Linkmeister

Moving Day!

And . . . I'm live with Word Press!

I ended up with a different theme than the one I'd been fiddling with. After I populated the sidebars I plugged a post into the center column and decided it was way too crowded and busy-looking, with not enough margin on either side of the post box to make the entries stand out. There was a ton of empty space on each side of the data, too, which seemed wasteful. Rather than muck about with stylesheets I went digging through the gazillion free themes available through Word Press and found several that overcame those perceived problems.

I still have some tweaking to do, and there are some utilities I'd like to see in Word Press that I haven't found yet. For starters, I'd like to be able to do a search for a specific word or phrase and then replace the category for each entry with a meaningful one without having to do it post-by-post. Also, I think I saw something in the settings somewhere which sets links to open in new tabs/windows, but I didn't immediately do it when I saw it and now I've lost it.

Anyway, I'm up and running over at the Word Press version of Linkmeister, nine years and two months after going to Movable Type. Please change your blogroll link accordingly.

When Capitalism overtakes Academia

Think Progress:

Yesterday, ThinkProgress highlighted reports from the St. Petersburg Times and the Tallahassee Democrat regarding a Koch-funded economics department at Florida State University (FSU). FSU had accepted a $1.5 million grant from a foundation controlled by petrochemical billionaire Charles Koch on the condition that Koch’s operatives would have a free hand in selecting professors and approving publications.

Turns out, this is but the tip of an iceberg. It's happening at places like WVU, Brown, Troy, Utah State, and many other universities around the country every year.

The Koch empire has been called an octopus, and it seems fitting.

Sneak peek at WP blog

It still needs a fair bit of color work, and I wish the theme spread all the way across the screen, but here's the first pass at converting to Word Press.

I haven't imported any of the Movable Type archives over yet. I'm wondering if I can consolidate 2002-2010 into yearly archives and then have links to monthly ones for just the current year.

I'm open to suggestions.

A momentous decision?

Comment spam is killing me, and the MT-Blacklist plug-in has died. I'm thinking of moving to Word Press blogging software because it's got Akismet available as a plug-in, which I'm told kills spam deader than dead.

Now I'm trying to decide whether to replicate the current color scheme as much as possible using WP or whether to go to something entirely different. I've had the same layout and colors for six or seven years.

What to do, what to do.

Denial of fact to serve ideology

In honor of mothers everywhere, an Orthodox newspaper in Israel photoshopped Hillary Clinton out of that now-famous Situation Room picture of the group watching the operation which killed OBL.

Fundamentalism often equals stupidity.

Rain rain go away

From Imported From Migratr

Lovely weather we're having, and it's forecast to continue for the next week.

That's a picture from eight months ago, but believe me, today looks exactly the same.

Happy 80th birthday, Willie Mays!

Update: Joe Posnanski shares some Mays stories.

Oh boy

Didja know the first Presidential (cough) debate between Republican contenders (cough, cough) is being held this evening in South Carolina? It's true, it's true!

In addition to (former Minnesota governor Tim) Pawlenty, those slated to participate in the debate on Thursday are former senator Rick Santorum (Pa.); ex-Godfather’s Pizza chief executive Herman Cain; and two libertarians, Rep. Ron Paul (Tex.) and former New Mexico governor Gary Johnson.

Be still, my beating heart!

Essentially none of the presumed leaders other than Pawlenty could be bothered to attend.

But wait, Link. Isn't it still a long time until the first primary/caucus? Well, yeah. Nine months till Iowa. However:

Consider the contrast with this very week four years ago, when a field of 10 Republican contenders lined up for the first time, onstage at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, Calif. It included four former governors, two sitting senators, three members of the House and a former New York City mayor who had become something of a national hero for his leadership in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks.

That was a pretty strong field, and compared to this one, it looks like Godzilla.

One imagines how the Obama political team feels about this disarray.

Firefox 4

One of the hassles about replicating the environment you had on your previous machine is that the software may have been upgraded or changed since you installed the version you were using. This can be disconcerting.

In my case, Firefox now offers version 4.01 for download on Mozilla's main page. That's all well and good, but the version I'd been using was the most recent before that, version 3.6.6. Version 4.01 changes the appearance of your screen: tabs are now at the very top above the address bar and the bookmark drop-down menu is over at the far right below the address bar. It takes a little getting used to.

I'm sure there are other changes as well, but these are the two I noticed immediately.

Oh, and some of the add-ons (LeetKey and Linkification) aren't compatible with FF 4 yet. Now that's annoying.

Bread for breakfast!

From Bread

Portuguese Sweet Bread.

1 Tbsp of yeast may have been a little too much, no matter what the recipe says. What else could explain why it pressed up against the bread machine's lid and didn't crust that top?

Numb

No, not by today's news. By Novocaine or whatever. My dentist filled a tooth for the first time in about fifteen or twenty years. I've had a couple of crowns put on, but I haven't needed a filling in a long long time.

It appeared to be a pretty easy process, and my dentist is a Dodgers fan, so we talked about the team while the drug took effect.

OBL dead

I will be damned. I never really thought we'd find this guy.

The astonishing thing to me is that there were no leaks. Intelligence found the compound in August, for cryin' out loud, and confirmed it as a possible bin Laden hiding place in February.

Navy Seals on two choppers (one mechanically damaged and left behind) landed and engaged in a firefight and killed OBL and a few others.

Amazing.

Gah! Machine dying!

Planned obsolescence or bad luck? My hard drive has crashed several times in the past couple of days. This is the same machine I replaced a motherboard on back in December, the one I bought in October of 2008.

Frenzied backup has taken place. I just bought an HP Pavilion Slimline desktop for $349.99 plus tax. 3MB RAM, 640GB hard drive.