Category: Rant

Decisions, decisions

I have three blogs on this site. One of them is this one, my personal blog, which I set up first just to experiement with this whole blogging phenomenom, but I got hooked and continued to update it nearly daily. And when my friend Maddy got acute lymphatic lymphoma, I set up a blog for her to record her thoughts and feelings as a form of release and catharsis for her. When she got too sick to post, we added a couple of other authors to her blog so that the people who were visiting her in the hospital and talking to her on the phone could keep the rest of her friends updated. And when she died, I set up memorial blog site with an author userid and password that anybody could use to post memories of Maddy, and also to post announcements of things like the memorial service in Philadelphia last winter and the interment ceremony in Quebec this summer.

So while it’s my site, and non-commercial, I have multiple blogs and multiple authors. Well, SixAhead, the people who maintain the MovableType software that this blog runs on have decided that people like me need to be hit up for vast quantities on money. I could probably afford the money they want, but by the same token I don’t want to pay it. So now I’m looking for new blog software. I’ve heard good things about Textpattern and WordPress, but neither of them allows multiple blogs, so I’d have to set up instances. Not sure how that works. Also, one or both of them only supports MySQL, and I much prefer PostgresSQL.

Heavy Stuff, Don’t Read

I can’t decide which I hate worse – the atrocities done at Abu Ghraib prison, or the apologists who think that torture, including rape, can be excused.

Even the erstwhile “Lean Left” gets it awfully, awfully wrong, linking rape and threats of rape with homophobia and sexuality. Rape isn’t sex. It’s merely the most degrading and damaging thing you can do to another person. Worse, far worse than murder, or maiming or physical torture or psychological torture.

What is going to appear below the cut line is pretty heavy, you probably don’t want to read it.

Continue reading “Heavy Stuff, Don’t Read”

Petty annoyance of the day

I’m watching my web server logs scroll by, and every minute, I see the following:

216.239.69.45 - - [10/May/2004:10:04:18 -0400] "GET /getlatest.glh?PV=6.0.5.27&OS=WIN&L=en-US, en, *&LID=1033&ch=120+90+0+0+0&ch=72+53+0+0+0&ch=52+739+0+0+0&ch=33+923+0+0+0&ch=73+166+0+0+0&ch=97+108+0+0+0&ch=118+14+0+0+0 HTTP/1.0" 404 1063 "-" "RMA/1.0 (compatible; RealMedia)"

Now, if Google can be trusted, and believe me, it can, it appears that this bozo somehow has his DNS screwed up so that it thinks I’m channels.real.com.

If only I had some suitably BOFHly way of handling this – like causing his RealPlayer to suddenly scream at him to shut the fucking thing off.

I don’t believe it!

‘I take full responsibility’

Stop the presses, something unprecedented has happened! Somebody from the G.W.Bush White House has not only taken responsibility for something, he’s even apologized!

Now if only Rumsfeld would do the traditional thing after a mistake this major, and resign. The only problem with that is that probably (shudder) Wolfowitz would take over.

Of course the real “taking full responsibility” are the poor innocent soldiers on the ground who are going to face a much bigger and more determined resistance/insurgency/uprising because of the actions of the scum who did this. I hope they make the people who took those pictures visit the families of every solider who dies from now on to say “It might be my fault your son or daughter died”.

And Rush Limbaugh can blow me.