No Runny Eggs

I should’ve done this before I went on vacation, but I ran out of time. Please welcome Dave_WI and Dave’s Thoughts to the roll of bloat.

Jib once said that once blogging became not fun, it was time to stop. I’m rapidly approaching the point where blogging is no longer fun.

I’ve still got a few things left to say, but right now, they’re at best half-formed thoughts. Once (or if) I get them out, I don’t know what the future holds for me.

I’d like to thank Phineas, Sister Toldjah, silent E and Fred (who finally included some talent in his annual Liza pic) for filling in while I was on vacation.

Now, for the fishing report. It was the coldest, rawest year ever, but that didn’t stop the fishing. I got a 25″ walleye and a 28″ walleye on consecutive days. In fact, we caught so many large fish, we had trouble getting keepers (ones between 16.5″ and 18″, since Ontario put a slot of 18″ and 23″ where we can’t keep any, and only one of a total of four over that).

I’ll slowly get back into the swing of things after missing 9,000+ items on my overstuffed feed reader.

This is the Emergency Blogging System. It has been activated because Steve is headed north of the border for some serious walleye fishing and some serious beer drinking. In his absence, he has lined up a heap of guest-bloggers, both familiar and new, to help Shoebox mind the place for the next week.

The average quality of posts is expected to increase exponentially until Steve returns on the 6th of June (that would be D-Day for the Normandy landings for those of you who know history).

You are instructed to treat the guest-bloggers far better than you treat the owner of this place. This concludes this posting from the Emergency Blogging System.

I’m headed up north of the border for the annual Spring Walleye Hunt next week Saturday. Since Shoebox is still busy with his special project, and because Sister Toldjah gave me the keys to her place last month, I’ve brought in a couple more guest-bloggers:

– Sister Toldjah, a very nice North Carolina blogger
– Phineas, who runs Public Secrets out of California and who was one of my cohorts when ST took a week off

Let’s have a kegger before I go :-)

One of the good things about going through the logs is I’m able to find some good places that link here that otherwise would slip through the cracks. Rabbit does some pretty good howling from the park bench over at Moons End.

In a continuing quest to synchronize my overstuffed feed reader with the roll of bloat, it’s well past time to add The Lid to the latter.

I could’ve swore I put Doctor Dave on the oversized roll of bloat on the right side before now, but somehow I didn’t. Don’t be like me and keep on forgetting to add Feed Your ADHD to your rolls and readers.

Over the weekend, Bluehost decided to move me to a newer server (I wish I would’ve been told this). The good news is that the processor is faster. The bad is the php server isn’t quite perfect.

I don’t know about the rest of you, but I occassionally get “500” errors now when doing something php-related. Sorry about that.

The other issue was a backroom one, and one I wish I could have prepared for before the trip to La Crosse. With the move, they assigned me a default max filesize upload of 2 MB. My big black camera takes 7 MP pictures which vary between 3 MB and 5 MB, and some of the audio I cut was also larger than 2 MB. Needless to say, I had to burn some time to track down what happened and fix it.

I’ve had Anthony on my overstuffed feed reader for a while, but until Sister Toldjah tapped both him and me (along with Brian) to guest-blog over at her place, I didn’t realize that I never put Public Secrets on that bloated roll to your right. It’s past time to correct that oversight.

Some of the blogs I read, like Hot Air, Sister Toldjah, Melissa Clouthier and The World According to Nick, have set up a “headlines” section, where they post headline links to news stories and articles they find interesting, but don’t necessarily have the time to do a full-blown post. Since the lengthy Scrambles are just too much work, I have been mulling using a “headlines” section as a replacement.

I want to be able to have comments on those headlines, so using a third-party service like Nick does is pretty much out. For a couple of technical reasons, I don’t really want to put the headlines into the same database as the rest of the blog content, so I wanted to have it as its own blog like Hot Air. One of the neat tricks that Hot Air does is allow a single login for both the main blog and the headlines, and that’s where I started running into problems.

I attempted to tie the user tables of the nascient “headlines” blog to those of my test blog (which, while being on a subdirectory of this place, is on a different database), and I just couldn’t get that to work properly. I ended wiping out that blog and the tables it created in the test blog database. At the same time, I was trying out a different mobile theme plugin on the test blog. Between the two things I was trying to do, I somehow hosed that blog, with that mobile theme being forced in IE even after the “force theme” checkmark was unchecked (necessating a cookie/cache clearing), and then all the page/post links attempting to find its equivalent here. That got fixed through brute force (i.e. an elimination of that plugin and then a reinstall of the WP files).

However, as that got fixed, Shoebox and I both lost access to the admin pages here. There was nothing that should’ve been affected on this blog, as the test blog is in its own directory and its own database. After failing to find a more-elegant fix, I had to reinstall the WP files here as well.

Oh well; life goes on.

I was hoping to get a few things done, like a “headlines” section and a slight redesign (necessary for said headlines section), in time for my 100,000th visitor (who came in just before noon), but I just haven’t been feeling too great. I do want to thank each of you who stumbled into this place the almost-2 years that I’ve been keeping stats, and the over-3 years total that I’ve been running it.

I’ve got a couple of ideas for posts floating around, but I need a clearer head to actually post on them. I haven’t decided quite what to think about CRG’s announcement of a Recall Doyle effort yet; I’ve heard some good arguments both for and against. I still don’t quite know what to make of Mark Verhalen’s write-in bid for Oak Creek mayor after he fell short in the primary. There’s also thousands of posts from hundreds of blogs in the overstuffed feed reader.

Oh well; I need something to eat, and then drink. See you at Papa’s.

Back on April 6, 2007, I started tracking those of you who stumbled in here. At that time, I got the standard 2-year/100,000 visitor warranty package, never thinking I’d hit the 100K mark before the 2-year mark. Little did I know that since then, some influential people, from John Hawkins to Bill Quick, from Ed Driscoll to Ed Morrissey, from Stephen Green to Jim Geraghty, from E.M. Zanotti to the gang at doubleplusundead and a lot of others I don’t have room to thank, would consider Shoebox and me worthy of some of their traffic. That is on top of those sent over by people who I’ve known since before then, bloggers like, Patrick, Dad29, Fred, Sister Toldjah, Jim Lynch, Owen, Kevin, Sean Hackbarth, Kate, and too many more to mention.

I also didn’t think I’d get a co-blogger as good as Shoebox to up the quality of this place. I’m eternally grateful for him wandering in on a couple of my debate liveblogs from the end of 2007/beginning of 2008 and eventually accepting an invite to start blogging.

I would also be remiss if I didn’t mention the contributions of my various guest-bloggers: Fred, Aaron, Patrick, Leslie, silent E and Big G. When I needed time off of this place, they stepped up and kept things rolling.

Here I am on the threshhold of having 100,000 unique visitors (if I cared about hits, that number is somewhere north of that), and uncharacteristically, I’m actually in awe of a number. Actually, I’m in awe of all of you who have dropped in. Whether you came here for Shoebox’s great early-morning prose, stopped in for the Scrambles that ultimately became too hard to distill (because there are that many good posts out there on a daily basis), or stumbled into one of my rants, I thank you.

Now, let’s break this place.

If you haven’t met the Burri clan, they’re more fun than a barrel of cash wheeled around by prospective Senate candidates. Let’s open up the bags, shall we?

Bag #1 – Lance Burri has decided to flee the confines of Blogger, at least for himself (he’s still part of the Badger Blog Alliance), and open up The TrogloPundit. Do adjust your rolls and feeders accordingly.

Bag #2 – I seem to have forgot to add Grandpa John’s to that oversized roll to your right. That’s where the rest of the Burris are, with the occassional dose of “sanity” from Lance.

Dad29 swears by him, and I saw, but didn’t actually get to meet, him at CPAC. Robert Stacy McCain, who is The Other McCain (i.e., the one who actually makes sense), deserves to be on your rolls and readers if you’re lazy like me and haven’t added him before now.

Speaking of rules, he explained the five rules to get into the 7 figures on hits. I hope I’m a better-than-average practitioner of Rule 2, even though I don’t have the temperment to follow Rules 1 and 5 (not to say that I don’t appreciate those that faithfully follow Rule 5A).

If you’ve followed VodkaPundit for any length of time, you have run into Will Collier’s posts. Stephen Green put out the general alert that he has struck out on his own again, so go and put one of the originals on your rolls and in your readers. If you doubt he’s THAT GOOD, Will already got an Instalanche and a NRO Corner mention.

I’ve often enjoyed McQ’s posts over at Right Wing News, but somehow didn’t add his home of QandO, even as he added me on Twitter. Time to correct that oversight.

I’ve got a few additions from CPAC to get done, but I made a written promise to add Liz Mair to that roll yesterday.

Yes, I know, it’s just after noon back in the land of ice cream and frozen beer (and 1 pm in the bowels of CPAC), but I need to add Skye and MidnightBlue.

This is the Emergency Blogging System. The Freezing Blog Drizzle Advisory that had been in effect for No Runny Eggs has been allowed to expire. The steam that steveegg had has run out.

We now return you to your regularily scheduled schedule of posting.

In case you haven’t noticed, I’ve been too silent lately. I’m still chewing over an epic topic or two, but while I’m chewing, I should fire off some quick hitters.

In that vein, the Emergency Blogging System has issued a Freezing Drizzle Advisory for No Runny Eggs, to be in effect until I’ve emptied out my feed reader.