Category: Bites

Kerry’s Campaign ‘Increasingly Confident’?

Via the Vet’s discussion forum, a brief piece from The American Spectator that alleges the Kerry campaign is confident the media will keep the Swifties quiet:
The campaign source said that the book was not considered a “serious” problem for the campaign, because, “the media wouldn’t have the nerve to come at us with this kind of stuff,” says the source. “The senior staff believes the media is committed to seeing us win this thing, and that the convention inoculated us from these kinds of stories. The senior guys really think we don’t have a problem here.”

Thought of the Morning

Perhaps the most satisfying element of blogging is the ability to indulge oneself; to expose ones inner emotions, demons, or angels, with full knowledge and confidence that the ice cream is free, damnit, and anybody who doesn’t like the flavor of the day can bloody well go elsewhere.

Swift Boat Tracker #2

Kerry Swift Boat Meter Day 3
Today’s reading: steady at 2,430.
PS: We’re tracking Google News, not just a straight Google search; hence the commenters who noted previously that the number had jumped to 80,000 were looking at a different metric…

Swift Boat Tracker #1

Kerry Swift Boat Meter Day 1
And now, a new, perhaps regular feature here at TTLB: The “kerry swift boat” GoogleNews meter:
Today’s reading: entries found on GoogleNews when searching for “kerry swift boat”.
Stay tuned!

Alliance blogroll code

Folks: I know some of you have had problems with the alliance blogroll code lately. I’m somewhat stumped as to what the problem is. That code hasn’t changed in ages, and I haven’t updated anything lately. And, on some sites at least, it seems to be working.
There is a possibility that the problem is due to the fact that the whole site was down due to a domain name problem over the past few days; the fix may still be floating through the DNS servers. So please check back and see if it resolves itself over the next day or so… I’ll keep trying to figure it out on this end…
Update:: I know what the problem is. Remember (scroll down), I recently changed the Ecosystem to retrieve a blog’s name from the TITLE attribute. Well, at least one blog in the Blogdom of God has some funky HTML code embedded in their TITLE. Dunno which it is yet, don’t have time to check myself. But I’ll bet you a dollar that’s what is screwing up the blogroll results.
So: Track down your errant member and convince them to ditch that goofy HTML, and your blogrolls will work again!

Ecosystem Cleanup II

Yet more Ecosystem cleanup today. I have completely changed the way the names of weblogs are identified now. Previously, the name was simply whatever was manually typed in when the weblog was registered.
Now, the Ecosystem is actually reading the TITLE attribute off the HTML of a weblog’s page, and using that for the name.
What this means is that there is now no need to submit requests for updates if you change the name of your weblog; just change the TITLE (as you probably were doing anyway) and it will be automatically reflected in the Ecosystem.
This is a first step in a new way of handling data updates by putting them directly in the hands of the weblog’s owner. In the near future, I plan to implement similar methods to handle deleting blogs from the Ecosystem entirely, and moving a blog from one URL to another. But for now, have fun with titles…

Kerry and Color

Kerry is continuing to draw fire for the somewhat, er, pale complexion of his “inner circle”. The latest is a takedown from King at the Washington Post, who points out that the Kerry campaign is quite literally taking a divide-and-conquer approach to American ethnic groups, but still can’t seem to bring itself to let anybody into the management team with a skin color darker than well-tanned:
Let’s be fair, you might argue. Doesn’t Kerry have a right to surround himself with close friends and top assistants who click with him? Of course. But is it too much to expect that the Democratic Party’s top liberal, the candidate who cries that he has “fought for civil rights and equal opportunity for every American my whole life,” who brags about his efforts to “enhance diversity,” and whose message is inclusiveness, would in fact have a presidential campaign inner circle that is reflective of the diversity of his party and the country? And if elected, will Kerry govern that way?

Lair on Liberation

Lair link whoring:
“NZ Bear went from being a highly observant and astute individual blogging to nothing more than an emcee for his link-engines, a mechanic enslaved by the prison of his own design. He broke free from it. I nearly shit myself with glee, but I made it to the bathroom in time.”
It wasn’t quite a prison… I have this nice big comfy desk chair, and coffee and beer, and… nevermind.
Thanks Lair. For the kind words, er, not for the extra ‘sharing’.

Jane on Old Babies

Hey, look, and Mindles haven’t been posting much either, so that makes me feel slightly less inadequate. But Jane has a sage post on adoption that contained a nugget of wisdom that hadn’t occurred to me, and is well worth your time.

HP’s Disintegration

On a lighter note, there’s something extremely, deeply wrong in the fact that HP is using The Cure’s Pictures of You to sell digital cameras.
I’m just sayin’.