Did I Miss the Coup?

Are other people tired of hearing administration spokesmen suggesting that anyone who expresses a view different from that of George W. Bush is somehow disloyal? I certainly am. For example, Vice President Cheney said last week that less than glowing comments by Congressional Democrats are “thoroughly irresponsible and totally unworthy of national leaders in a time of war.” Repeatedly, Americans have been chastised for daring to express ideas of their own when there is a war on. At the same time, we are being told that the current war has no end in sight. President Bush, quite correctly, I think, sees it as something more like the Cold War than World War II. But does this mean that free speech must be suspended for the duration? If we are fighting for our freedom, perhaps we need to be fighting our own government, not Al Qaeda. Did we have a coup while I wasn’t paying attention?

Back Again!

My Web hosting service informed me a few weeks ago that Lionel Deimel’s Farrago was to be moved to a different server. I received detailed information about what was to happen and what I needed to do to assure a smooth changeover. Not surprisingly, I was not actually told everything I needed to know. Most aspects of the migration went smoothly, but there were hangups, most of which could have been avoided had I been given another paragraph or two of instructions. In other words, 80% (or more) of my effort required to keep the Web site up and running was consumed by 20% (or fewer) of the tasks I had to do. So, what’s new? My last real problem was getting BLOGGER, which I use to maintain Lionel Deimel’s Web Log, to update the log properly. BLOGGER could not seem to log on the the server to upload files. The tech support people for my Web hosting service were little help, and I did not even want to think about trying to get technical support from BLOGGER. In the end, I guessed the likely source of my problem and apparently guessed right. The password for my account on the new server was outrageously long, and I thought that perhaps the BLOGGER FTP client could not handle such a long password. I changed the password to something shorter (and something I had already memorized) and bingo, it worked. Well, BLOGGER was able to log in, anyway. I had to change a few configuration settings I had wrong, but that was relatively easy.

All this is by way of saying that Lionel Deimel’s Web Log is back in business, and additional posts should follow. Stay tuned.