I’m back in CA. We didn’t make as much progress unpacking as I’d hoped, and Patricia’s computer didn’t survive the trip to Florida. It arrived sufficiently addled that, upon boot, it shows a crazed scattering of phosphor trails across the screen, though which one can barely make out the Award logo of the BIOS, after which it attempts to load Windows, and then bluescreens with obscure messages in various dialects of Greek and hex. My machine came up OK, but we don’t yet have an internet connection there, or even phone service, so I’ve been cut off from civilization (or, at least, the blogosphere) all weekend. Thanks to Andrew for keeping the ball rolling with some interesting posts.

Because I was away, some of the lowest forms of life imaginable managed to attack my comments section with spam of the most vile nature on Sunday, most of which involved websites hawking variants on b3stiality, r@pe and inc3st, sometimes in varying combinations. Normally, I catch these after the first two or three, after which they’re banned, but my absence gave them free rein for hours and days, and for some reason, MT Blacklist doesn’t seem to remove all comments with banned URLs (at least for me)–it only deletes them one at a time, so I spent the first hour back on line cleaning up the mess. (By the way, Andrew, I don’t get emails of comments to your posts, so you should keep an eye out as well, as they age like fine wine and thus become more attractive to the scumbuckets. If you get one, let me know, and I’ll show you the drill.)

If anyone has any suggestions as to what may have gone astray with the computer, let me know. I’m guessing it’s a MB problem. I’ve had problems in the past while moving equipment in which cables came loose, but it’s hard to imagine how that would cause a weird screen display even before POST.

I’m back in CA. We didn’t make as much progress unpacking as I’d hoped, and Patricia’s computer didn’t survive the trip to Florida. It arrived sufficiently addled that, upon boot, it shows a crazed scattering of phosphor trails across the screen, though which one can barely make out the Award logo of the BIOS, after which it attempts to load Windows, and then bluescreens with obscure messages in various dialects of Greek and hex. My machine came up OK, but we don’t yet have an internet connection there, or even phone service, so I’ve been cut off from civilization (or, at least, the blogosphere) all weekend. Thanks to Andrew for keeping the ball rolling with some interesting posts.

Because I was away, some of the lowest forms of life imaginable managed to attack my comments section with spam of the most vile nature on Sunday, most of which involved websites hawking variants on b3stiality, r@pe and inc3st, sometimes in varying combinations. Normally, I catch these after the first two or three, after which they’re banned, but my absence gave them free rein for hours and days, and for some reason, MT Blacklist doesn’t seem to remove all comments with banned URLs (at least for me)–it only deletes them one at a time, so I spent the first hour back on line cleaning up the mess. (By the way, Andrew, I don’t get emails of comments to your posts, so you should keep an eye out as well, as they age like fine wine and thus become more attractive to the scumbuckets. If you get one, let me know, and I’ll show you the drill.)

If anyone has any suggestions as to what may have gone astray with the computer, let me know. I’m guessing it’s a MB problem. I’ve had problems in the past while moving equipment in which cables came loose, but it’s hard to imagine how that would cause a weird screen display even before POST.

I’m back in CA. We didn’t make as much progress unpacking as I’d hoped, and Patricia’s computer didn’t survive the trip to Florida. It arrived sufficiently addled that, upon boot, it shows a crazed scattering of phosphor trails across the screen, though which one can barely make out the Award logo of the BIOS, after which it attempts to load Windows, and then bluescreens with obscure messages in various dialects of Greek and hex. My machine came up OK, but we don’t yet have an internet connection there, or even phone service, so I’ve been cut off from civilization (or, at least, the blogosphere) all weekend. Thanks to Andrew for keeping the ball rolling with some interesting posts.

Because I was away, some of the lowest forms of life imaginable managed to attack my comments section with spam of the most vile nature on Sunday, most of which involved websites hawking variants on b3stiality, r@pe and inc3st, sometimes in varying combinations. Normally, I catch these after the first two or three, after which they’re banned, but my absence gave them free rein for hours and days, and for some reason, MT Blacklist doesn’t seem to remove all comments with banned URLs (at least for me)–it only deletes them one at a time, so I spent the first hour back on line cleaning up the mess. (By the way, Andrew, I don’t get emails of comments to your posts, so you should keep an eye out as well, as they age like fine wine and thus become more attractive to the scumbuckets. If you get one, let me know, and I’ll show you the drill.)

If anyone has any suggestions as to what may have gone astray with the computer, let me know. I’m guessing it’s a MB problem. I’ve had problems in the past while moving equipment in which cables came loose, but it’s hard to imagine how that would cause a weird screen display even before POST.

Probably no posts for a few days. I’m meeting some work deadlines today, and flying to Florida tomorrow morning to unpack the moving van, which will probably consume the weekend. But keep checking back–Andrew can probably tell you all about the fusion conference.

I see that I’m not the only one to be having trouble with Earthlink DSL in the last day or so.

We’re getting ready to load up the truck and move to Florida, so lots of things to do around the house for the next few days. Maybe Andrew will pick up the slack, if he has time.

…for the day. See you later.

Well, not really, but it’s a royal pain. I’m posting this from my laptop. The drive on which my main Winbloze installation lives (lived?) seems to have died in its sleep last night.

Chkdsk says multiple unrecoverable errors are found on it.

Fortunately, I didn’t have much data on it, but at a minimum I’ll probably have to repartition and format, and I may have to replace the drive. Either way, I guess I’ve lost all of my software installation on that drive.

Unless someone else has a suggestion before I do the deed…

By a scientist. I found his inaugural post quite interesting, about the tension between science and religion, as well as this more recent follow up to one of my comments in the post about the two cultures.

Check it out.

I’ve added a new feature to Blogspot Watch. Now, in addition to telling you whether it’s up or down, I’m logging the ups and downs, and using them to calculate the percentage of down time for the past twenty-four hours. I display this at the bottom of my link list, just above the “Moveable Type” ad. As I type this, Blogspot just came back up after a twelve-minute outage. The percentage downtime over the past twenty four hours is 16.3%.

For those who are interested, the log itself can be viewed here.

[Update at 11:09 AM PDT]

Per popular request (i.e., one person asked me, and no one has objected), I’ve moved all the Blogspot status stuff to the same place, just to the left (until this message scrolls down). I’ve also added a permalink to the log.

I should also note, that if you see a 0.0%, that’s not because Ev magically healed it. That’s the default number in the template, which appears whenever I do a page update (adding or editing posts). Note that the default traffic signal is green also, so a 0.0% means that blogspot isn’t necessarily up, even though the signal says it is (the way it’s been lately, maybe I should make the red signal the default…)

Any, just check back in a minute or so, and you’ll see the right number, with the correct blogspot status, after the background script does its update. Another way to check is to view the log, and see what the last entry was (up or down).