Crash and Burn and the nuclear option

I've been quiet today, not by choice. My computer crashed yesterday evening. After three hours of work I gave up and decided it was time for the nuclear option - reformat and reload. A long process which still has a long time to go.

Disqus Installed

The new comments are now through Disqus. Feel Free to test. From the post below:

If you register on the Disqus site your comments will not require moderation and it will also make it possible for you to comment on a growing number of blogs like The Moderate Voice and Captain's Quarters which require registration. You will be able to register from the post by clicking the Options button. I am doing this because it will allow threaded comments, avatars, while integrating all comments into a separate forum.

New Comments

A few months ago I stopped using Haloscan for comments and switched to blogger comments in order to escape the daily job of spam deletion. Well I'm going to make yet another change. MEJ comments will now be through Disqus. I will allow anonymous comments but they will require moderation by either me or Jazz. If you register on the Disqus site your comments will not require moderation and it will also make it possible for you to comment on a growing number of blogs like The Moderate Voice and Captain's Quarters which require registration. You will be able to register from the post by clicking the Options button. I am doing this because it will allow threaded comments, avatars, while integrating all comments into a separate forum. I will probably make the change on Sunday or Monday.

Happy Holidays

Unless something really big breaks we here at MEJ and Mid Stream Radio are going to take a few days off. We wish you all a happy holiday season and we will be back in two or three days.

Update
OK, I'm back for a minute. This is just too good - Bill (I'm always wrong) Kristol makes his 2008 predictions.

Administrative News

As monitors get bigger so does monitor resolution. Since only about 10% of the MEJ readers now have a monitor resolution width below 1024 I have increased the width of MEJ to 1024. The increased width is all in the center column.

I have added a couple of new things which you will find in the sidebars. The first is MEJ has joined the Out Of Iraq Bloggers Caucus. You will find a rolling blogroll in the left sidebar along with a link to OOIBC Central. The second thing I have added is BlogRush which can be found in the right sidebar. It is a constantly updated syndication tool.

Construction Zone

I am getting tired of spending 20 minutes a day deleting comment and trackback spam from Haloscan. Since Blogger has a decent comment system with verification I have decided to get rid of Haloscan. There will be no trackback but with Technorati effortless trackback it has become irrelevant anyway. Since I really have no idea what Haloscan did to my template I will be using the "nuclear option" - I will be reloading the original template. This means I will lose all of the other tweaks and modifications I have done over the last nine months so there will be several hours of rebuilding to be done. Since hardly anyone will be reading Blogs this weekend this seems like a good time to do it. As a result things may look strange for awhile.

Update
Well nearly done and it was fairly painless.

Thinking Blogger Award

I am honored to have been tapped by Chuck Butcher of Chuck For... (Chuck also occasionally posts here)for a Thinking Blogger Award. The rules for this are HERE, but the idea being to list five Blogs that make me think. I'm not going to link to any of the A list blogs because this is a good opportunity to recognize some of the B and C list bloggers I read regularly. So here's my list.

Preemptive Karma: Carla, Kevin and company keep me up to date on both national and local issues.

Lance Mannion: Lance is a lot smarter than I and gets me thinking about as much as anybody.

The NewsHoggers: Cernig and company are often first on a story and lead the way with news and great insight.

Pharyngula: Always thinking about science and the anti science wingnuts.

Newsfare: Ralph not only gives us his own insightful commentary but supplies a great aggregator for the entire ProgBlog Research Center (Indie 500)

Of course everyone on my blog roll makes me think or they wouldn't be there.

Comments

It's not that I don't want you to comment. Haloscan seems to be having some problems - it comes and goes. It started yesterday and hopefully will be back to normal soon. Haloscan is normally pretty reliable so I'm not going to scream and yell just yet.

Megan's New Digs

For those of you who have Megan Donvan's C'est Moi Political Blog book marked or blog rolled you need to know she has a new virtual address, http://www.cestmoicitizenmedia.com/. If you haven't check it out this would be a good time to go take a look.

Admin - Some Changes

I'm going to switch MEJ over to the new blogger. It will look different and there will be some features that are missing for awhile, some features for a long while and some that I never figure out how to do. I will try to get all the Haloscan and all the links up first then the bells and whistles.
Update
Well it's done - seems to load a lot faster. I still have a few features to add and a few cosmetic tweaks but that can be done over time.

Some Statistics

As a retired manufacturing engineer I know about statistics - I have designed and conducted many multi-variable industrial experiments. Well here is a tool I can use to analyze the culture and politics of the United States that is now my passion.

I mentioned OrderFromRandomness.com in this post below. The site also has a great tool, Basic USA 360 Application that lets you chose two variables from over 360 available and see how well they correlate. Here is an example of one I did, Evangelicals per 1000 and teen births per 1000 of the female population aged 15-19. If you click on the link you will see there seems to be a pretty good correlation, states with the highest number of evangelicals also have the highest teen birth rate. You can't copy the graphic but a link is supplied. Go check the site out.

Joe Gandelman & Co could use some help

The Moderate Voice is one of the best blogs around and is truly "fair and balanced". To better serve us all Joe moved to WordPress a few months ago. Joe could use some help to keep his great group effort going. If you can spare a dime or two head over to TMV and give them a hand.

Creepy!

This post, Yes, the war is lost (before it started), was read by someone at the Office of the Secretary of Defense, Pentagon.

NewsHoggers

Our friend Cernig has taken on some reinforcements and changed NewsHog to The NewsHoggers. The same great stuff from Cernig but some additional content from:

• Fester, from Fester's Place
• Libby Spencer, The Impolitic.
• shamanic, Simianbrain

The URL remains the same only the name has changed.

I do listen!

Several of you have written me that the font is too small. I can only assume you are nearly as old as I am. Well I do listen and the font size has been increased from 9pts to 11pts 10pts in the body. Messing around with the sidebars will create problems I really don't want to deal with but you probably never look to the right or the left anyway.
Happy Reading