No Runny Eggs

Once again, Shoebox has come through with a high-quality guest-blogger who goes by the nom de blog Birdman. In addition to the brief bio he sent Shoebox, I’ll add that he has a lot of experience in Twin City-area politics. I’ll let his bio do the talking:

Born in ’61.
Happily married to my first wife.
Two children.
Sexual preference: A lot.

Believe truth is absolute, and that pursuit of truth is a life-long
enterprise.

You can learn all you need to know about the current political trends in
America by reading “The Road to Serfdom” by F.A. Hayek.

Favorite writers: George Will and Robert Bork.

Favorite movies: A Few Good Men and Oh God!

I should’ve done this a couple months ago, but better late than never (I blame that overstuffed reader). Dean has reopened Musings of a Thoughtful Conservative.

We’re somewhere near 400 blogs on that bloated roll to your right (and over 400 feeds in my overstuffed feed reader), but there’s always room for more quality places as we find them. One of those is Soapbox Jill’s Liberty’s Logic.

Since Sister Toldjah has gone down with a nasty bug, she hung out the guest-blogger sign, and invited Phineas and me to cover for her while she gets healthy again.

Get well soon, ST, and the rest of you stop on in over there. Once again, I’ll try to do some exclusive content for her and hopefully remember to repost it here when the comments time out, while doing some other stuff here. In fact, I’ve just put up a look at the media poll question from the WPRI/UW poll from the weekend.

I haven’t been able to keep up with all the moves Alexander/Rabbit has been doing, but at least this time he only changed the name. Of course, since I didn’t keep up with the previous move, I had to do both in the bloated roll. In any case, a Little off Main is back in business.

Since Shoebox has finally started Twittering (do follow him at @Shoeboxnre), I needed to shoehorn a second Twitter badge on the right sidebar. It’s not a perfect solution because, except at the largest resolutions, you’ll need to scroll to get to the bloated roll, but it works for now.

I have to thank a few high-profile people for linking here the last couple days:

– Ed Morrissey over at Hot Air for the video I shot of him at the Defending the American Dream Summit.

– Robert Stacy McCain for me trying to steer you to Part 1 of his reporting from Clay County, Kentucky.

– John Hawkins for naming me the Blog of the Day over at Linkiest. For those of you who don’t know what Linkiest (formerly known as Conservative Grapevine) is, it is an aggregator of who’s who in the conservative blogosphere.

Thanks for stopping in, and do stick around and enjoy the posts from Shoebox and me (and the occassional guest-blogger).

A housekeeping note; I hadn’t realized that John had changed the name of Conservative Grapevine. I’ve updated the bloated roll to the right.

There’s nothing common about Common Cents Blog. Now only if they would enable the feed, even if it’s just an excerpt, it would be easier to follow.

I honestly don’t know why I’m acknowledging my 4th blogiversary because I missed the first three. It could be because a couple of good friends, Ed Morrissey and Sister Toldjah, celebrated their 6th blogiversaries over the weekend. Of course, we need some music…

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vyaYXwoXpeM[/youtube]

I first have to thank you, the loyal readers of this place. You’re why I keep on churning out the inane ra…er, high-qual…er, I was right the first time with inane rants.

I definitely wouldn’t have made it to year four without Shoebox. I lost count of how many times he’s bailed out this place from my blogging dry spells. Besides, even though he’ll deny it, he is better than I am.

I have to give a special shout-out to all my guest-bloggers; Fred, Patrick, Aaron, Leslie, silent E, Big G, the aforementioned Sister Toldjah and Phineas. I owe all of you drinks.

I am deeply humbled when I recall all the people I’ve met because I’ve been blogging. There are too many to name, and even though I probably don’t belong in the same room as many of them, they are all great people.

I tried to put together a “best-of” list of posts, but there’s a couple problems with that. There’s just so many posts that have gone up over the years that I would sound narcisstic. Besides, most of those that I wrote aren’t exactly “best-of” material.

God willing, the posts will keep coming for many more years, and they’ll hopefully be good enough to keep you coming into this little corner hole in the wall.

James Wigderson, blogger, Cowboys fan (though I don’t hold it against him…much), and columnist, has come back from his summer vacation and opened up a new version of the Wigderson Library and Pub. Welcome back James.

Just been too busy:

– I wanted to get the audio of Paul Ryan’s Greendale townhall up, but given its massive size (82 MB and just under 1 hour of audio) and weak sound quality (which will take time to clean up), I couldn’t get that done just now.

– Meanwhile, I’ve been working with Patrick to get BadgerBlogger back online. We got it down to a site host issue, and Patrick’s host got that resolved.

– Via Hot Air Headlines, we have the idiot of the day – Robert Reich, who called for higher deficits in The Guardian. His inanity deserves a full fisking, which I won’t be able to get done tonight.

– The polls are continuing to slide on Obama. In today’s Rasmussen Presidential Daily Tracking Poll, 45% of those surveyed approved at least somewhat of Obama’s job performance (the lowest yet), while 41% strongly disapproved and 53% disapproved at least somewhat of his performance. Shoebox will have more up in the morning.

I’ve got a couple of things on the burner, but no real energy to push them from the back simmer burners to the front ones.

Tomorrow will be light as well, at least until late. I plan on making the Janesville Paul Ryan listening session, then take a trip to Madison for the AFP town hall.

Fresh from a week of canoeing, fishing and camping in the Boundary Waters (outfitting done, as always, by Tuscarora Outfitters, I’m off to Pittsburgh for the RightOnline conference, hopefully pick up a new trick or two, and run into a heap of old and not-so-old friends. I think, I hope, I pray I got enough sleep up in Minnesota this past week because I’m running on no sleep since about 7 am yesterday.

…and given the lack of posts from me, you probably didn’t, I’m out canoeing the wilds of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. I leave you in the capable hands of Shoebox and all the guest-bloggers over on your left (or in the Authors section if you’re viewing this on mobile).

I will technically be back in comms sometime late on the 13th, but I have a very-short turnaround to a weekend trip to Pittsburgh. Most-likely, you won’t see much of me until Monday. However, I do invite you to enjoy the rest of the gang propping me up (as usual).

I started using FeedDemon as my RSS reader shortly after I signed up for NewsGator to help Sister Toldjah troubleshoot some problems she had with NewsGator Online. For a long time, it worked rather well. Lately, FeedDemon, actually its underlying NewsGator Online interface, had not been updating nearly as often as it should. I stuck with it because that was still the best RSS reader I knew.

Now, however, a pair of items has caused me to dump FeedDemon entirely. First, NewsGator Online is disappearing. That means that FeedDemon will instead be synchronizing with Google Reader, and if I ever bothered to fire up the NewsGator Go on the “smart”phone, that would be no more.

That’s all well and good because Google Reader updates far more reliably than NewsGator has lately, except the second change as part of FeedDemon caused me to dump it entirely. There is now a rather large and obtrusive rotating ad as part of the new software, with no real plans to take it out (supposedly the creator of FeedDemon is considering removing it from a paid version, but with these economic times, I’d rather not pay).

Fortunately, there is an answer that will allow me to keep things synched between at least between the desktop and the laptop – RSS Bandit. It’s not quite as convenient as FeedDemon was, but it gets the job done. Bonus item that I missed when I finally abandoned SharpReader – it shows link relationships.

Yes, the internal browser uses the IE engine rather than the Firefox one, but that’s the breaks.

Phineas decided that, with the shrinking amount of money being left for the non-public-sector economy, he couldn’t pay TypePad anymore for his blogging. That means Public Secrets has a new home – http://pubsecrets.wordpress.com/.

Sorry about that; something odd happened to the php server. I basically ended up nuking the entire php handling routine.

The actions of Honduras’ military to uphold their country’s Constitution and eject a Chavez-wannabe from their Presidency have resulted in me finding another of Dan Collins’ blogs – Piece of Work in Progress

Speaking of that news, I’m merely waiting for a second opinion on the translation of Honduras’ Constitution to put something up on that.

The Badger Blog Alliance has been retired. There’s no word yet where my blogfather will end up, though I hold out hope for Spotted Horse 3.

In case you haven’t noticed, I’ve been reworking the bloated roll to your right, adding stuff I read, removing stuff that is no more, correcting links, and creating a new category for bloggers who have retired their places of abode. As the title says, there’s just too many new ones to list, so just look for the new ones. Each one has something like a 1-in-350 chance of being on top because randomness is how I roll.

Somehow, until Sam pointed it out, I didn’t realize that I didn’t have yoSAMite says on the bloated roll. Sorry about that, Sam; it’s fixed now.

While I like WordPress 2.8’s new file editor because it displays line numbers, and offers syntax highlighting and function help, actually using it to edit either plugins or themes breaks the blog.