Zak Klemmer’s Neighborhood

Although this compose window still took a while, Daisy got back to me with a new theory, one that sounds very plausible, about why I had been having so much trouble.
   When each compose window loads, it comes with one’s tags (if you look at the source code for a compose window, there is a whole line of them). It is to enable Vox’s auto-complete feature for the tags.
   Since I have blogged a lot in the last three years, and introduced a lot of tags, the server appears to time out when loading them with the compose window.
   While the video and photo windows also have these tags, I assume they have less code on them.
   It doesn’t explain why I had a problem with my second Vox account last night (could it be the cookies?), but I have spent just over an hour today removing tags, seeing if they would make a difference. Most of the unwanted tags on this blog have come in via YouTube video imports, so I’ve focused my efforts there.
   Patricia was also a heavy Vox user and I suspect she will have had her share of tags that led to the problems she confronted.
   While the tag auto-complete a user-friendly feature, if it causes this much grief, I would not object to having it switched off.
   It is still too early to tell if removing some of the tags has helped, but I believe we will soon find a solution. Thanks, Daisy!

What's your guilty television pleasure?

Watching it. Have you seen the crap that is on nowadays [1]?

John

[1] Of course, this has always been true, even before "My Mother the Car". As Sturgeon once noted, 90% of everything is crap. (Which makes TV critics the moral equivalent of dung beetles.)

Cheer up, you could have been British!

The Great One reports on:

Great Moments in Socialized Medicine
"British health care is little better than that of former Communist countries, which spend a fraction of the billions poured into the NHS"--the National Health Service--reports London's Daily Mail:

British cancer and heart attack victims are more likely to die than almost anywhere in the developed world;

Asthma and diabetes patients are more than three times as likely to end up in hospital as their neighbours in Germany;

Life expectancy in Britain--79 years and six months for a man--is far worse than in France, where men expect to live until 81. The deficit is similar for women.

Britain performed only marginally better than former Communist states whose governments spend only half as much on healthcare.

But there is also good news for Brits, courtesy of former Enron adviser Paul Krugman: "In Britain, the government itself runs the hospitals and employs the doctors. We've all heard scare stories about how that works in practice; these stories are false."

Remember when Barack Obama was a brilliant and inspiring young leader who was going to revive an America that had gotten dangerously off track? To be honest, neither do we, but we were reliably informed of it at the time. Now, however, that talk of hope and change has given way to a familiar litany of failure.

"Obama used his speech rolling out a stimulus-style jobs program Tuesday to point the finger at Republicans for allegedly facilitating the economic crisis and then foisting it off on his administration to solve," FoxNews.com reports:

While praising his own team for pioneering "ambitious" financial reform and "sweeping" economic recovery initiatives, the president took some pointed shots at Republicans who are now blasting the latest package as a spend-crazy "stimulus two" that will drill deeper into the deficit.

"We were forced to take those steps (to jump-start the economy) largely without the help of an opposition party which, unfortunately, after having presided over the decision-making that had led to the crisis, decided to hand it over to others to solve," Obama said, starting his address with a history lesson on the roots of the recession.

But here's something with which we can agree:

Obama said the crisis was caused not just by economic weakness but the "weakness in our political system"--one corroded by the "bitterness of partisanship," and the "endless campaigns focused on scoring points instead of meeting our common challenges."

"We've seen the consequences of this failure of responsibility. The American people have paid a heavy price," Obama said, calling the nation's unemployment a "human tragedy."

The president, of course, is engaging in psychological projection. The primary political responsibility for the country's problems has belonged to Obama for a year, and to his party in Congress for three years, because the voters deemed the GOP unworthy of it.

WARNING: The following makes too much sense

More from Taranto...

But there is something Obama could do that would likely help the economy: call a moratorium on so-called health-care reform. Just tell Congress to put the effort on the shelf until after next year's election.

The threat of a government takeover of the health industry, which would impose enormous new costs on businesses, has got to be a drag on the economy. In part this reflects a fear of the unknown, a tendency to hold off on major economic decisions as long as it is unclear what if any legislation will pass. But from all we've heard about the so-called reform bills under consideration, there will be plenty to fear once it's known, too.

ObamaCare looks like a political disaster as well as an economic one. It is increasingly unpopular in its own right, and if it is a drag on the economy, that doesn't enhance the prospects of the party in power come next November. Obama needn't give up on the idea of health-care reform. All we're suggesting is that he call a halt to it for the next year, on the grounds that the economic crisis makes the timing bad, and that he has listened to the concerns of voters who don't want to see such a sweeping measure rammed through on a partisan vote.

Everyone would understand that if Democrats do well, that is a signal of approval for ObamaCare-like policies, whereas if it's a good Republican year, they want a different approach--one that Obama could make his own, just as Bill Clinton embraced some Republican ideas after the GOP took Congress in 1994. Under this scenario, the extreme left would have every reason to get out and vote Democratic, and congressmen who think socialized medicine is good policy and good politics could put that belief to the test.

An ObamaCare moratorium would counter the emerging stereotype of Obama as arrogant and out of touch. Will he do it? Probably not. After all, that stereotype is true, isn't it?

What's your favorite thing about the holidays? Least favorite?

My favorite thing about the holidays is EggNog Lattes and I can wear red all month if I want.

My least favorirte thing is that Christmas becomes more over the top each year and I want my daughter to learn it's not about the gifts. & The anniversary of my grandmothers death is December 24th(2006).