I had a choice: write a blog entry, or fix the reCaptcha thing so that boots could have his precious "preview" when he deigned to leave a comment.
So the comments should work now, with the reCaptcha spam-avoidance thingie, whether you are self-secure enough to just send your words winging through the wires, or like bootsie and you have to review them before you can let them go.
Maybe I'll write a real blog entry tomorrow.
Least I have one. boots isn't man enough to have a blog ... <grumble>
In spite of boots's bitching, my blog software does not suck and I haven't been poasting because I have been busy, lazy, and not very blogative.
Busy: had a visitor last weekend, went to a NASCAR race. Never been to any kind of auto racing, mostly because when I took auto shop back in high school the teacher would play Indy films (as opposed to Indie films) when he didn't feel like actually teaching us anything or letting us loose in the shop. I got car sick watching the cars speed round and round and round so I figured I'd get car sick at a real race. Anyway, my friend came to 'Zona just to see the Sprint Fresh Fit 500 race and I went with her. Had a good time, especially when the car I chose to follow ended up winning. I figured I couldn't go wrong with a guy named "Jimmie Johnson" because that is so NASCAR-esque sounding and his car was just kind of gradually overtaking all the other drivers, one car at a time, making it kind of interesting to watch. His car was blue-ish. Lowes. And I don't mind Lowes all that much, mainly because their logo is blue instead of that pukey orange that Home Depot uses.
Lazy: strained a muscle or tendon or something in my right elbow so I've been trying to take it easy. Makes shopping really really difficult, but I managed it, and now have a noo pair of shooz for the summer. DSW rocks, shoe-wise. Top labels for discount prices, oh baby!
Blogative: my computer was misbehaving. No, not the blog ware :: glaring at boots ::. Windows Installer stopped working, and none of the solutions offered by Microsoft or all the bloggers and forums (who merely parroted Microsoft's solutions) fixed it. I ended up reformating the hard drive, reinstalling everything, and now it's all back up and running, but damn!
Anyway, the news is boring because we've all been there with Obama saying what he really thought but getting slapped for it, and Hillary lying about what it had been like in Kosovo or wherever, and earthquakes here, tornadoes there, I mean <yawn>. There's only so much you can say about this stuff, y'know?
I'll be fixing tofu tacos tonight (thanks UV!) only they'll be burritos with rice and black beans instead of tacos. Same deal, though. Fry the tofu chunks, make the taco seasoning sauce to saute them, then use that instead of ground beef. Sounds faboo.
Web service seems to have continued. E-mail was a bit dodgy, but everything is up and running. I'm sure all of my reader missed me.
My domains will be down for a couple of days. I'm not sure exactly when, but I will not have any websites, nor e-mail, until, well, until it's all back up.
Here's the poop: A few months ago my web host decided to implement a new and exciting feature that would make me ultimately happy. It did not involve batteries, nor breathless moments and moist warmth. It involved an implementation of some sort of super-duper anti-spam software.
The process of rolling this thing out was painful for me, for another customer of theirs with whom I correrspond and, I suspect, for pretty much everyone.
Eventually it settled down, except ... the damn thing continues to sporadically reject e-mail from people I've white listed. They are not sending anything even remotely resembling spam _and_ I put them on the white list! I complain, the techs claim they twiddled something, everything's fine, and then once again some mail gets bounced as spammy. Sometimes the sender gets the bounce message, but I still get the mail! And ... get this ... the sender is on the same domain! He's using the same mail set up that I am!!!
So I finally threatened them and they are now moving my domain and data to a new server that has not been configured with this anti-spam software. It will take a couple of hours for them to move the stuff, but it will take a few days for the new IP address to propagate to all the name servers, so if you come here, find I'm not here, then that's why.
Please pardon our dust.
Not the Megadeth LP of the same title, no, but a bit of a tongue-in-cheek social commentary here.
Mind you, I'm going off of just what the media reported a number of days ago, and simply writing my gut reaction to it all. The report concerns the (local to me) story about a 15 year old who shot his dad because his father cut off his Internet access.
The guts of the story as I read it:
My first thought was "he's at that fucked up age where his moral compass is already 'iffy' and it's clear he's more fucked up than most, so maybe they can redeem him if he gets the treatment he so clearly needs" but when I read that final line I figured all hope for this boy is lost. There is no way that kid will go through this system and come out okay in the end. They may as well just fry him, put him out of what is obviously misery.
How much of this reflects my real feelings and how much is just disgust with the criminal justice system and how young people are treated is left up to the judgement of the reader.
whoozTalkin?