I love the History Channel.

Weirdness

Blogger won't let me edit entries as html.

The first blog I ever read...

The first personal blog I recall reading is that of former Apple employee Wilfredo Sánchez. His old blog, the one I used to read, is at advogato.org. He now blogs at wsanchez.net.

Elkins woman questioned by Secret Service

Call brings agent to home of woman with anti-Bush signs

For months, Renee Jensen has stirred up controversy in Elkins by posting anti-war and anti-Bush administration signs on her front porch and in her front yard.

Last Tuesday afternoon, Secret Service agent James Lanham and State Trooper R.J. Boggs spent 90 minutes questioning Jensen in her home.

“They asked me a lot of questions,” Jensen said. “He [Lanham] told me they were investigating a call they had received. The person who called said I was running for city council, came knocking on their door and said I wanted to cut off President Bush’s head.

“I told Lanham it is true I am running for city council. But everything else the person said is untrue. I had not even begun door-to-door campaigning, and I would not tell anyone to cut anyone’s head off.”

No LJ for me until Sunday night

The LJ crew write: "We have all database clusters except one back online at this time. Unfortunately MadCow is still recovering, and we expect it to be back online by around 10 PM PST tomorrow."

I'm pretty sure I'm on MadCow.

Reply to Comments

I can't figure out how to reply to comments on Blogger. Maybe I'm missing something.

Oncee's guide to culture

Ahead of the Curve:
Bollywood

Madonna's new look

Being Snarky


Hot Now:
Bloggers


Behind the Curve:
Howard Dean

Virginia safe for fornication

Xeni Jardin at Boing Boing reports premarital and unmarried sex is now legal in Virginia.

La Conchita

I posted link to a picture that Doc Searls took of the La Conchita mudslide that really helped to put the disaster into prospective. Doc now reports that he lost a friend of a friend.

Turns out friends of friends — people we've hung out and partied with — are among the dead in La Conchita. Clan Destino's whole site is now dedicated to the memories of Charlie Womack, the Wallet family (only two out of six survived) and others in this little community by the sea.

There's an overlap between Clan Destino and Burning Man. If we go back far enough, I wouldn't be surprised to find more ovelaps between both and the Mountain Road community that thrived above Santa Barbara before the Coyote Fire wiped most of it out in 1964. There are threads here... good people, high times, great art, sweet community, dangerous places... I dunno. Right now it's just so sad.

Doc's post is here.

LiveJournal back up for some...

but not me.

We are bringing as much of the site back online as we can, though some database clusters will remain unavailable while we continue to recover from backups (Where am I?).

These are the clusters that will be temporarily down, as well as the times we expect to have them back online:

FiletMignon: 7PM PST
MadCow: 4AM PST

While we do not anticipate any major data loss, please contact LiveJournal Support in the event there is anything missing from your journal. We have tools to recover missing data from backups, if necessary.

I think I'm on MadCow, so no LiveJournal for me. I logged off, but it looks like no free user support. Based on the above estimate it looks like LiveJournal should be back to normal by Sunday morning.

Hitler 'ordered pope kidnapped'

But leading German general refused to obey order, newspaper says

VATICAN CITY (Reuters) -- Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler gave one of his generals a direct order to kidnap Pope Pius XII during World War II but the officer did not obey, Italy's leading Roman Catholic newspaper reported.

LiveJournal outage. Day Two

Well into the second day of the LJ outage, and I've having friends list withdraw. I have managed to direct tuscendi to this journal, but I'm out of contact with the rest of my friends list.

This is the longest downtime of LiveJournal I can recall.

This year's farewell tours have begun

I just saw the Eagles will be making a return to the Charleston Civic Center on March 13. If I'm correct this will be their first appearance in Charleston in 10 years. They last played the Civic Center on their 1995 farewell tour.

Bob & Tom

I used to listen to Bob and Tom every morning when I drove in from Huntington. On March 4, Bob and Tom bring their road show to the Charleston Civic Center. If you are a fan of the show this is an event you can't miss:

MARCH 4, 2005 - FRIENDS OF THE BOB & TOM SHOW WITH DREW HASTINGS, HENRY PHILLIPS, PAT GODWIN AND SPECIAL GUEST HOST KRISTI LEE
CHARLESTON CIVIC CENTER LITTLE THEATER
TWO SHOWS: 7:00 PM AND 9:45 PM
TICKETS ARE $22.00
TICKETS GO ON SALE WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 19 AT 10:00 AM

Source: The Charleston Civic Center website

Sorry folks, that's Charleston SC

Charleston again ranked 'best-mannered city'

No WV city was included in the list.

Here's the list according to etiquette expert Marjabelle Young Stewart:
1. Charleston, South Carolina
2. San Diego, California
3. Seattle, Washington
4. Peoria, Illinois
6. Omaha, Nebraska and the Quad Cities, which are Bettendorf and Davenport in Iowa and Moline and Rock Island in Illinois
7. Hollywood, Florida
8. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
9. Houston, Texas
10. Salt Lake City, Utah

Yet Another LiveJournal Update

From LiveJournal.com: "Update #2, 10:11 pm (PST): So far so good. Things are checking out, but we're being paranoid. A few annoying issues, but nothing that's not fixable. We're going to be buying a bunch of rack-mount UPS units on Monday so this doesn't happen again. In the past we've always trusted Internap's insanely redundant power and UPS systems, but now that this has happened to us twice, we realize the first time wasn't a total freak coincidence. C'est la vie."

LiveJournal still down

In the last update posted on the LiveJournal site the power is back on, but still unreliable. They are powering servers back on and in the process of bringing the site back online. They say they will "work all weekend" if they have to.

When in doubt, database everything

Gee no wonder the new FBI case management software doesn't work, if they are filling it with this kind of crap.

ET Call Home

Scientists See High Likelihood of ET Visitors

Whoa.

Decades ago, it was physicist Enrico Fermi who pondered the issue of extraterrestrial civilizations with fellow theorists over lunch, generating the famous quip: "Where are they?" That question later became central to debates about the cosmological census count of other star folk and possible extraterrestrial (ET) visitors from afar.

Fermi’s brooding on the topic was later labeled "Fermi’s paradox". It is a well-traveled tale from the 1950’s when the scientist broached the subject in discussions with colleagues in Los Alamos, New Mexico. Thoughts regarding the probability of earthlike planets, the rise of highly advanced civilizations "out there", and interstellar travel -- these remain fodder for trying to respond to Fermi’s paradox even today.

Now a team of American scientists note that recent astrophysical discoveries suggest that we should find ourselves in the midst of one or more extraterrestrial civilizations. Moreover, they argue it is a mistake to reject all UFO reports since some evidence for the theoretically-predicted extraterrestrial visitors might just be found there.

The researchers make their proposal in the January/February 2005 issue of the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society (JBIS).

La Conchita

Doc Searls took a picture of the recent landslides in La Conchita. The picture was taken from an airplane on approach to Santa Barbara. Doc's post helps show the larger geological context of the event.

Internap power outage=total Livejournal outage (Update)

The outage message on LiveJournal has been updated and now reads:

Our data center (Internap) lost all its power, including redundant backup power, for some unknown reason. (unknown to me, at least) We're currently dealing with bringing our 100+ servers back online. Not fun. We're not happy about this. Sorry... :-/ More details later.

For $170 million I'd build them a case management system

FBI may scrap $170 million project

What a waste. I saw video of this system this morning on the news, and it appears to be an Access data base. I hope I'm wrong and they used something like SQL or Oracle, but it looked like something anyone could have thrown together. The firm that build this piece of crap should never be paid one red cent.

I need to post here more...

This blog got removed from Blogshares becuase it looked like a link farm. I want to get it relisted soon.