Well, you don’t need me to tell you that George Tenet resigned, that’s for sure. I was hoping to catch the final rebroadcast of Bill Maher on Larry King last night, but it was not shown as CNN was way too hyped about their second hour of telling us for the twenty-seventh time that, yes, Tenet still has resigned.

The question is, why did he resign? Saying it is because of “personal reasons” is so much of a cliché that no one takes it seriously. Some think it was because of the investigations into intelligence handling. Others think Tenet is being the loyal fall guy for Bush.

And then there’s the resignation of James Pavitt, the Deputy Director for Operations at the CIA, who just announced his resignation. Kinda makes you think that a lot is going on here that we don’t know about, and a lot of people are waiting for the other shoe to drop.

In news that may or may not be related, the story has leaked that Bush has spoken to, and is considering hiring, private counsel in the Valerie Plame affair. As you recall, it was reported that at least two senior White House officials committed a federal felony by vindictively releasing the identity of a covert CIA operative, and at this time there is a grand jury investigation into the matter. Just like the Tenet resignation, this has many scratching their heads and wondering why–does Bush expect some serious flak to come directly at him? Or is he just being cautious?

One source says that it is damnably serious: Capitol Hill Blue–not always the most reliable news source, I must warn–has released a story that witnesses testifying before the grand jury in the Plame affair accused Bush of knowing about the Plame leak and not doing anything to stop it. If (a) this report is accurate and (b) it can be proven that Bush knew, that would make him an accessory to a federal felony. Which kind of puts this in the too-good-to-be-true category, so I am taking this with a grain of salt and waiting for other independent sources to confirm.

The relevant part of the Capitol Hill Blue article reads:

Witnesses told a federal grand jury President George W. Bush knew about, and took no action to stop, the release of a covert CIA operative’s name to a journalist in an attempt to discredit her husband, a critic of administration policy in Iraq.

Their damning testimony has prompted Bush to contact an outside lawyer for legal advice because evidence increasingly points to his involvement in the leak of covert CIA operative Valerie Plame’s name to syndicated columnist Robert Novak.

The move suggests the president anticipates being questioned by prosecutors. Sources say grand jury witnesses have implicated the President and his top advisor, Karl Rove.

If anyone hears anything more on this tack, please let me know.

The grand jury investigation into the Valerie Plame affair came into the media spotlight today as we find that Bush is speaking with private counsel about what he should do if they want to ‘sit down and talk’ with him. This is most interesting in that it means the grand jury might be focusing on more than just Cheney’s chief of staff, if only as far as looking into what the president knew and when did he know it.

Meanwhile, another Bush-related scandal has also shifted back into view: Enron, Bush’s biggest Texas backers. We are now getting an earful of the traders cheerfully gabbing about screwing California over:

“He just f—s California. He steals money from California to the tune of about a million.”

Shutting down power plants to drive up prices:

“If you took down the steamer, how long would it take to get it back up?”

“Oh, it’s not something you want to just be turning on and off every hour. Let’s put it that way,”

“Well, why don’t you just go ahead and shut her down.”

“They’re f——g taking all the money back from you guys? All the money you guys stole from those poor grandmothers in California?”

“Yeah, grandma Millie, man”

“Yeah, now she wants her f—–g money back for all the power you’ve charged right up, jammed right up her a—— for f——g $250 a megawatt hour.”

Enron traders hoping for Bush to win in 2000:

“It’d be great. I’d love to see Ken Lay Secretary of Energy.”

“When this election comes Bush will f——g whack this s–t, man. He won’t play this price-cap b——t.”

Which is exactly what Bush did. “We will not take any action that makes California’s problems worse and that’s why I oppose price caps,” Bush said during the election. It is commonly believed that Bush fully supported not only Enron and its shady business practices, but also the rifling of California through usurious energy rates, so that Democrats in that particular Blue State would become unpopular, so that Republicans could take over. And guess what happened?

And as a massive fire scorched California, one trader made the quintessential Enron comment about California: “Burn, baby, burn. That’s a beautiful thing.”

It can be found the the new Fahrenheit 9/11 web site. It is available in QuickTime and Windows Media. The main page (www.fahrenheit911.com) is just a static placard at the moment, no other content can be accessed.

Unfortunately, the trailer is streamed, not a downloadable file. I have no idea why they did this, it makes the trailer harder to watch at the larger sizes. I have at least 3 Mbps of bandwidth at my home account, several times more than most DSL accounts in the U.S., and the larger sized versions of the trailer had sound dropouts and/or video freezes. The small version played beautifully, though.

Thanks once again to Mark for the info!

Stephanie Herseth won a close election to narrow the Republican majority in the House to only 11 seats. DailyKos points out quite rightly that their involvement in the campaign may very well have helped tip the scales, and points out the importance of grass-roots Democratic support, which is swelling enormously in this contentious election year. Herseth replaces Republican Janklow, who killed one of his constituents (which is pretty much how far a Republican has to go nowadays in order to get the police to arrest him).

This is the second big win for Democrats in special elections this year (they picked up a House seat in Kentucky earlier), and signals a likely trend for Democrats to gain seats and take over at least one house if not both in Congress–but there is a possible braking action here, an illegitimate Republican dirty trick in the form of non-census-related redistricting. Usually voting districts are redrawn only when new census figures change the number alloted to a state and require the districts to be re-drawn. If there is one party decisively in power at the beginning of a decade, they often gerrymander, that is, draw up districts to maximize their chance to win more seats in Congress.

Republicans, however, have hit upon a new strategy: instead of waiting a whole ten years for those pesky censuses, just do it now. Any time Republicans gain control of both houses in a state, they pounce on the opportunity to redistrict right then, in order to solidify their hold on power. In 2002, the GOP broke with long-standing political tradition and gerrymandered in Colorado without any legitimate need to do so; they wanted to win more seats in the next election, so they just redrew the lines for that purpose and that purpose only. This year, with Tom DeLay pushing the agenda, Texas followed suit–and Republicans elsewhere are gearing up to follow.

The Supreme Court has ruled “excessive partisanship” in districting as unconstitutional, and the recent Republican efforts in Colorado and Texas are undeniably just that. In fact, the entire redistricting effort by GOP members in control of those states is, without any question or possibility of doubt, strictly designed for the purpose of slanting the playing field so more Republicans can win, and for no other reason whatsoever. The Texas redistricting alone stands to gain Republicans at least four seats in the House. Republicans in Georgia and Ohio say they want to do the same thing next.

A case was rejected by the Supreme Court last month (Vieth vs. Jubelirer) concerning the overtly partisan Republican Pennsylvania gerrymandering (at the time of the census) on the grounds that there are no “workable standards” for courts to follow in determining whether a redistricting is partisan or not. But a new case, Jackson vs. Perry, brings forth the question of non-census gerrymandering in the Texas debacle, and may have the “workable standards” that would bring about a majority of SC justices to agree that the redistricting is unconstitutional.

Unfortunately, Jackson vs. Perry will likely not be decided until after the election–which means the Republicans will get away scot-free with another heaping handful of stolen elections. There is a chance that perhaps the Texas courts will find the reason to throw out the new lines before time runs out, but I am not holding my breath there. If the Dems fail to win a majority in the House by less than five seats, then the Republicans will have won yet another victory for governmental control via the illegal scumbag route. In other words, nothing new to see here.

The New York Times is just now reporting that the independent Canadian Lions Gate Films has won the distribution rights for Moore’s film, and that a release date of June 25 has been set. The film will be released on “about 1,000 theaters” in the U.S. Showtime, which caught the ditched Reagan miniseries, will show the film on pay cable.

If you go to Michael Moore’s site, you’ll see the initial flash screen confirms this, though there are as yet no details on the main page.

For those of us in Japan, I have found no release date for this country, though films quite often are delayed by a month or so; smaller films like those Moore makes are often delayed by several months or even more than a year, but this film is time-based enough that we will hopefully see it before November.

A few days ago I reported on how preliminary ratings had shown Air America Radio to be highly popular. Now new numbers show that not only is AAR doing well, it actually beat out time-slot competitor Rush Limbaugh–especially in the most prized young-listener demographic:

Heard in New York on WLIB-AM, whose ratings were virtually non-existent prior to switching over to Air America’s programming earlier this year, Franken and the rest of Air America’s 10 a.m-to-3 p.m lineup grabbed a 3.4 rating among listeners age 25-to-54. By contrast, Limbaugh who has been the most highly rated political talk show host in America for the last decade, and who is heard in New York on talk radio powerhouse WABC, lead the station to just a 3.2 rating. There’s more (although the Times forgot to mention it): Among listeners 18-to-34, Franken and WLIB won in a knockout, garnering a 2.9 ratings share compared to WABC’s dismal 0.4 showing.

Wow. For a brand-spanking-new radio station with mostly inexperienced talent and using masking tape to hold things together, to beat out the #1-rated show in the biggest market in the country is nothing less than spectacular–if the preliminary ratings are accurate. It will be fascinating to see how the final ratings will come out.

Of Matt Drudge’s three abortive attempts to smear John Kerry earlier this year (the first two were the fake Botox and Jane Fonda stories), the most famed was the charge that Kerry had had an affair with an “intern” named Alexandra Polier. The story was false, of course, but that didn’t stop Drudge, a boatload of conservative pundits and a wave of tabloid reporters from sinking their teeth into it and acting like it was real.

Now it’s time for Polier to have her say. In a six-page story in the New York Metro, Polier gives an exhaustive account of the story, from her first meeting with Kerry to the genesis of the rumor and finally, an interview with Matt Drudge. The story, told in a light that makes neither side of the political spectrum appear very attractive, gives a personal account of how she weathered the story, and then how she went about investigating its origins.

She describes how she met Kerry in Switzerland, then attended a fundraiser where she met Kerry’s finance director whom she later dated. But her relationship to Kerry was nothing more than a few public encounters, never alone with him. And then the rumor struck.

Though my name wasn’t mentioned in the initial Drudge “exclusive,” it made its first appearance in the British tabloid The Sun on Friday, February 13. The article, by one Brian Flynn, referred to Kerry as a SLEAZEBALL in the headline and said I was 24 (didn’t I wish). It purported to quote my father at home in Pennsylvania discussing the senator, saying, “I think he’s a sleazeball.” The article also claimed to quote my mother as saying Kerry had once chased after me to be on his campaign. My mother was not even home when Flynn called, and Flynn didn’t tell my father—who at this stage was unaware of the Drudge allegations—that he was interviewing him. Instead, he presented himself as a friend trying to get hold of me to talk about John Kerry. My father, a Republican, who believed Kerry had flip-flopped on various issues, said, ‘Oh, that sleazeball.’ ” Here’s how it reappeared in Flynn’s piece: “There is no evidence the pair had an affair, but her father, Terry, 56, said: ‘I think he’s a sleazeball.’ ” Drudge quickly linked to The Sun’s interview.

By that time, Polier had already moved to Nairobi to be with her new fiancé. There, she was mostly trapped in her fiancé’s home as swarms of reporters amassed outside, desperate for some kind of story, offering anyone who had a photo of her massive amounts of money.

When she finally issued an official denial, the story began to die down, and eventually, Polier decided to start investigating the story behind the story. Interestingly, she found one of the earliest reports to have been on a blog, some guy who had posted a vague rumor which was then picked up by reporters. One reporter, who like the others has spent weeks looking into it and found nothing, told her, “We shook the tree. A bunch of names fell out, and yours had the most flesh to it.” Furthermore, Polier reports on the genesis of the infamous Clark comment that Drudge reported:

Drudge claimed Clark himself had told reporters on his campaign bus that Kerry was going to “implode” over a scandal, but when I called Wesley Clark Jr., a screenwriter in L.A., who had helped out on his father’s campaign, he told me Drudge had ignored the context of his father’s quote. “He was reacting to the latest issue of The National Enquirer, which had just run a front-page story about Kerry and possible scandals, when he said that.”

In other words, Clark was reportedly only commenting on the rumor itself, not providing any personal knowledge of the matter–a fact ignored by Drudge.

The story quickly gained steam, however, as Bush was under attack for his National Guard record, and conservatives were hungry for any scandal to throw in the opposite direction. “Rush Limbaugh spent the first hour of his program discussing Kerry’s ‘affair’ with his 10 million listeners. Dozens of conservative commentators followed suit.”

Polier tracked down the reporter from The Sun, and tried to pin him to the wall for fabricating a quote from her mother and taking out of context a remark by her father, “evidence” which seemed to give the story weight when it in fact had none.

“Why did you quote my mother when she wasn’t even home?” I persisted.

“I really can’t talk about this right now, Alex,” he said.

When I finally tracked him down the following week, he was brusque and told me to go through The Sun’s PR office. I asked him about my mother again, but he kept saying, “Sorry, Alex, proper channels.”

Of course, she never got through to him. But she did get through to Drudge, who told her, “In retrospect, I should have had a sentence saying, ‘There is no evidence to tie Alex to John Kerry.’ I should have put that,” and then blamed the Wesley Clark quote for pushing him forward.

All in all, a very informative article, one which outlines the serpentine and often messy path a rumor takes from the mists of obscurity to the front pages of the world press.

TIME Magazine will soon be reporting the existence of an email which incriminates Dick Cheney of being involved in the arrangement of Halliburton’s billion-dollar no-bid contract for work in Iraq. If this is or can lead to a smoking gun, it would have serious ramifications for Cheney and for Bush, as Cheney was the former CEO of the company and still receives payments from the firm. In addition, when the obvious connection between Cheney and Halliburton was pointed out when Halliburton won the no-bid contract, Cheney denied through a spokesman that he was “involved in any way, shape or form in the contracting issue.”

However, the March 5, 2003 “internal Pentagon email from an Army Corps of Engineers official to another Pentagon employee” states in part: “[the contract is] contingent on informing WH [White House] tomorrow. We anticipate no issues since action has been coordinated w[ith] VP’s office.”

Naturally, Cheney’s people tried to weasel out of the mess, though surprisingly did not try to deny the email’s veracity; instead, they attempted to spin the meaning of the note, claiming the coordination” mentioned in the email was “that of publicly announcing the contract decision that has already been made.” Um, yeah, okay. Sorry, but that constitutes a “way shape or form,” even if you believe Cheney’s present claim.

The question is, will the media latch on to this one, or just let it wither away like the many other felonies and scandals in the wings?

Just received a reply to an information request made to Surpass: they define “high server load” as one account taking up 25% of the CPU’s workload. Seems quite reasonable.

Scaramouche asked about streaming video; Surpass simply advertises “audio/video streaming,” Jaguar has “Real Media HTTP Streaming.”

It should be pointed out to the more budget-oriented readers out there that Surpass offers a low-priced plan (Pketh mentioned the plan in general terms), a one-year deal at $40 (roughly $3.33/mo.) which offers 1 GB of disk space, 15 GB bandwidth, and all the other features of the other plans, except it allows no add-on domains. The 2-for-1 sale would double all the numbers, though, in addition to allowing a second domain.

One very pleased review of Surpass posted to the WebHostingTalk forums came from someone with 1,809 posts–meaning the person had been on the boards a very long time, and did not just sign up so they could post nice things about someone they work for. They claimed to have been with Surpass for 16 months; that long at one host and still a positive attitude is a good sign.

Again, they say that deal is only good between June 5-7.

It turns out that Michael Moore has footage of Nick Berg at an Iraqi business conference in the U.S. 6 months before before he was killed, stating concerns over security in his upcoming trip, which eventually led to his death. Moore, however, decided that it would not be responsible or considerate to Berg’s family to use the footage; instead, he sent the footage to the Bergs for them to view as they wished, and made the decision not to use the interview–which could have been a sensational and dramatic addition to the film.

David Berg, Nick’s father said Moore handled the situation with “dignity, respect and discipline”; “Michael Moore has really been a total class act with this whole thing. He could have sold this to the media or stuck it in his movie.”

In the meantime, the Weinsteins have bought “Fahrenheit 9/11” from Disney and talks are ongoing between them and several distributors, Lion’s Gate and Focus Features being among the forefront. At this, I am ending my own personal boycott of Disney goods, but my opinion about the company has taken a palpable hit even so.

The hostage event at Khobar Towers (that place really seems to draw attacks, you gotta wonder if people have the choice of moving to another place or not) has ended, and the Saudis say that “most” of the 50 foreign hostages are now safe, suggesting that some died in the dramatic storming of the towers. The group has not yet been identified as al Qaeda, though that is what most suspect. The hostage-taking is seen as an act of desperation, as it involved the killing of Saudi security guards, and while killing Westerners is not seen as being critical, many people in the Middle East see the killing of other Arabs as crossing the line.

This crisis is yet another development in the ongoing disruption in the Middle East. As Bush tries to worm his way out without giving up anything, he is missing chance after chance of any hope of return to even the days of regular Middle East instability.

While the dramatically sudden climate shift and drastic temperature drops illustrated in the film The Day After Tomorrow are more fiction than science, it has been observed that some gradual and yet dramatic trends are taking place and could remake the world climate into something significantly different for our descendants. This story shows that “global dimming” is responsible for less and less sunlight hitting the ground, that the skies have darkened by 10% over the last 50 years, and it may be a natural phenomena, though some contend it is a result of pollution.

And then there is the Earth’s magnetic field shift, which many scientists believe is now underway–though it may not be complete for thousands of years. Our magnetic field is dropping in strength by about 5% every century, and has been waning for perhaps 2,000 years now, and the decline is accelerating. The north magnetic pole is also not static even now–it has moved 1,100 km in the past 200 years, and most of the movement has happened in the past century. The north magnetic pole now travels at the rate of 40km per year.

The previous magnetic pole flip was 730,000 to 790,000 years ago, and scientists say that a flip every 200,000 or 300,000 years is average–so we seem to be due for one. Reversals can last between 1,000 and 28,000 years. During that time, it has been believed that the Earth would be open to solar and galactic radiation, and we would get a higher dose, increasing the incidence of cancer–though not by so much as to be cataclysmic. One positive side effect thought to be possible is the occurrence of the Aurora Borealis just about every where on Earth, most of the time, fantastic light displays on a regular basis.

A new study, however, indicates that there may be a backup system: the solar wind, which would wrap itself around the Earth and create a new magnetic field which would do about as good a job in protecting us from radiation as the Earth’s present magnetic field accomplishes.

Smoking, it seems, is even more dangerous than we’ve thought. The Surgeon General released a report that says smoking “significantly harms almost every major organ of the body and has been directly linked to a new series of diseases including leukemia, cataracts, pneumonia and cancers of the kidney, cervix, pancreas and stomach.”

Me, I just hat the smell. It gives me headaches, a sore throat, and makes me nauseous–and more than that, it gets into your clothes and hair after a short time and you have to shower and change just to get rid of it. So if they find that it is more dangerous and that dissuades more people from smoking, it is not a result I would mind at all.

Long-time friend Tom pointed me to a web site called Tech Central Station, which is hosting a page which is practically a web site on its own called The Super Size Con, which goes all out in blasting and deriding the film “Super-size Me,” a film about a man who eats nothing but super-sized McDonalds meals for a whole month and becomes dangerously obese and unhealthy. The film won the Sundance Film Festival, and is receiving a lot of attention. Some say it is an important warning about the dangerously unhealthy fare served at fast-food restaurants; others say that it is a super-sized “Jackass”-style stunt–after all, if you eat nothing but huge amounts of McDonalds’ food every day for a month and get no exercise, what the hell do you expect will happen? My own feeling–not having seen the film–is that there is some truth in both.

But what Tom pointed out to me about this site which more or less wages war on the film is that if you look at the site’s “About” page, you will note something interesting:

Tech Central Station is supported by sponsoring corporations that share our faith in technology and free markets. Smart application of technology – combined with pro free market, science-based public policy – has the ability to help us solve many of the world’s problems, and so we are grateful to AT&T, Avue Technologies, The Coca-Cola Company, ExxonMobil, General Motors Corporation, Intel, McDonalds, Merck, Microsoft, Nasdaq, PhRMA, and Qualcomm for their support. All of these corporations are industry leaders that have made great strides in using technology for our betterment, and we are proud to have them as sponsors. However, the opinions expressed on these pages are solely those of the writers and not necessarily of any corporation or other organization.

Not only is the site a shill for just about every other megacorp you can think of (who really buys that “opinions solely those of the writers” garbage?), but McDonalds–the target of “Super-size Me”–is right there in the middle of them. Despite the site’s stated mission of having concern for the dangers of technology and solving many of the world’s problems and yadda yadda yadda, one detects more than just a whiff of the idea that this site is more about protecting corporate interests than in serving you, the peon consumer.

It really does pay off to take the time to check out who is paying the bills….

In my current search for an upgraded hosting package, it came down to two finalists: JaguarPC and Surpass Hosting (the latter of which was called to my attention by the graphically talented Pketh).

My first inclination has been towards Jaguar, as I have had a site hosted with them for one year and 9 months, and in that time there has been only one rather limited disruption of service (ironically it occurred as I was writing about them recently). My thoughts of changing hosts came as I heard that Jaguar had a new offer, called the “Gigadeal,” which offers a gigabyte of disk space, 45 GB of bandwidth, 30 MySQL databases and 5 add-on domains for $10/mo.–a leap above standard offers. Usually I would take such offers with a grain of salt–many less-than-reliable web hosts entice people with grand offers but then boot anyone who tries to take full advantage of them–but since I had been with Jaguar for almost two years, I felt I could trust them on it, to a certain extent.

Then when Pketh suggested Surpass, I took a look–and though initially cautious about a service I’d never heard of before, was interested in what they had to offer. They start with a GB disk space deal at $40 a year (about $3.33/mo.), but for the same price as the Gigadeal ($10), they offer 7 GB of disk space, 75 GB bandwidth, 3 add-on domains, and “unmetered” MySQL databases. The Jaguar deal only does better in add-on domains, and only by 2. But there is no doubt that Surpass lives up to its name and offers much better features.

More study found that Surpass offered more in other areas too–for instance, something called Scripta, which allows installation of open source or freeware scripts for the site. That’s a normal feature, but the list of additions in Scripta is much more fleshed-out. They also offer something called Xoops, a site development tool, which I do not yet know the value of but looks interesting.

I emailed Surpass to check out a few of their unmentioned policies–for example, database usage. They replied: “We do not have a specific set limit on SQL usage, but it cannot use a high server load. If the server starts running slow or if there is packet loss due to the script, we would have to disable it.” Which brings up a bit of a doubt about what they consider to be “high server load.” This seems to fall in line with what the less scrupulous web hosts do–offer unlimited use but then cut you off when you reach an unspoken limit. Not knowing exactly where the limit is is the problem.

A check on WebHostingTalk’s forums uncovered a few bad reviews, but fewer than normal and mostly in the range that I would consider acceptable. In fact, they received fewer poor reviews than Jaguar. Some veterans also spoke of it as being a reliable service. (Pketh, what’s your experience so far? Or have you signed up with them yet?) So in that area they seem to check out OK.

Something that has in a way sealed the deal with me, however, is a new promotion they will be offering from June 5 to June 7: a 2-for-1 deal. Buy one account, and receive another at equal or lower value for free. If I read that correctly, it means that if I pay $10 per month for the “Deluxe” account (7GB disk space, 75GB transfer, etc.), I can get two of that account and pay for just one, indefinitely. Effectively, 14GB of disk space, 150GB bandwidth, and 6 add-on domains for $10 a month. That sounds spectacular–and trips some of my too-good-to-be-true alarms. Still, there is a 90-day money-back guarantee, and I would opt for the monthly payment so I could get out of Dodge should things become dodgy. So I figure I’ll start getting geared up for the switch on June 5th–though that comes very close to the billing deadline for my current host.

I’ll keep you notified of any new information, and would appreciate your comments and advice on the matter!

In Japan, there are sales trucks all over the place. Most are just plain noisy and annoying–the secondhand shop truck, the kerosene truck, lunch and snack trucks, and so on. Annoying because they drive at 5 kph and wander through all the driveways and small roads in the neighborhood, all the time blaring annoying announcements and mind-numbing repeating electronic tunes at full blast. Their slow and winding path keeps them well within earshot for perhaps half an hour each, and it’s impossible to shut out unless your listening to headphones with the volume way up.

One truck selling stuff that regularly wanders by is a bit less annoying: the sweet potato truck. A traditional standard in Japan, a small truck (in older times, a cart) with a small oven furnace and sweet potatoes (“yaki-imo,” or baked potatoes” in Japanese) hot and ready to eat. Hard to miss when it comes, there is always a musical call, a voice singing, “yakiiiiiiii… imooooooo!”

This is a bit less annoying than the others because it is (a) an organic sound, and (b) not shouted at blaring volumes–they seem to be aware of the annoyance factor and keep it down to a reasonable blast.

Not only that, they even emit a nice smell–a product of the wood-burning stove in the back of the truck, a kind of fireplace/campfire smell.

I’m not a big fan of sweet potatoes, though, so I can’t review the taste. But I’d have to say that if these were the only trucks going around selling stuff in the neighborhood, I wouldn’t mind quite so much. Well, at least the weather is warmer and that blasted kerosene truck no longer comes by Wednesday and Saturday evenings.

“Buffalo Spammer, Don’t you come home tonight…”

This a continuation of “How to Be the Master of Your Domain” from four days back. In the prior post, I explained how to get a domain name and some of the basics about getting a web host. What I left unsaid was the features offered by web hosts.

Disk Space: This is the amount of disk space you may fill up with your web site. If you have a simple site with few graphics, maybe a primarily-text blog, for instance, then disk space is not a big issue. But if you plan to have a lot of photos or even video on your site, then a lower disk space allotment of 50MB, for example, can get filled up fast. For $5-$10 a month, you should get at least 200 MB of space.

Data Transfer / Bandwidth: This is how much data can be sent to your site and downloaded by visitors (the latter being the major drain, of course). For example, if you have a photo page that weighs in at 500 KB total, and 100 people view it, that would use up 50 MB of bandwidth–plus the 500 KB you used to put the photo page up in the first place. Bandwidth can be crucial if your site is popular or if you have photos and/or audio/video media that people download a lot. Perhaps you have heard about a site that has a great video on it, and you go there and the site is off-line, perhaps with a “Bandwidth Exceeded” note in place; that’s because too many people came to view, and the web site operator did not pay for extra bandwidth.

I myself am just grazing the ceiling with this blog–my current account has 5 GB of bandwidth alloted, and is going to end the month just under that amount, so I’m going to have to graduate the site from the $9/mo. “beginner” account to the $13/mo. “homestead” account (as my current web host titles them).

So more bandwidth is better, but people who run web sites often talk about how one must beware of web hosts who offer “unlimited” bandwidth. Such offers are usually scams, they report; when you start using up more bandwidth than they really want you to, they find a way to cut you back or cut you off.

Domain Pointing / Add-on Domains: let’s say you have many domains (as I do) but you would rather not pay, say, $10 a month for each one of them. Instead, you can put all of them into one web hosting account. Get the account with the web host for a primary domain (let’s say in my case, blogd.com), and then you can add new domains as subsets of that account (for example, I could add xpat.org and teach-japan.com).

Each added domain would be ‘hosted’ within something called a ‘subdirectory,’ which is a folder inside your main account. So in my main blogd.com account, I would create a folder called ‘xpat,’ and in that folder I would put all the files for xpat.org. I would then direct my site (through a control panel they give you) to point the domain ‘xpat.org’ to that folder. When you go to www.xpat.org in a browser, the folder acts as its own web site, with the correct URL and everything. Currently, I do this with teach-japan.com, which is the primary domain; another of my domains, lcjapan.com, is an added domain. You can see this by going to the address http://www.teach-japan.com/lcjapan/; it displays exactly the same as http://www.lcjapan.com.

This is a bit similar to something called ‘sub-domains,’ which are subdirectories just like the add-on domains, but do not have a completely different domain name associated with them. For example, in this site, I could create a folder called ‘luis,’ and by assigning that as a ‘subdomain,’ people could access it by going to http://luis.blogd.com. The subdomain name replaces the “www” you usually see in URLs. That’s how ‘blogger’ works, giving each person with a blog a distinct subdomain, e.g. http://blogd.blogger.com (if I did my blog with them).

Each web host offers a different number of add-on domains, but the number is often no less than 2 and no more than 5.

Email: When you have a hosted site, you get the works, including the ability to create your own email accounts as you see fit. Usually you would want POP3 accounts, email which you can access with programs like Eudora, Mail (on Mac OS X), or Outlook Express. These accounts can usually be accessed via ‘webmail’ as well–that is, through using a browser, in the same way you would with Hotmail or Yahoo Mail.

Some web hosts limit the number of email addresses to 5 or 20 or 50. Many give you an ‘unlimited’ number, though of course each account takes up hard disk space, so that is a real limit that must be dealt with–though you’d need to have a lot of accounts all loaded with email in order to really infringe on the disk space limit.

Email accounts you can make will of course end with you domain name (e.g., ‘@blogd.com’). Creating one is trivial: go to the control panel, select the email manager, click ‘add account,’ and then give the account a name and password. You can also set the space limit on the account to however many megabytes, or just leave the option blank for unlimited space.

Email is usually accompanied by auto-forwarding (forward email sent to address X to address Y), autoresponders (pre-written messages automatically sent out to anyone who sends email to a certain address), a catch-all account (any email with your domain name but without a correct account name will pile up here, usually spam), mailing lists (so you can send one email and have it go to multiple addresses), and filters (for filtering out spam before email gets to your screen).

Databases: This is important for running blogs or forums; each entity uses one database. I prefer MySQL databases, of which you are often alloted up to 5, maybe 10, or more if you pay more. However, you have to read the web hosts’ policies before planning to set up many blogs or forums–some hosts do not allow more than one of either or each because they create more work for the server’s CPU. Some hosts may even ban the use of some blog or forum software due to processor strain. So check that out before signing up for a hosting plan.

Scripting Languages: Usually cgi and php; these allow you to run simple programs on your web site. A very common example is the hit counter, which acts like a site odometer, adding a tick each time someone visits. Another is a clock or count-down for some event or another. One that I often use is formmail, which allows you to create a form (with pull-down menus, buttons, and text boxes) that visitors fill out; when they click on the ‘submit’ or ‘send’ button, it generates an email to be sent to you.

You have to be careful, though–some scripts can be hijacked by hackers. On more than one occasion I have noted my formmail script being accessed thousands of times, and it turned out a spammer had somehow access my script and used it to send truckloads of spam to people, using my domain as the point of origin. More reason to despise that scum.

Statistics: a boon to the vain, but also an extremely useful tool. AwStats is the best stat arranger. Webalizer is as common or more common, but is less attractively done and much less useful in how it adds numbers and displays things. For example, in listing sites and pages which send visitors to your site, Webalizer includes people who move from one of your pages to another, so outside link-ins are lost among a sea of ‘referrals’ from your own pages; AwStats handles it much better, omitting internal transfers.

AwStats also tells you the total number of unique IP Addresses that visited your site (also lacking in Webalizer), and gives totals for the hour, day, month and year; which country visitors came from, the ISPs that handled the requests, visits by spiders and bots, how long your visitors stayed (average for this site: 5.5 minutes), what file types they downloaded, what pages they visited and how many times, their browser and operating system versions, which search engines sent visitors your way and how many, and what searches they performed that led them to your site. Quite an impressive array of information that tells you not just how many people visit your site, but all kinds of information about them. The main drawback is that the stats are never a running tally; they get revised only once every 24 hours or so, which means that if you get a sudden spike, you won’t know it for another day.

From this I know that 74% of my visitors type in my address directly, or use a bookmark or have me on an RSS feed application; 23% come from search engines (fully half from Google), and 3% come from links from other web sites. I know that visitors wane during weekends and near midnight California time, that most people view my site with an RSS feeder; that fully three quarters of my visitors use Windows (17% Mac) and 70% use Explorer (when will people learn?!). If a web host does not offer AwStats, I usually look elsewhere.

Another useful stat utility is “Recent visitors,” which gives you a long list of the people who visited your site most recently. This is useful if your site is getting hotlinked–you would otherwise not be aware that your photos are being accessed (AwStats does not track specific image downloads). That’s how I caught the guy who copied my post and hotlinked to my photos.

Other features include hotlink protection, customized error pages, password-protected directories, pre-set blogs, forums, counters, guestbooks and the like, as well as a variety of professional tools which I have yet to understand.

Recently I stumbled upon a new plan at a web host I have long used. The company started as one called “Aletia,” which I used after I left the dreaded AIT debacle. Aletia ran OK for a while, but then started messing up big-time. Just as I was ready to move my primary domain away from there, they told me that because of the screw-ups, they would host my site indefinitely at no charge. So I figured, why not, and after that, their service was pretty good. Not too long after, they were bought out by JaguarPC, which was kind enough to carry the gratis account, which I still enjoy today. Jaguar had been too expensive for me so I did not do any paid hosting there, but recently I discovered that they are now offering a new deal: 1 GB of disk space, 45 GB bandwidth, 5 Domain pointers, 30 MySQL databases, unlimited POP3 email and email resources, and an otherwise fully-loaded package–including AwStats–for $10 a month, or $95 a year. Compare that to my present $9/mo. package, which gives me 200 MB hard disk space, 5 GB bandwidth, 10 MySQLs, and 2 Domain pointers. Not too shabby.

But the best thing is that I have used Jaguar with that gratis account for a few years, so I know I can trust these guys, and that their service is usually good–except for that hiccup last week, the first I experienced with them.

So I will probably get two accounts, one for my blogs and another for the rest of my domains (now hosted between 4 different accounts averaging $8 a month or so). But first I will get a single account, put my non-blog stuff there and do a lot of experimenting to make sure the account is all it is cracked up to be, then move this blog and The Expat to a second account when I’m more sure-footed.

Yesterday, May 27th, was my 300th consecutive day of blogging.

Despite the constant right-wing rants about how AAR is due for an untimely demise, the first ratings have come in, and they are stellar: Air America Radio even beat out Rush Limbaugh in New York among target audiences. In Chicago, it shot the local station’s ratings up 2000%, despite being pulled off the air after 28 days due to a billing dispute.

“If this is how we’re doing now, imagine what things will be like when we actually know what we’re doing,” Franken said.

The ratings are preliminary, but prove one thing that conservatives will hate to hear: AAR is popular and has a good future in radio. So much for the naysaying and death knells from the right.

Well, I am coming much, much closer now to switching to a blog type which requires registration. And I hate doing it. However, I just don’t see as how I’ve got the choice here.

I was hoping to be able to stay with what is tried and true, good ol’ Movable Type v. 2.6. Up until now I’ve been doing OK, but the spammers have been getting out of hand. At the end of last August, I got my first blog comment spam, something that had been new to me. At first I was OK with just deleting each comment, but then the spammers started hitting me more often, and then with multiple spams. By early December, some jerk put spam in the comments of 50 different posts–and I found MT Blacklist, thank God in heaven. It caught most of the worst spammers, and best of all, if somebody hit me on many different posts’ comments, I could use MT-Blacklist and zap them all in one go, as opposed to slowly and deliberately going through the steps to eliminate them one at a time.

Well, now I’m facing a new tide. When spammers hit, they are now using different IP addresses and different new URLs every time, and they are hitting me daily. Now, I face between 4 and 10 spam comments each day that get by the blacklist (that’s after MT-Blacklist stopped the majority of them already!), and I usually have to take them out one by one, as Blacklist can’t connect the IP addresses or URLs found within them. It’s really getting intolerable.

I hate comment registration systems. I hate them because it means people have to jump through hoops when they want to leave a comment, it makes the site less accessible. But there comes a point where it’s just not worth it. Still, you really want to find out where those spammers live, and then hire a dozen homeless people to camp out in their backyard and ring their doorbell every five minutes. Or rig a software program to autodial their business phone incessantly and play a recording of Van Halen at full blast when they answer.

I’ve found a great hosting plan that I might take, loads of bandwidth, 5 add-on domains, and 20 MySQL databases plus lots else for $10 a month, I’ll probably get that account and then install every type of blog software I can find, see how they each compare, then make a decision about which one to go with…

Here’s where the value lies in checking your stats.

There’s something called “netiquette,” a kind of Emily Post for the Internet. Certain rules you shouldn’t break. One of them is plagiarism, a universal breach of etiquette. If you take someone else’s words and reprint them, you give credit–and with blogs, you link to the source, so that the person who originally wrote something not only gets the credit deserved, but also possibly more traffic from the link.

Just as bad is something called “hotlinking.” If you use an image from somewhere else, the least you can do is save the image on your own site. But some people don’t do that; instead, they link directly to the image on the other site. So that when someone visits the hotlinker’s page, they see the photos as if they were native to the site. But each time a visitor views the hotlinker’s page, the images are loaded from the original site. This results in the content being displayed on the hotlinker’s site but the original site does the heavy lifting–the original site has to do the sending of the photos, which takes up bandwidth, which is a resource that people pay for.

Let me put it this way. Let’s say you write software, you create a program. Another person comes along, steals the program and publishes it under their own name. And then they add your home phone number as the tech support line, and tell people to call collect. That’s kind of like what this is.

When I checked my stats this morning, I noticed that some guy had done that to one of my blog posts. He had taken my blog entry verbatim, and had hotlinked to the two photos in it. No credit, no link, nothing. As if he’d written it and he was hosting the photos.

So I played a little trick on him. The danger in hotlinking is that the original images are not under your control, but are controlled by the person who owns the originating site. If that person changes the photos, then your site changes without you knowing it. So I replaced the photos on my own site with blank cards announcing what this guy did. For my own site, I re-uploaded the original images under new names and edited the posts accordingly so the images display correctly on my site. But the hontlinker gets busted–on his own page.

Yeah, I’m a vindictive stinker. But it is a little piece of justice, and I do so enjoy it. When the guy eventually finds out what happened and changes his post, I’m turning the hotlink protection feature of my site on. Until then, this guy’s page will look like this:

Update: this guy’s not paying attention to his site. I even sent him a blog comment, and still he hasn’t edited the post. I have had emails of interest about it, so what the heck–here’s his site’s URL and the URL for the specific post. Let’s see if we can’t give him some business.

On a nice saunter down to the Tama River today–the weather has been beautiful lately, I couldn’t pass up the chance–I found something which is quite rare in Japan: friendly cats.

By “friendly,” I mean ones that you can walk up to and pet. Living in Japan for a while, you tend to get used to the fact that neighborhood cats never let you get near them; they get skittish at anything less than 20 feet at least. I used to wonder why this was, and I think I found the answer some years back. There was a cat once I saw in the street, and was having some success approaching it. But then, about 100 feet down the road, a child darted out into the street. Despite the distance, the cat bolted. Ah. In addition, I’ve seen cats getting treatment not exactly in line with cat protocol, for instance people picking up poor felines by their front legs.

So when I saw two cats lazing in the grass on the banks of the Tama River, I did not expect to be able to get close. Instead, I got out my camera so I could take some pictures. To my surprise, when I looked up, I found that both cats were approaching me. I let them sniff my hand, let them see where I was going to pet and scratch, and both cats were cool to it. As a number of adults walked by, the cats paid no heed. But as I expected, when a group of young boys walked by, both cats ran for cover–not too far though, and they came back. So I snapped my pics and enjoyed some tame, friendly cats for a bit in the warm, late afternoon.

To see some of the photos, I’ve posted them here.