Special Announcement:
The Dark Wraith Forums Has Completed Its Move
The old blog URL at dark-wraith.blogspot.com will be showing for another 24 hours before it is turned into nothing but a page that redirects to the new site. All posting will end, and comments posted at dark-wraith.blogspot.com will not appear on the new site. That means they will be lost forever once this site becomes a redirect page. Please go to the new blog URL so none of what you have to say is lost.
And please be sure to delete the bookmark for the old blog Web address and make a new bookmark at the new site, which looks exactly like the old site because it is the old site except that it resides on another server and is accessed by a different Web address. Sometimes, that whole thing confuses me, so don't ask for an explanation; just follow the instructions.
The Dark Wraith skids over to the new site.
Published 3/15/2005 12:14:00 AM
<< 16 Comments Total
Good morning DW, The move to the URL seems to be successful. But for some reason Opera 7.54 (the browser I use at my office won't open up a comment window.). I'm currently doing this one in IE 6.0 SP2.
The new URL loads up very speedily. I like it.
In other news I throughly enjoyed my 2nd trip to Vancouver to visit the school I'm going to attend. Although I did get the special treatment coming home because 2 trips to Canada in 2 weeks looked suspicious or something to our lovely DHS folks.
Also check out this thread over on DailyKos about the Chinese threatening to dump our T-Bills if we don't butt out of their forthcoming invasion or shall we say in Bush terms their "Re-Unification" of Taiwan.
China warns US on Taiwan-Gary A
Good morning, Gary.
Thank you for letting me know about the Opera 7.5x problem. That bothers me a lot. The only change I had to make to the entire Website was the comment cookie, which had to go from a "www.dark-wraith.com" name to a simple "dark-wraith.com" name. The original name of the cookie was "dark-wraith.blogspot.com," which automatically became a "www" cookie in the blog transfer process, so I had to hard-write the name so it wouldn't put the World Wide Web pretext on the front. I did that at about 3:00 a.m. this morning after I noticed that the comment counts were not working properly: the comment counter was looking for a dark-wraith.com cookie, but the javascript was writing a www.dark-wraith.com cookie to users' computers to keep track of how many comments were on a thread the last time a visitor opened the thread.
By the way, for anyone who knows how to manage cookies, on your computer there will be dead cookie that will look like "something@dark-wraith.blogspot.com" in your computer's cookie directory (the "something" part will probably be "default," although it could be different from that). Anyway, if you're into cookie management, that cookie can be deleted, since it was tracking the comments on the old blog. It doesn't hurt to leave it; cookies like that one are tiny in size, and it will expire on its own, eventually, anyway (in the year 2040, a year I figured would be well after my death and this blog would be re-consigned to free electrons).
Where was I? Oh, yes: China and Taiwan. Here we go, again: utter failure of American diplomacy is putting the world on the brink of war, all thanks to an Administration that has never met a situation in front of which it could get diplomatically and by covert means before it turned ugly. The amateurish nature of the Bush Administration pops up in so many situations.
I remember during the Presidential Election hearing so many people giving this Republican-scripted statement something to the effect that "Kerry scares me." I heard that so many times that I knew they were getting spoon-fed a line that they could repeat to explain away their otherwise illogical preference for a man who could not even stop a bunch of stupid terrorist thugs from wiping out more than $30 billion dollars worth of U.S. stuff and more than a couple thousand lives.
"Kerry scares me," indeed.
And as for you, Gary, you need to be concerned about all of those flights you're making back and forth from Canada. I feel quite a bit safer knowing that the Department of Homeland Security is keeping its eye on prospective theology students shuttling back and forth to that known hotbed of terrorist activity, Canada.
Lord knows, you might try to smuggle in some terrible device like a moose.
You know how sensitive we are about those weapons of moose destruction.
Heh-heh-heh-heh-heh...
Heh-heh-heh...
Heh...
Okay, then...
The Dark Wraith really needs to secure a new pun generating program.
A little grey poop on moose turd on you Spam sandwich Mr. Wraith?
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The blog seems to be working fine with the change to the new server, but man, that blogger interface still sucks big time, at least for me. Trying to post a comment is becoming trying.
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Those following the issue of peak oil will find this article worth reading.
Running on Empty
Good Afternoon, Mr. Wraith.
I know that you're a busy specter today, with the big move and all, but if you get a few moments could you take a look at this N. Gregory Mankiwarticle in The New Republic?
It presents a relatively cogent argument for the establishment of private social security accounts, and makes what I thought were some reasonable points. Reasonable, that is, to anyone who finds the notion of social conscience to be a quaint anachronism.
In particular, I'd be interested to hear your thoughts about his assertion that the creation of private accounts will have no net impact on the federal deficit:
"More important, under the president's proposed policy, the long-run impact of personal accounts on the government's finances is approximately zero. When a person signs up for a voluntary personal account, the government puts, say, $1,000 in his or her account. In exchange, that person agrees to receive lower benefits from the traditional defined-benefit system, by an amount equal to $1,000 in present value. The initial payment into the account requires $1,000 in extra government borrowing, but that debt is offset by a reduction in the government's liability to pay future Social Security benefits.
All economists will tell you that the government faces a budget constraint that is expressed in terms of the present value of current and future cash flows. If a worker takes more out of the system today and agrees to take less out in the future--and those two changes balance in present value--then the government's finances are neither better nor worse than they were before. Higher budget deficits in the near term are balanced by smaller deficits or larger surpluses further out. In essence, the establishment of personal accounts recognizes an existing liability rather than creating a new one."
This does not square with what many other economists have been saying. I beleive Krugman referred to this sort of reasoning as "An exercise in free-lunch thinking".
Who should I believe, here?
Good afternoon, Mr. Goat.
Yes, I am still using that mindless Blogger commenting system, which has several superior features that are becoming overwhelmed by the unbelievable delays in getting to the comments window.
I have received a number of e-mails from regulars saying that they cannot get the comments to toggle open or they cannot get the comment link to take them to the comment editor. The second problem might be just that the comment editor is taking so long to load that it is creating "time-out" errors. I don't know, yet. The first problem, the one about some folks not being able to get the comments to toggle, has me absolutely befuddled. I am literally banging my head on the desk trying to get it resolved.
Are you using Netscape 7.x to view this blog? If you are, that's encouraging: now I know that Internet Explorer, Netscape, and Firefox are able to see it, although I have one report that it is a mess in Opera (the latest version, no less), and that issue is sending me up the wall, too.
One thing that shocked me is that, for all of the problems Firefox poses for cross-platform Webmastering, this site seems to be absolutely smoking in Firefox. I don't know exactly why that is, other than that the servers on which this blog is now sitting use really cool server software and hardware.
Anyway, right now, I'm trying to figure out whether the comment posting problem is at the level of the blog or at the point of the Blogger server; once I've gotten that figured out, I need to find out why some users cannot get the toggler to work, since that wasn't changed a bit.
The weird thing is that it might have to do with something as simple as using the wrong URL for this blog: if someone types in "www.dark-wraith.com," the World Wide Web will get them here, but toggling and comment counts won't work properly because the URL of this site is actually just "dark-wraith.com"!
That might be part of the problem; but if any of you folks out there are having difficulties, for Heaven's sake, send me an e-mail message at Wraith@dark-wraith.com. Tell me what browser you're using, what problem is occurring, and what messages, if any, you're seeing that are associated with the problem. Also, be sure to include information about what you're having for dinner tonight in case I get hungry for a nice, home-cooked meal.
I tell you, Mr. Goat, this is enough to put a Grandma Wraith in a sealed tomb.
Fortunately, it's Spring Break for me, so I needn't concern myself with classes and grading for a few days.
I suppose I should stop working on this long enough to eat something, though, tonight.
The Dark Wraith puts some Spam out to thaw.
Good afternoon, Mr. Shakes. Thank you for the link to that article. I shall read it thoroughly in a few hours, just as soon as I get too close to the brink of madness working on this blog's code.
I'll tell you this, right now, though. I've seen way too many subtle changes in different presentations of the privatization proposal. On that level alone, I smell a rat: throw out all kinds of variations, and if one is torn to pieces, then deny that was the real one. This thing about dollar-for-dollar benefit exchange is definitely not what was put out in other proposals. Besides, they can't just say that it's a wash if we take down the future benefit stream from a lock-box trust and up the front end in some other kind of program. It doesn't work that way.
I'll tell you what, Mr. Shakes, let's try this proposal: I owe you $2,000 at some future date. I'm going to lend you $1,000 now, which you'll have to pay back to me with interest on the date that my original obligation to you is due. Oh, and by the way, on that date, I'm also cutting the amount I'm paying you from $2,000 down to $1,200.
Good plan?
For me, it is.
For you, it bites donkey sausages.
The Dark Wraith got a little wound up there.
Congrats on the successful migration to the new home, Dark Wraith. I've updated my blogroll. No problems with display in Firefox or IE here. Glad you survived your code wars. :)
lol.
I've never heard it put quite that succinctly before.
Donkey sausages, indeed!
Good afternoon, Pam.
Not only is it showing and posting okay in Firefox and Internet Explorer, but something really, really weird just happened: I clicked on the "Comment" link, and I got to the "Leave your comment" screen in a split second!
I can't take much more of this. I got away from the Blogger servers for the Website, itself, but Blogger is still giving me these emotional whipsaws with just using their mindless screens to publish content to the blog.
Lordy. And here I thought I was the most incompetent hack on the Internet.
By the way, Pam, thank you, thank you for reminding me about the Blogrolling matter. I should probably send some kind of notice out for folks to make the change. Theoretically, Blogrolling, itself, should be updating the rolls (since I updated the information, there), but I don't see it doing that. Also, it looks like Blogrolling is going the way of Blogger with repeated downtimes that are crashing the blogs of everyone who has the Blogrolling script.
Gracious.
I guess I should be the last one to talk, considering I'm about to release subscriptions to blogScream. I'll just keep my fingers crossed.
Once again, the Dark Wraith drifts to the edge of midnight.
Donkey sausages? Purple ones I assume. Geez, I haven't heard that one since the days of double dog dare.
Oh, yeah, Mr. Goat?
Well, I triple dog dare ya to come up with a better one.
There.
That oughtta hold him fer a while.
The Dark Wraith strives for high-minded debate tactics.
AHA! I am here, albeit using the wrong URL(The redirect sent me to a www. addy with the post about having to post or some such, and I made the first part my bookmark.)
No problems for me this early AM in Opera, and blogger is slow on the comments page, but I got here.
AHA! Here you are! I wento to the old address thinking it would redirect me to the new one, but since the old address is still in one piece I thought the move hadn't happened. But I really was thinking it was strange to not see any update... today I decided to try the new adress and EUREKA!
Ok, now that I found you it is time for me to get lost... until later in the evening... ;)
Geez, Joseph. I'm glad you stopped by, but you could at least have stayed for coffee and a scone.
Tonight, I am going to try a recipe I have for cinnamon and raisin scones that I found in a file on my hard drive. I haven't the slightest clue as to where I got it, but it definitely looks like a winner. We'll see.
By the time you get back, maybe I'll have got scones on the table.
The Dark Wraith lights the wood.
Hmmmmmm, I like you "Gran'ma" DW ;)
Cinammon and raisin's Scones? That sounds wonderful! Just don't misuse the cinammon because it is said that the trees from where it comes from are in danger due to that spice being so overused. About the coffee only if it were "decaf"... but either way surprisingly I tend to like to drink, and also the caffeine, in the form of tea. And one of my favourites is cinammon and apple tea... although the green tea is the healthiest and therapeutic as we tend to discover every day.
But about the scones, when will I get them on the mail "gran'ma"? ;)
Good evening, Joseph. The next batch I prepare will have a couple of extras so I can distribute them to interested parties. For some reason, this last batch is all gone.
I made only four, just so I wouldn't waste ingredients in case they came out raunchy; but they were really, really good. And the recipe was quite a bit different from the one I had used a long time ago to make home-made scones.
Now, as far as tea goes, I prefer Earl Grey, myself; and I brew it strong enough to make the sides of my jaw ache. Green tea does me wrong in ways of which I shan't speak. I do not know if that is just me or if it is a common and for-some-strange-reason desirable outcome of drinking that stuff.
Now, Joseph, you really need to get back to drinking unaltered coffee. The caffeine is good for you. It helps you stay awake all night so you can hang out here at The Dark Wraith Forums and engage in lively banter with the other regulars. If you are a reader of other blogs and the comments thereon, I'm sure you've noticed that the crowd here has to be about the most intelligent you'll find anywhere, and I'm not just saying that to boost egos.
And concerning spices, I hadn't heard about the cinnamon shortage. That's news to me; and the supply problem is probably at least partly my fault, considering I use that particular spice in quite a few recipes, and I probably use it too generously. That is also true of vanilla extract, which I believe should be doubled in any recipe that calls for it. Same with butter.
Heavens. It's a good thing I don't get a chance to cook too often.
For one thing, four scones every night would likely kill me within a few weeks.
The Dark Wraith says, "BLAH" as the scones mix with ultra-strong coffee just swilled.