lookin

I'd like to think that a great scientific mind wouldn't get totally derailed by sitting through a class in creationism. In fact, might it not develop a more questioning nature and become proficient in the skepticism so valued in a good scientist? If I had had to bracket my life's journey by the stuff coming out of my science teacher's maw, it might have been a very short trip indeed.

Perhaps your crew were amateurs. Mine were all madrassa graduates and had done advanced training in Tora Bora.

A dozen or so years ago, I went to The French Laundry. At the time, it was considered the best in the world and was, in fact, 'all that' and more. I had a goose liver pâté that made butter seem grainy in comparison. When the beef course showed up, I was disappointed by how small it looked on the plate; I needn't have worried, as a few ounces of the stuff was as filling as a steak. Thomas Keller dropped by at the end of the meal to a chorus of praise, and threw in a couple of extra dessert courses. I don't know what the tab was for the eight of us, with wine at every course, as a company vendor picked up the check. What I do know is that I have never felt the need to go to a luxe restaurant since then, as I'm pretty sure it would be no better and very likely not as good.

Quick for me too. So what was the culprit?

Oh, he'll have noticed. If memory serves, a massive heart attack may get by you for a few days, or perhaps a perforated ulcer, or maybe even World War III. But not scabies.

Pardon me, but if it's the exact same code, wouldn't they be the exact same sites? One thing I learned from the small amount of programming I've done over the years is that even a single line of code, or even a byte, or even a bit, can make a world of difference in how a program behaves. The only other thing I learned is that I'm glad I'm not a programmer.

OK, but I don't do neoprene.

Safari has a 'developer' toolkit which I just ran during the latest delayed page opening. It took an agonizing 1.3 minutes to load an element called "index.php". That seems to be the entry point to the Message Forum. Sometimes there are a few elements that load before "index.php", mostly jpegs, and they come from cache. Therefore, they load quickly, and that's probably what lets the progress bar move a short distance right away. But then it hangs, waiting for the "index.php" element to load. "index.php" appears to be a fairly small ~90kb text/html file and, when it actually starts loading, it does so in a second or two. And everything that loads after "index.php" loads in a matter of seconds. So, I think if you ask the programmers to figure out what makes the "index.php" file occasionally reluctant to start loading, you'll have solved your problem.

How I wish to believe this! But only when OZ comes on here personally and tells us that he has spent an hour creating a post only to have it disappear into thin air will I believe his suffering has been commensurate with ours. Thankfully, I have noticed the site getting quicker than it was last week. I also realize that when I've said the site was 'slow', I may have been misstating what's actually been going on for me. In truth, when a page actually starts to load, it seems pretty speedy. What's been different since the 'upgrade' is that some pages (down from most pages last week) just hang with the progress bar stuck at about 10%. Then, all at once, something will come unstuck and the page finishes loading. I started trying to find out what would cause this type of behavior, especially since switching from Safari to Firefox seems to make the issue go away, at least for me. I cleaned out the Safari cache, and that didn't help. So today I changed my default Domain Name Server to see if that solves the problem. So far, so good. Anyway, a little progress report, and a fervent hope that this post will see the light of day.

I think I'll wait until they get all the kinks worked out.

Couldn't agree more. I so wanted - and still want - him to be another FDR, but he keeps stopping just short. I think his relative inexperience is what holds him back. As you say, the key is a direct connection to the electorate. Kept hoping he would have let Clinton run in 2012 and 2016, and come back for a second term in 2020. But alas. My current hope, like yours, is that he will push mightily for a Democratic Congress in 2014 and go balls-to-the-wall for his last two years.

Please add my good wishes to those already given. I'm glad you're able to appreciate the bright spots as they come along, and that you and your dad have been able to hold on to the obvious affection you have for one another. Sometimes when these difficult life journeys come along, it may help to realize that some of the most difficult steps have been taken and are now behind you. You know our thoughts are with you and your dad.

Plus we have a birthday coming up!

Or a prepuce.

Good for you! I hope that you got more than $20 of good feeling from it. You deserve it. Mebbe yes, mebbe no. Take healthcare: * The government currently pays a little over $12,000 a year for the average person on Medicare. These are usually older and sicker folks and the insurance companies aren't too eager to take them on as customers. If they did, and wanted their stock prices and executive compensation to remain high, they would need to add 30% to the number so that they could cover overhead and lobbying and make their usual profit. So it's not clear, to me anyway, that the government cost is 'ridiculous'. It's true that they could do a better job though, as you say. But unfortunately, unlike for-profit insurance companies, the government is precluded from negotiating better drug prices. It's definitely one of those pesky 'regulations' that contributes to government inefficiency. But it's a regulation that the drug companies lobbied aggressively for and were successful in convincing Republicans to block the vote to allow negotiation. And, to bring us full circle, even Margaret Thatcher supported government-run healthcare. These days, the negative words about 'government inefficiency' roll pretty easily off the tongue, but they sometimes do not hold up under even the most cursory review. If you get a minute, I'd be interested in your take on this article. It purports to separate fiction from the facts of Medicare. If they've got anything wrong, and you can provide some objective rebuttal, I'd be interested in hearing it. * ... Please!

RA1, I think much depends on your definition of "largesse". Is it "largesse" for one of our fellows to have his own bed? Or a nourishing meal? Or a visit to the doctor? Is Sheldon Adelson spending his own money to elect a low-tax politician, or did he get it from somebody else? Did Lloyd Blankfein create his own wealth, or did he get it from somebody else? Throughout history, and certainly in the plutocracy we risk becoming, rich folks usually get to write the rules. What they do with that power defines them as human beings. Some are predatory and consider a dollar that leaves their hands to be a dollar lost. Others are generous and consider it an honor to help the less fortunate. Similarly, there are some poor folks who look for opportunities to game the system, while others work hard and even then don't mind giving away a bit of what they've earned. Personally, I don't think it's useful to divide ourselves between rich and poor. Rich can become poor overnight and, occasionally, the reverse is true. The difference that's worth exploring, in my opinion, is what makes some people selfish and other people altruistic. I think much of the difference comes from the life experiences one has had. There's a classic dichotomy that says liberals believe that folks are basically good and conservatives believe that folks are basically evil. I've been blessed to have life experiences that convince me that folks are basically good. I fit comfortably into the liberal mold and have no shame about it whatsoever. I'm not naive, however, and I know that there are bad people out there. But to live my life that way, afraid to give anything up because a loafer might get it, would mean that I'd be afraid to help someone who desperately needs it. And that's not the kind of life I choose to live. If a cheater gets ten cents of every dollar I give, so what? Even twenty cents is OK, or thirty, or forty. If I act like there are only cheaters out there, and never give anything away, then I'd be living a life that is much less pleasant than the one I live now. I'm sorry for those whose life experiences have taught them that the world is full of takers, and can only hope that they will go outside of their current circle of friends and go meet the many others in the world who are givers. As some have already found, and many others will someday find, money can disappear in the twinkling of an eye. What stays with us, on the other hand, are those folks who have our back, just as we have theirs. We're social animals, after all, and I believe we're at our best when we take care of one another. It would be a real bonus, for me anyway, if our elected officials would reflect that view as well. So there's my brain talking, as well as my heart, and much more than you wanted to know, I'm sure.

I've been saying that for years!

It sure did when eight large bolts holding the new Bay Bridge together snapped last week while they were being tightened. Nuts. It looks like the fix, which has not yet been finalized, may delay the long-awaited Labor Day opening of the Eastern span connecting Oakland and Treasure Island. Although there is a school of thought that says even a hastily patched up new bridge might be safer than the seismically-deficient old bridge. The Caltrans engineers are presently mulling it over. Me? I'm planning to take the ferry.

For a world in desperate need of growth, this is the wrong direction. Europe will never thrive until it frees up its markets. America will throttle its recovery unless it avoids overregulation. China will not sustain its success unless it starts to liberalise. This is a crucial time to hang on to Margaret Thatcher’s central perception: that for countries to flourish, people need to push back against the advance of the state. What the world needs now is more Thatcherism, not less. If by 'flourish', the author means a superheated financial caste with billion-dollar bonuses, water and air chock full of industrial waste, and a low-paid uninsured workforce fighting for a possible glimpse of the economic pie, she might be just what the doctor ordered. The difficulty with such a worldview is that it makes no mention of the human values that, in my opinion, make life worth living: compassion, altruism, kindness, love, enlightenment, and much of what you'll find in the Golden Rule. How we have allowed "Free Markets", "Growth", and "The Economy" to so fully dominate the national discourse is, I must admit, beyond me.

The good news is that the site's a lot zippier since that error message appeared in place of the BoyToy splash screen, the Flirt4Free banner, and the login box. Looks like the programmers are narrowing down where the problem is. The BoyToy splash screen and the Flirt4Free banner both currently appear on the site's Home page and don't seem to be slowing down anything there. I noticed a few days ago that the login box on the site's Home page and the login box on the Forums page appeared different. Maybe that's where the problem is. It could also explain why I sometimes get a message that I don't have the right permissions when I try to post. It's as if the Forums page has trouble deciding whether I'm really logged in or not. As of now, the only place to log in is on the Home page. After doing so earlier, I did notice a brief 'hang' when clicking the box that takes me from the Home page to the Forums page, though it happened only once. My working hypothesis is that the programmers will find the problem swirling around the login process on the Forums page. I hope OZ will let us know what they discover. And if the site keeps vexing OZ, Perhaps he'll have to call in WOZ.

Here's a line that just now appeared at the top third of the Forum page, in lieu of the BoyToy banner, login box, and Flirt4Free banner: Fatal error: Call to undefined method general::getticker() in /home/boytoy/httpdocs/forum_top.php on line 76

I knew somebody here would have the skinny! Perhaps the gangsters could be persuaded to start sporting suspenders - delicate enough, of course, to prevent hanging oneself but robust enough to hitch up one's drawers.

As my personal shopper is also an ascetic, he charges nothing at all. To help make ends meet, he moonlights as a personal organizer for his clients and, so I'm told, has never owed a nickel in taxes.

You might then be interested in one of the characters referenced in AdamSmith's informative link: The Mark Twain novel A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court features a man who lives on a pillar in the valley of the hermits and repeatedly bends over at the waist . . . Twain's hero hitched the holy man to a sewing machine and used him to make linen shirts, though your proclivities may lead elsewhere.

It's been acting up for me too over the past few weeks, just as you say. It's mostly a case of 'stalling' when waiting for a page to load. It usually loads eventually, but not always. I haven't complained because, when I switch from Safari to Firefox, the page loads OK. Not sure if the programmers test the updates with various browsers but my guess is, for this last one anyway, they didn't. The other problem is getting booted when I hit the 'post' button. Something about not having permission for that action. I think RA1 has had a similar problem in the past, but it's a new one for me. As I'm planning to keep Safari as my browser, I've resigned myself to slow loading and posting problems until the next site update occurs. Until then, I probably won't be infesting the Board quite as much.