There’s a report that MSNBC might give Al Sharpton his own show. Al Sharpton?? I wrote him off as having no credibility as soon as the truth of the Tawana Brawley incident was revealed. If Sharpton’s brought on board I will stop watching MSNBC. Since Keith Olbermann started at the tiny Current cable network I’ve been jumping between him and Lawrence O’Donnell, so it will be bye-bye O’Donnell.
Author: DOuG pRATt
Saugerties salutes native son Joe Sinnott
The 4th of July parade in Saugerties, NY featured grand marshall Joe Sinnott. Joe served in WWII, enlisting in the Navy after his brother Jack was killed in France.
Joe is 84, and take a look at his perfect-as-ever finished ink art over Alex Saviuk’s pencils for yesterday’s Spider-Man comic strip. Joe has said that he thinks he hit his peak about 50 years ago, and he’s just stayed there. It’s no brag, it’s just fact!
Here’s an example of Joe’s supremely masterful and clean inking over Jack Kirby’s pencils for Fantastic Four #63, in 1967 (borrowed from Rob Steibel’s Kirby Dynamics blog). The notes in the margins were written by Jack, and those notes get into the extremely contentious subject, that’s currently being litigated, of who created the characters of the Marvel Comics universe.
The Endurance of Bluehost
My former web hosting service, iPower, was OK until it was bought out by Endurance International, which is in turn owned in part by Accel-KKR. As iPower’s technical problems became more chronic, I prepared an exit strategy by getting an account with Bluehost. But I waited too long to jump, and iPower cut me off for using 30 GB of my unlimited storage. I was forced to spend an extremely stressful weekend doing nothing but making the switch.
Bluehost’s founder, Matt Heaton, had a definite “my way or the highway” attitude, but the service was reliable, if not necessarily fast. The servers are over-committed — according to Domain Tools I’m one of almost 3000 sites sharing a single server, although many seem to be junk sites or placeholders (dograt.net is a placeholder). To speed things up I added caching in WordPress and switched to memory-resident PHP processing on the server.
Since the start of this year there have been rumblings that Bluehost was sold to Endurance International. There was a widely circulated announcement of the iPower buyout, but there’s been no notice of Bluehost being sold; however, Heaton has said goodbye: It’s been a blast!!! Now its time to move on… So something is up at Bluehost.
Because of my bad experience with iPower, I’m on the lookout for trouble with Bluehost, and lately I’ve been finding it. This weekend the site went down at least twice. The SQL database server was offline yesterday, and the server was unavailable when I got up this morning. When I tried to log onto the management console, I saw this message:
Refusing to allow you to login because your server box468.bluehost.com is not responsive enough right now. Please allow a little time for responsiveness to return before trying again.
Bluehost offers something that I had thought was a great idea — a Pro plan for $20/month that supposedly provides more CPU and memory, without resorting to a VPS (virtual private server). I was seriously considering switching to this plan when my account comes up for renewal next month, but if Bluehost is now part of Endurance International I’m worried about the service’s policies changing and its reliability slipping.
Red Sox and the deathly innings
When we started watching Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1 tonight, to get ready to see Part 2 this week, the Red Sox at Tampa Bay were in the sixth inning. The movie is two-and-a-half hours long, it’s over, and the game is in the 13th inning, still scoreless! Now they’re going to a 14th inning??
And now, inning 15! I don’t know when NESN stopped carrying the game, but they’re showing infomercials now. WEEI radio is hanging in, so maybe I will too, but it’s 1:15 AM! Fortunately, I’m taking tomorrow — I mean today — off from work.
Finally! Pedroia delivers in inning 16. Red Sox 1. But it’s not over yet, and it’s a quarter to 2!
Whew! It’s over. One nothing, Red Sox.
Kate Klim makes her ex explain
The audience at Kate Klim’s show at Club Passim last night was quite a varied mix of ages and couples. Kate has a very sweet, bright and attractive stage presence, and when we saw her in Bridgewater back in May, she told some funny boyfriend stories. Kate didn’t do that last night, but a year ago she posted this cute video where she pressures an old boyfriend to talk about her.
http://youtu.be/uutgbnoTCLY
From matchsticks to margueritas
I love BBC Radio 2’s Sunday programme lineup, because it’s all over the place musically and the hosts are sincerely enthusiastic about their respective genres of interest. Today, Paul O’Grady, who’s all over the place all by himself, played an 80’s UK hit called Marguerita Time. I didn’t recognize the tune…
… but the name of the band, Status Quo, I knew from a psychedelic 60’s favourite, Pictures of Matchstick Men.
http://youtu.be/_kG-mU7wgW4
With fifteen years between the two songs, I wondered if it could be the same band, and the answer is yes, albeit with some personnel changes along the way.