

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An oft-dis­cussed top­ic among writ­ers of spec­u­la­tive fic­tion, both sci­ence fic­tion and fan­ta­sy, is how to name char­ac­ters, places, and ideas of extrater­res­tri­al or oth­er­wise non-human or alien ori­gin. Nam­ing is a dif­fi­cult part of all fic­tion writ­ing — it’s more dif­fi­cult than one might think to make names for char­ac­ters. Some (myself includ­ed) believe that char­ac­ter names ought to sug­gest some­thing about the char­ac­ters, the themes of the sto­ry, their roles in the plot, or per­haps stand in iron­ic … Read the rest

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Posted onOpinionated Junk

Chinese Steel

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Apolo­gies to Dee Dee Ramone and John­ny Thun­ders.

Also, apolo­gies to hero­in addic­tion. Being com­pared to the 2016 US Pres­i­den­tial Elec­tion is unflat­ter­ing even to hero­in addiction.

Somebody called me on the phone
I defaulted on another loan
No big deal! Wanna cop a feel!
Let’s go get some Chinese Steel

I’m living on Chinese Steel
Nobody buying Art of the Deal
I’m living on Chinese Steel
Everything I say is in the newsreel, bigly

Got no pesos for
… Read the rest
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Posted onBlahg

Status update: I didn’t expect it to be that much downtime

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Whoops! OK, that was my fault. I was actu­al­ly quite sur­prised at how smooth­ly and quick­ly the tran­si­tion went. As it turns out, it appears to have tak­en longer than expect­ed for the DNS to update. In fact, the prob­lem may have been in DNS cached in my browsers. When I test­ed the site with a brows­er I had no prob­lem access­ing it. When I test­ed the domain with dig and ping it looked like my sys­tem was see­ing the … Read the rest

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Posted onBlahg

Status update: some downtime expected

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As Mono­chro­mat­ic Out­look pre­pares to cel­e­brate its 21st anniver­sary, we are prepar­ing to trans­fer the splicer.com domain to a new reg­is­trar. This is a pret­ty sim­ple admin­is­tra­tive change, but it’s quite pos­si­ble that there will be some time between the change in reg­is­tra­tion and when the new reg­is­trar pub­lish­es the name ser­vice infor­ma­tion and as that infor­ma­tion prop­a­gates across the Internet.

The servers will be run­ning the whole time, but may not be acces­si­ble from some loca­tions. It’s not … Read the rest

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Posted onOpinionated Junk

Lies, damn lies, and thirteen and a half percent statistics

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It’s unclear why any­one is sur­prised by Bernie Sanders’ tax return. The out­rage appears entire­ly man­u­fac­tured built on dis­tor­tions and an assump­tion that no one will check facts.1

Sen­a­tor Sander­s’s tax fil­ing is sim­ple, easy to read, and con­tains no sur­pris­es at all. His income is close to exact­ly what one would expect2 and his deduc­tions are all com­mon, or should be.3

Yet still we see posts like this:

… Read the rest
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