This is the first post I’ve put up in a while, because I’ve basically been unable to post. Our theory is that I was running out of memory (the server for this blog, and all my other sites, only had four gig). So I’ve upgraded to one with sixteen. You won’t see this immediately, until the DNS servers pick up the new IP, but hopefully I’m back on the air.
Commenting Problem
A regular commenter writes:
I’ve been blocked from commenting on your site for weeks now. I’ve tried both IE and Chrome, and I get the same error message:
Your comment has been blocked because the blog owner has set their spam filter to not allow comments from users behind proxies.
If you are a regular commenter or you feel that your comment should not have been blocked, please contact the blog owner and ask them to modify this setting.
As far as I know I’m not behind a proxy, whatever that is. I use the same email addy and computer I’ve always used. If I’ve offended you somehow and you’ve blocked me, I would like the opportunity to apologize for the offense. If there’s a technical issue, I haven’t changed anything, but Win7 updates so many times, I wouldn’t know if it messed up my settings somehow.
As I told him, I have no idea why WordPress thinks that he’s behind a proxie, but I’m afraid that if I don’t block proxies I’ll be inundated with comment spam. I’m not sure how to allow his IP, because while I have a blacklist, I don’t think I have a white one. Any suggestions?
Linux On Gateway
OK, so I purchased a new laptop, a Gateway NE522 series. It came with Windows 8 installed. After doing a full Windows update, and making a recovery disk, I tried to install Federa 19 on it from a USB drive (it doesn’t have an optical drive). It wouldn’t boot, instead barfing out the following (after the jump) I’ll probably submit it to the Fedora Project for a bug report, but I’d be interested in opinions:
[Update late evening]
OK, I tried with Ubuntu as well. Same result. Dumped into a shell. I’m guessing that it’s the problem described in comments, but not sure I’ll do that experiment until tomorrow.
Keith Cowing’s Hoplophobia
On full display.
And to answer his anticipated question, I read NASA Watch because I find it informative, despite things like this.
Men And Women Are Different
Some apparently politically incorrect thoughts from Sarah Hoyt.
Whole Foods
I see the gluten-free section filled with crackers and bread made from various wheat-substitutes such as cardboard and sawdust. I skip this aisle because I’m not rich enough to have dietary restrictions. Ever notice that you don’t meet poor people with special diet needs? A gluten intolerant house cleaner? A cab driver with Candida? Candida is what I call a rich, white person problem. You know you’ve really made it in this world when you get Candida. My personal theory is that Candida is something you get from too much hot yoga. All I’m saying is if I were a yeast, I would want to live in your yoga pants.
Next I approach the beauty aisle. There is a scary looking machine there that you put your face inside of and it tells you exactly how ugly you are. They calculate your wrinkles, sun spots, the size of your pores, etc. and compare it to other women your age. I think of myself attractive but as it turns out, I am 78 percent ugly, meaning less pretty than 78 percent of women in the world. On the popular 1-10 hotness scale used by males the world over, that makes me a 3 (if you round up, which I hope you will.) A glance at the extremely close-up picture they took of my face, in which I somehow have a glorious, blond porn mustache, tells me that 3 is about right. Especially because the left side of my face is apparently 20 percent more aged than the right. Fantastic. After contemplating ending it all here and now, I decide instead to buy their product. One bottle of delicious smelling, silky feeling creme that is maybe going to raise me from a 3 to a 4 for only $108 which is a pretty good deal when you think about it.
Read the whole (foods) thing. It’s pretty funny.
The Media’s Guide To Firearms
Captain Video
Lileks has a review:
Now. Let’s think. The escape portion is the rear. It has no controls or power, according to Captain Video. Yet that’s where the engine was. So the escape pod is powerless and rudderless even though it has the engine, and that’s what you get into to escape. From onrushing asteroids. How? By disengaging from the front half, which cuts off the engines, which makes the escape capsule fall.
Captain Video and the Ranger landed on the planet when the gravity of Atoma took their escape capsule and laid it down gently about 14 feet from the front door of the evil bad guy’s lair. What a stroke of luck! They dress up as natives. Aliens always dress like 19th century Arabs with big futuristic guns.
It was amazingly bad, almost Plan-9-like.
A Denunciation Of President Obama
In remarks on the Senate Floor on March 16, 2006, Sen. Obama said the need to raise the Debt Limit was “a sign of leadership failure.”
Sen Obama said the need to raise the Debt Limit was another reflection of the “Government’s reckless fiscal policies.”
The[n], Sen Obama also denounced the rising National Debt as “a hidden domestic enemy” robbing cities & states of “critical investments.”
Denouncing the ever-increasing National Debt, then-Sen. Obama told the Senate he would oppose an increase in the Debt Limit.
Pwned.
It goes without saying, of course, that Mark Knoller is a racist.
The Economic Recovery
What economic recovery?
…why is the current recovery so weak? It is not because of the aftermath of the 2007-08 financial crisis. U.S. Financial markets began to recover in late 2008, more than four and a half years ago. Moreover, research by Michael Bordo of Rutgers University and Joseph Haubrich of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland show that US recoveries following financial crises are typically faster, not slower, than average.
Recent research by us and other scholars analyzes the chronically slow economic recovery from a very different perspective. Specifically, our view is that poorly designed and implemented government policies have impeded capital and technological investments and hiring, and that bad government policies – not underlying problems with the U.S. market economy – are the primary reason why the economy has not recovered.
And the low-info voters voted for four more years of it last fall.