Archive for January, 2005

The Culprit

Monday, January 31st, 2005

The reason for the blog downtime? A broken Wordpress plugin, the acronym replacer — the thingy that adds the cool mouseover tooltips to acronyms like HTML.

What’s that you say? You want to know what was “wrong” with it? Well, ok… are you sitting down?

An extra space had mysteriously appeared at the very end of the wp-acronyms.php plugin file. So the last line was “?> ” instead of “?>”.

I am Jack’s raging bile duct.

Cue the angelic chorale

Monday, January 31st, 2005

EET EEZ FEEXD!!

If you’ve been champing at the bit for a new post — and I can imagine that all three of you are — there’s been a perfectly good reason why you have found nothing new here for nearly a month: the blog was broken :(

A broken blog is an embarrassing thing, kids. Especially when you’re the admin of said blog, and most likely caused the broken-ness through something stupid and/or careless that you did. As it turns out, the culprit (for some as-yet-to-determined reason) was the acronym generator plugin, which created mouseover explanations for select acronyms. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, congratulations! — you’re not a nerd.

Delving deeper, you might be asking yourself, “Self, why didn’t Mr. Admin Man get this thing fixed a long time ago?” Well, dear reader, I’ll give you three guesses :D Of course, lots and lots have gone on since then that have kept me pretty dang busy (most notably, Nichole’s surgery and recovery), but any at-home computer time was definitely usurped by WoW. I can say it without shame. More or less.

This Is Me

Friday, January 7th, 2005

VDH’s latest offering really hit home. He hits the nail on the head when it comes to how I feel about world current events: a combination of mad and disbelieving …with a growing undercurrent of sad weariness.

Imagine a world in which there was no United States during the last 15 years. Iraq, Iran, and Libya would now have nukes. Afghanistan would remain a seventh-century Islamic terrorist haven sending out the minions of Zarqawi and Bin Laden worldwide. The lieutenants of Noriega, Milosevic, Mullah Omar, Saddam, and Moammar Khaddafi would no doubt be adjudicating human rights at the United Nations. The Ortega Brothers and Fidel Castro, not democracy, would be the exemplars of Latin America. Bosnia and Kosovo would be national graveyards like Pol Pot’s Cambodia. Add in Kurdistan as well — the periodic laboratory for Saddam’s latest varieties of gas. Saddam himself, of course, would have statues throughout the Gulf attesting to his control of half the world’s oil reservoirs. Europeans would be in two-day mourning that their arms sales to Arab monstrocracies ensured a second holocaust. North Korea would be shooting missiles over Tokyo from its new bases around Seoul and Pusan. For their own survival, Germany, Taiwan, and Japan would all now be nuclear. Americans know all that — and yet they grasp that their own vigilance and military sacrifices have earned them spite rather than gratitude. And they are ever so slowly learning not much to care anymore.

Your Daily Dose of Reality

Thursday, January 6th, 2005

…this time from Larry Kudlow at townhall.com. Larry points out that all that doom-and-gloom you heard from the CBS/NBC/ABC newsdesks was pretty much BS. The economy is strong, growth looks good, and prospects for the immediate future are bright.

My condolences to the Michael Moore-on crowd. “The Left”: 0, “Reality”: 7,432,746

CBS-gate/Memo-gate/Blog-gate continues…

Tuesday, January 4th, 2005

…with this delightful Little Green Footballs story about a recent article in the Columbia Journalism Review. Go Charles! :D