August 29, 2004, You cannot silence us!
Well... perhaps you can... Anyway, with thanks to Kathy Kinsley of On the Third Hand, we seem to be up and running again, albeit temporarily without archives.
It seems that all those SOBs who spammed the older comment threads with endless ads for pornography, viagara and psychotrophic drugs finally overloaded all those gigashmites of bandwidth we thought we had... causing a database crash. Given just how close this occurred to the GOP Convention, those of you prone to conspiracy theories can jump right in!
Anyway, Kathy tells me we now have anti-spam countermeasures, that should hopefully, keep us up and running for... ever. For those of you who want to see recent posts and comments, someone (who isn't me) seems to have set up a Live Journal mirror site; and the google cache seems to have everything (so far). Whoever you are, thank you.
As many of you know, Jim Henley and I are planning an assault on D.C.'s Marine Corps Marathon on Halloween (for added masochistic joy, I will then run the ING New York City Marathon the following week; and possibly another one later in the year, depending on how the MMC goes); hence it was with peculiar horror that I watched the travesty that took place in the Olympic marathon as a crazed and drunken priest from Ireland screaming about the second coming jumped onto the course and tackled lead runner Vanderlay Lima from Brazil, costing him valuable seconds and momentum (he ended up with the bronze medal) allowing the Italian and American runners to pass him. If the IOC has an ounce of decency (and its well established that they do not have so much as a microgram of decency), they will award Lima some kind of honorary gold medal. (I assume most people don't really care about this; it just happens to be "my sport", even as I'd be lucky to finish within three hours of any of these guys).
Finally, initial reports of "the big protest" (didn't get back from the undisclosed location in time for it) show that it was peaceful. Please God, may we have that kind of a week.
Comments
Glad you're up and running again, TD. I watched the protests on C-Span....simply awesome from my perspective. Thank you C-Span and thank you New York!
Posted by alicia at August 29, 2004 11:02 PM
I heard a lot about your site, and now when I get to check it out, there's not that much. Oh well.
Posted by Spiv at August 30, 2004 01:40 AM
Spiv...you've been living in a cave.
Posted by alicia at August 30, 2004 03:20 AM
Ooops...never mind.
Posted by alicia at August 30, 2004 03:26 AM
FWIW, the crazed and drunken priest may be /literally/ crazed; according to a commentor over at crookedtimber.org, he's previously been diagnosed with schizophrenia, and has spent some time in an asylum for it.
Comments spam is indeed a blight. One day someone will explain to me how these people think this is going to work for them.
Doug M.
Posted by Doug Muir at August 30, 2004 02:54 PM
If the spammers can get enough "links from other sites", it puts them up top of Google and other search engines for their selected keywords. That's why they do it.
Posted by Kathy K at August 30, 2004 03:22 PM