I did so after considerable deliberation and thought; my intention is not to whitewash the very critical words I had for a certain project, and a couple of its members. (As if it’s not obvious whom I’m speaking of.)

I’ve spent a lot more time dealing with and discussing this issue than is justifiable. And you know? I’ve come to the conclusion that, like many people, “I don’t care, because this doesn’t affect me“.

I shot my mouth off, to be sure. Made my opinions known in very direct terms. But for me, it keeps coming back to square one, the initial post made by the project that brought all this to my attention to begin with. (It wouldn’t have affected me, one iota, if I’d never even heard of it.)

And I’m convinced that my criticisms still bear some measure of truth. It’s a rare thing that I cannot either bring myself to either correct a record, or redouble my assertions. And this is one of them. But against that, I must consider the fact that this nerd fight wasn’t initiated by the project; it only responded –less than perfectly– to the whole fracas as it developed.

I do want to take a moment to thank those who have attempted to clear the record. That counts for something.

Sometimes, things like this continue to draw oxygen because people allow it to. If this issue is much ado about nothing, which it certainly appears to be, that does not explain, or excuse, the failure of the project in question to deal with it in a manner consistent with its relative importance. I hope everyone has learned something from this; I know I have.

I’ve wasted enough of my time on this. A lot of other people have wasted a lot of their time as well. I’m pretty disgusted with the whole affair, from top to bottom, and I’m washing my hands of it. All the players in this sad little mess have meant well, and that’s enough for me, at the end of the day.

Like Mr. Eddie said: it’s time to get back to work.

I run, on behalf of a client, a wide array of WordPress blogs using the excellent PodPress podcasting plugin.

Some of those blogs suddenly started experiencing the dread “blank page” error. The logs were unhelpful, reporting a 304.

The problem wound up being a bunch of MP3’s (the podcasts) that another contact of the clients’ had uploaded for them, that wound up in the /tmp partition.

One quick “rm -rf /tmp/*.mp3″ and everything was good to go.

I hope this is helpful to others; I know how many blind alleys I stumbled down trying to properly troubleshoot this issue. In the end, I just happened to notice 100% utilization of /tmp as I was checking the RAM usage. Troubleshooting this error is unfortunately made more difficult by a wide range of red herrings.

On Day One of BD’s Excellent WaMu Adventure, my buy-in price of just under nine cents per share has become fourteen cents a share….AND SOME CHANGE!

That, friends, is a 77% one-day gain. I told you dead stocks had a big future!

On the other hand, my cunning WaMu buy will have to advance to fifty cents a share just to earn out the ten-buck broker’s commission. Them’s the breaks when you’re rolling with the big boys!

Disclosure: I’m riding WaMu all the way up, or all the way down, Strangelove-style. I am not an investment counselor, just a guy making the best black humor this market can offer. And this is decidedly not investment advice: Your results may vary; no warranty is given or implied. Finally, don’t eat yellow snow.

I think dead-stock certificates are the stamp collecting of the 21st Century.

But we all know it ain’t going to be perfect. And the magic of the Google brand will induce at least a million people to switch overnight, mark my words.

So now, a web designer has to work around the unique flaws in IE (6, 7, and 8), Firefox (2, 3), Safari (2,3), and arguably Opera (of a million small revisions), plus the new Chrome.

Fun fun fun, but I guess bullcrap like this helps keep me in business….

http://www.thingsyoungerthanmccain.com/

A few months back, I got the bright idea to try MLB’s Extra Innings package, thinking I’d get to watch games out of market at times of my choosing. (Every regional sports channel these days runs replays of the games during off-hours.)

There’s a few major problems with the service:

• The “MLB Mix” channel hasn’t worked for me, since Day Two.
• The games are just rebranded feeds of the regional FoxSportsNet, and replays are not offered, despite the fact that all FoxSportsNet channels show at least one replay of the game.
• Half the time, the games don’t actually show at all. I’m not sure if this is the notorious “blackouts” I’d read about, or what, but either way, it sucks.

In short, I’d strongly recommend to anyone that bothers to read this that you avoid MLB Extra Innings at ALL costs. Whether it’s the policy of my provider, or MLB, I’m stuck paying for another three months of almost $50 a month for a service that’s nearly worthless in the 21st Century. Apparently, once you opt-in, you can’t opt-out.

(Eat that, MLB. Hope my token $300 was worth a permanent signpost saying “MLB EXTRA INNINGS SUCKS” where everyone can see it.)

Drawing some very tenuous parallels between JFK’s rocky first meeting with Nikita Krushchev, who opined of Kennedy that he was “too intelligent and too weak”, the piece seems to imply the usual right-wing message about Obama: that he is an eloquent speaker without much substance.And it’s all talk, ironically enough. To be sure, the crude farmboy Krushchev did walk away from Vienna thinking he had the upper hand, and quite publicly crowing about it. It’s equally true that the US faced a series of blunders shortly thereafter, culminating in the Cuban Missile Crisis.

But by the end of his tragically shortened Presidency, and despite his very real flaws, Kennedy had evened the score, and demonstrated that while a Western-style democracy always starts out with the lesser hand, since we generally try to negotiate from good faith and give our opponents a chance to prove themselves, that we nonetheless can very effectively adjust to an implacable adversary, and become as tough as we need to be.

No, to the contrary, it is the Republicans who could bear to learn a lesson from the Kennedy-Krushchev dialogues and dynamics. The idea of talking first, before starting a war, or of making a series of incremental movements prior to the onset of war, would have been one that might have been more sensible than the position we now find ourselves in.

And the idea that we must aggressively flex the muscles of American power in order to maintain our respect worldwide has equally proven its futility.

No, as Kennedy, and later Ronald Reagan, both eloquent speakers, proved, it is precisely when America is so confident of her own strength that she is willing to be the bigger country and talk through problems, however provocatively, that she is most respected outside her own borders.