Kevin Drum and Cancer

Sad tonight for the blogger with whom I most often agree.

On Blogging--Personal and Policy

Was reading a fine post by Sharon Astyk here which starts off by commenting on the observable differences in parenting ability she finds among the domestic animals and wildlife on their small farm.  I've seen the same, though I was nowhere near as observant as she is.

She then segues into a discussion of human parenting, of which she's seen much, as she and her husband are parents and foster parents of a large number of children.

When I first started reading her, she was blogging as a peak oil/locavore activist.  She always had an interesting voice, interesting enough to overcome my knee-jerk reaction against the positions she favored and the dire future she forecast.  But time happens to us all, and these days she's less into policy and much less into blogging and much more into managing a large and variable household.  Whether her blogging, as opposed to the subjects she blogs on,  has changed that much, I don't know, but I do find myself liking her writing a lot more.

Found--an Honest Blogger

Diogenes may still be looking for an honest man, but I've found an honest blogger--Kevin Drum, in a post on post-shutdown polls:

I don't want to beat a dead horse, but — oh, who am I kidding? I love beating this particular dead horse.

(Returned from a 5-day trip to NY which explains the hiatus.)

The Modern Sisyphus or Diogenes

In the Sisyphus myth, the king was fated to roll a stone uphill forever, each only to see it roll back down.  That was my first thought in considering the blog The Daily Howler, written by Bob Somerby.

Mr. Somerby seems always to be disappointed by the truthfulness of media, particularly mainstream media.  The "always" brought Sisyphus to mind, but then I see the king's offense against the gods was to be deceitful and to try to outwit Zeus himself.  So that doesn't work particularly well.

So then I thought of Diogenes, who supposedly wandered the world with lamp in hand, looking for and not finding an honest man.  Maybe that's closer; Mr. Somerby is our modern Diogenes.  Perhaps fitting, since Diogenes was a Cynic.

Or maybe we're fellows under the skin, both nitpickers supreme. 

Anyhow, I recommend occasional dips in the blog, though perhaps Mr. Somerby is wandering the blogosphere with lamp in hand, searching for and not finding the Art of Brevity.

Google Reader Is Doomed, and So Am I

One of the problems of growing old is maintenance.  Just getting going in the morning takes a while.  Have to do my 15 minutes of back exercises each day just to keep from having a sore back on a regular basis.  (It works--one visit to the doctor has averted lots of pain, but doing the routine is a pain...)  "Maintenance" also includes the obsolescence of one's knowledge. 

Back in the day when we first got our telephone it was a party line, and you had a crank to turn to ring the bell.  One long ring got you the operator, and a combination of longs and shorts was the code for each of the four or five other households on the line.  Now I was never physically coordinated, so when I first had occasion to use the phone my ringing was atrocious. I'd stutter on the long ring, making it sound like two shorts, etc. so you'd have to apologize to the person who answered because it was the wrong number. 

Anyhow, after time and practice, I finally got good with the phone.  Then of course we got it replaced with the old dial handset, which required a new set of skills...etc. etc.

What triggered this nostalgia? Almost anything these days gets me going but the announcement that Google was killing its Google software this summer is the trigger.  I've used it for years to follow a bunch of blogs and some other websites.  And now I'm faced with finding a new RSS reader, and learning it.  That's maintenance, and that's a problem.

When I Don't Post, My Page Views Go UP?

Having been traveling for a few days, I find the increase in page views amazing.  I don't really want to face the logic of the message the statistics are sending me: my audience [sic] wants me to blog less.  I take back everything I've written about wanting government websites to publish their statistics.

Whoops--Meade Screws Up

From my RSS feed I see this at the Ann Althouse blog:

The Clown Suit Solution.

by noreply@blogger.com (Meade)

Did you see the comment by Patrick that Glenn linked to:

“I think it would be the ultimate act of honesty to dress the Secretary of the Treasury in a clown costume. I have no objection to that at all.”

Well that gave me an idea. What would be the value of having all 14.5 million federal government employees - starting at the top with the President - made to wear clown suits for, say, the next four years? Who knows? But the free market should give us an idea, right?

For whatever reason, this is no longer on the blog.  I don't know if the blogger thought better of the taste of the comment, but I doubt it, or actually checked his facts and found there are more like 2.1 million federal employees.  I'm tempted to put it down to the conservative mindset, but I'll attribute it to a screw up, nothing more significant.

[Update: this morning the post is back up on the site, with no change]

Comment on Comments

Until recently there haven't been many comments on this blog. Every few days I check for comments and usually respond.  But in the last few days it looks as if the amount of spam comments has been growing. If it continues maybe I'll have to adopt a spam filter. 

Hiatus

Laptop went down, a trip is coming up, things generally disordered so blogging may/will suffer.

The Case of Powerline's Missing Archives

I follow Powerline, though it's often not good for my blood pressure, though Paul Mirengoff, now he's back, is sometimes good.  I was trying to figure out what they were saying 4 years ago, only to find a big hole in their blog archives: no posts for May - November 2008. Could just be a technical problem, or it could be they don't want people to know what they were saying?

Condolences: Kevin and Inkblot

Kevin Drum is my favorite political blogger, because he mostly agrees with me. 

He suffered a loss, and I express my condolences.

Commenting on Commenting

Sometimes I learn something new.  Just the other day I realized I should be used "reply" to address comments, rather than just adding a comment.  Why it took years to learn this, when I was well aware of it when I comment on others' blogs is a mystery.

Liberals Are Cheap

Kevin Drum admits he's an idiot and his commenters chime in noting how they drive cheap old cars.

Hacked: Apology and Information

This is the text of an email message I'm sending out which I thought I'd also post here:

Yesterday morning you may have received an email from “bharshaw at hotmail.com” with no subject which contained a url, probably ending in “176.xxx” where the “xxx” is a file type, usually an image one but not always. There was also a post on my facelessbureaucrat blog. I’m still not sure what happened but it appears my hotmail and possibly google passwords were hacked and someone used my email account to spam you. As far as I know now the url did not contain a virus (my wife got one, which she opened, but full scans of my PC using McAfee didn’t reveal any virus. But since I’m no expert:

1. if you did click on the url and open it, please be sure your security software is running and up-to-date. Let me know if you have any problems.
2. if you didn’t click on it, delete the message and congratulate yourself on following the prime rule for email safety: never open an unexpected url or attachment. Check first.

I’m now changing my passwords, following the experience of James Fallows after his wife’s account was hacked (see his http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/11/hacked/8673/ –but don’t click on that—go to the Atlantic website and search for “Fallows password” to see the sequence of posts he put up. Long story short, he went to Lastpass, which is a  free password manager and permits you to have strong passwords for individual accounts.

My apologies for endangering your security.

.

Warning: I've Been Hacked

Sorry.

The Perils of Blogging

From Chris Blattman, who's on vacation in Vietnam:

I only realized this by accident, when I peeked into my email Inbox for one measly second (I am still on vacation, dammit) and notice a gazillion comments and pingbacks on a post I wrote three years ago about Invisible Children. In the past three days, that post received roughly as much traffic as the entire blog in 2012.

An Honest Blogger

Which Greek of ancient times searched for an honest man? 

I forget, but I nominate Chris Bittman as an honest blogger.  After welcoming an new economics/development blog, he talks about how hard it is to last blogging substance:

My secret to longevity? Six days out of seven I cut and paste peculiar drivel I that catches my interest on the web

Petty Bureaucracy in the Private Sector: B&B Complaints

James Fallows had a bad experience with a B&B (owner forgot his reservation) and petty bureaucrats prevented him from publishing his review because he didn't actually stay at the B&B.  Read the whole thing here.  In the old days, this was a Catch-22.

Apologies to Commenters

I've screwed up.  There are comments on some of my posts to which I've not responded. I'm sorry and will try to do better.  Responses coming this weekend.

Warning: Posts Updates

I'm still using the new Blogger editor and still having problems--either I miss adding labels to the post or I miss titling the post.  So don't be surprised if the RSS feed shows these problems--I usually update the posts quickly after I discover the problem.