September 2008 Archives

I've always voted Republican, but it seems like more and more the GOP is pushing me away from their party. I'm not keen on the Demos either, but currently, I'm steaming over the GOP's rejection of the $700B bailout bill yesterday.

I'm not at all a fan of big government or a huge national debt (or making it $0.7 trillion more), but this is a time of crisis where we're on the brink of a deep recession and potentially a depression. Was this bill a sure-fire fix to the nation's problems? No. But it was desperately needed in my mind (and lots of others) to restore confidence in the financial industry and loosen up credit world-wide so that business is not straight-jacketed. This plan is about rescuing the national (and to some extent, global) economy. Did you see what happened because of the rejection? The DOW dropped 777 points - biggest drop since the 1987 crash.

Many who are glad the bill was defeated think the money is just going to pad the bank accounts of rich executives. That is not the case at all. Sure there may be some wealthy people who benefit from not losing everything they own, but so will Joe Blow. This plan imposes stricter limits on executive pay (I'm staunchly opposed to the golden parachutes given to departing execs of failing companies), and gives some ownership of the companies to the federal government - returning dividends and profit to the treasury. In fact, this could actually be profitable to the US. I'm not saying it will, but where everything is linked together, we need to get the first step going and put confidence back in the economy and let it grow again.

Pelosi's partisan and political speech before the vote yesterday was plain stupid and uncalled for, but the House GOP needs to look past politics, re-vote on this bill and pass it.

Well, I'm mostly back.

A month or so ago, a co-administrator of the web server my blog is on decided to rebuild it (wipe all the software off and re-install). There was a valid need to update the OS, and he asked what I wanted backed up, and we backed those things up. What I didn't think about was the SQL database running on the box that held all my pictures and their data from my picture gallery, held all the info for a web-based gift registry my family uses extensively, and held all the info for my blogs.

It was a tough blow to have all that blown away. Fortunately, I was left with a bunch of static web pages and such for my blog, but a lot was lost.

However, in the past while, I wrote some python scripts to go through each static html file from my old blogs and assemble a file that can then be imported into a new Moveable Type Blog. It's taken a fair bit of effort, but it's mostly back. You'll see a few quirks here and there that need to get straightened out, and pics on the blog that link to my gallery are all messed up, but I'm a lot closer than where I was :).