CORRECTION: below, I said the new Echo system would cost me $120/yr, a figure
which I got by multiplying 12 months by (approximately) $10 a month. It appears I am mistaken. The ads I've
seen recently show the price as $9.95/year, not month. Obviously I have to think things through again.
My apologies for the error. I'm still not certain I'll keep the system, but as ill as I am these days, it may
not be worth it at that price to undergo a major changeover right now (or any other time). I'll keep you
informed.
AFTER FURTHER READING on the Echo blog comments: I couldn't agree more with the
anonymous poster
"Guest"
(good luck finding the specific comment; I can't find a way to bookmark individual comments in a stream of
more than 50 comments), who concludes this way:
...
You're only giving us two weeks' notice? Some of us have better things to do with our lives, and don't
appreciate being forced to spend Christmas sorting out our blog comments, thanks. And there's no free trial
period? It's just "Pay us within 2 weeks or we kill your comments"? You call this an upgrade; I call it
extortion.
I've been a very happy and appreciative Haloscan customer for years. You've destroyed all that good will in
under 5 minutes. Good luck with that business plan.
Please note the last paragraph. That about sums it up. The guy (gal?) who runs is "VP Product
Strategy & Community" of this nightmarish company is named Chris Saad, but as far as I'm concerned, s/he
he can just saad off.
UPDATE 12/20:
I just left the following comment on their blog:
I suppose it is just as well that a company full of bright young (mostly) men should get its first epic fail out
of the way early. The product? an epic fail? NO... your customer relations.
Somewhere below is a comment (um, how does one link to an individual comment?) in which someone writes,
(Imagine a blockquote here)
You're only giving us two weeks' notice? Some of us have better things to do with our lives, and don't
appreciate being forced to spend Christmas sorting out our blog comments, thanks. And there's no free trial
period? It's just "Pay us within 2 weeks or we kill your comments"? You call this an upgrade; I call it
extortion.
(Imagine a concluding /blockquote here)
And so do I. I've been a happy subscriber to HaloScan for many years, but any goodwill I may have felt toward
your company is gone. Now, my Christmas present is this: I get to rebuild my blog. No way will I reward your bad
corporate behavior.
Oh, there may be typo's in this comment, but there's no Preview feature...
I posted it as "Guest" to make a point.
UPDATE PROGRESS Sun. 12/20 2313:
I have exported the 18,607 comments you've all left over the years into a set of XML files and verified that
they work properly... as XML files. Who knows about importing them on the new blog.
IF YOU ADD ANY NEW COMMENTS, THEY WILL APPEAR HERE FOR A WHILE, BUT THEY MAY NOT BE MOVED IMMEDIATELY TO THE
NEW BLOG. Any additional notifications will appear here.
(Original post follows.)
HaloScan commenting system has announced that it is going commercial. My notification arrived today, announcing
a gun-to-the-head changeover to a new system called Echo for $9.95/mo, to begin... get this...
Jan. 2, 2010. Thanks for all the notice, guys... what a great time of year to spring this upon us. No
extra break for your former paying customers like me, either.
HaloScan has been deplorable in the maintenance category. Back when they had only one programmer, he had to
sleep sometime, and things would sometimes crash for 24 or 48 hours at a time. Now that there appears to be a
staff of sorts at JS-Kit, they've apparently been busy developing the new system in preference to maintaining
the existing one. These are the people who want to charge me about $120/yr for a new "improved" system. Forgive
me if I am skeptical.
I'm not sure what course I'll take. I hate to reward corporate behavior of that sort, but they've effectively
made this into a "this is a stickup; fork over your money now" situation. I may switch to another blogging
system rather than cave in to the criminals. In any case, I'll certainly contemplate all the alternatives I know
of. I have a feeling I'll find a suitable one, or move away from my home-grown blogging approach to a blogging
system with built-in comments, stats, etc. This is the second time in a couple of years that Son of HaloScan
has pulled this kind of trick, and I'm tired of it.
Needless to say, if I ditch HaloScrew, any comments you've left will vanish on 2010/1/2, so if your
magnum opus
is out there, you'd better fetch it now.
I'd conclude, "your comments welcome," but the irony would be too great...
Jane Hamsher,
transcribing and commenting on Dr. Howard Dean's debate with Sen. Mary Landrieu over what was and was not in the
President's original healthcare plan, concludes that the public option (let alone Medicare-for-all) was never
real, that the bill emerging now as the "final" bill, was always Obama's intention (possible but who knows),
and moreover, that the Democratic majority (in the Senate, not among the public) favoring such an option was
never there to begin with. Could've fooled me... indeed, it seems the whole [expletive deleted] Democratic
government, president as well as Congress, did, in fact, fool me. It's enough to make me sick... except that I
already am sick. Read Jane. Put down your coffee or beer before you do so. We have been had.
No, I am not recovered; more shit just keeps hitting the fan. In addition to problems with my meds that left me
unable to walk for a couple of days, now Stella has (by her own term) a bad "cold," though I would have thought
it was something worse. So blogging here will still be sparse. I just couldn't let this pass without a minor
rant, which is all I have the strength to do. We have been taken, and in my opinion, our chances to respond
through the agency of the Democratic Party have all but been eliminated. Time will tell if I am right, and not
very much time at that.
... in Houston, no less. We had actual snow today, not heavy but not negligible, either, especially in a city
where no one knows how to drive on snow and ice. The "winter wonderland" arrived this morning shortly after I
woke up, and continued most of the day, sticking on roofs and (for a while) lawns. Earlier I said in a comment
thread that we were expecting only a light freeze; that's changed: 25°F is predicted overnight. Fortunately,
Stella and I both can stay home today and tomorrow. That's especially good as the freeways are already beginning
to have fender-benders, and I am not trained in driving on icy or snow-covered roads.
To make my day complete, I started a new medication last night that has some unpleasant side-effects: nausea
and a just plain "weird" feeling. My doctor forewarned me, and the timing is good because I don't have many
responsibilities this weekend, and if this works, I shall be very glad of the intended effect. But I'm not a
very contented sicko, and I can't wait to see the side-effects pushed to the side.
For this post to make sense, you have to know two things:
I have had the same land-line phone number for over 25 years.
I am not, to the best of my knowledge, in any kind of long-term debt.
Recently I've received many automated debt collection calls which included my name, crudely inserted into the
middle of a standard threatening text. They have been annoying, but I have learned to recognize the Caller ID
by its name... the number varies... and if I'm home, I simply pick up and hang up. If I'm not home, the debt
collector "considerately" leaves a message. I get more messages from Toll Free Call than from anyone else.
Today I received an almost identical call, but instead of my name, J.W.'s name was inserted (name withheld for
the sake of privacy). J.W. lived in this rent house some time back, and I receive occasional snail mail for him or her.
Think about this for a moment. Is J.W. in debt? Who knows, but it seems likely to me that the collector is
employing an exceedingly primitive matching scheme: if the addresses agree, call the current phone number
obtained by a reverse lookup. In a lot of neighborhoods, this procedure inevitably yields a live phone... and
it is equally inevitable that about 99 percent of numbers obtained that way are not the numbers of the person
being sought for collection. In other words, it is utterly useless for collecting debt, but very effective at
intimidating people who may wonder about their credit status.
"O brave new world," that has such software in it. Aren't you glad you live in the nation that probably
invented it? Aren't you proud, when you pick up the phone for the third time in the course of a day only to be
reminded of someone else's debt, that your nation's debt collectors are so clever?
Yes, I know about do-not-call lists. I also know about reporting in-state phone harassment to the state
Attorney General. Unless the AG has a button on his desk for each collector, and can press that button to
obliterate the collector's phone, I don't much care. In Texas, the problem is a little different: the AG is a
GOPer, and is effectively on the side of the harassers.
Newspaper publishers will now be able to set a limit on the number of free news articles people can read through Google, the company has announced.
The concession follows claims from some media companies that the search engine is profiting from online news
pages.
Under the First Click Free programme, publishers can now prevent unrestricted access to subscription websites.
Users who click on more than five articles in a day may be routed to payment or registration pages.
...
Just how many ways can print newspaper publishers be unbelievably foolish when it comes to profiting from their
readers?
Fewer free click-throughs mean fewer readers. Fewer readers mean fewer ad views. Fewer ad views mean less
advertising revenue.
Google unintentionally trains its users in which results not to click. If (Dog forbid) I were a fan of Fox
News who discovered that Fox News but not CNN placed a five-click limit without a paid subscription, I'd
run right out and subscribe, wouldn't I? Like hell I would... I'd find another news source. It's not as if
there's a shortage of sources either of quality journalism or of the irrational hype favored by wingnuts.
As newspaper sites move more aggressively to a subscription model and web-only sources move to a primarily
advertising-funded model, most users, who after all are looking for good journalism wherever they can find
it, will abandon the mainstream newspaper-derived sites altogether. For example, it's not that I avoid the
New York Times site, but I usually go there only through a Google search reference... exactly what owners
are complaining about. So if the NYT restricts my Google click-throughs, I will be gradually moving from
perhaps a few dozen ad views a month on the NYT to zero ad views. How does that help their profits? Damned
if I know.
I just don't get it. No one is suggesting that news sites should not be paid for their work, but we already have
a shining example of wholly advertising-sponsored content in the broadcast TV market, and that's been going for
literally all of my life (I'm 61 years old). I can see how physical newsprint might place restrictions on the
amount of advertising content in a birdcage-lining newspaper, but the web has no such limitations.
So... is it greed or stupidity on the owners' part? or both?
So says Keith Olbermann, and not only is he correct, his assessment may even be an understatement:
Some among us lived through the Vietnam era. More than a few of my friends, classmates and colleagues actually
fought in that war.
All of us, crippled stay-at-homes like me and battle-hardened veterans, watched in horror over the years and
concluded, as at last
Lyndon Johnson himself concluded,
that the war couldn't be won and that the U.S. had no
business being there, all the standard Communist domino theory rhetoric notwithstanding.
What part of this lesson has Barack Obama not learned? When the history of the misbegotten American version of
the Afghanistan war is written (for our nation is far from the first to plunge into that hole), will it become
Obama's signature, his legacy, his political epitaph, as Vietnam was for Johnson?
And so, between a generation lost to Bush's Iraq war and another generation lost to Obama's Afghanistan war
(for that assignment surely will be made), many of the best of America's youth will, for the third time in my
lifetime, be sacrificed on the altar of an ill-defined cause, possibly because a few old men feel useful when
they are pursuing war on a grand scale, possibly because a few more old men gain unbelievable amounts of
taxpayers' money by pursuing such a war.
As Olbermann proclaims emphatically near the end of his special comment, "We cannot afford this war." Somehow
it is clear, to me at least, that he is not talking only about the Treasury. In every other meaningful sphere,
morality, ethics, diplomacy and just plain human values, we cannot afford this war.
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Better the occasional faults of a government that lives
in a spirit of charity than the constant omissions of a
government frozen in the ice of its own indifference.
- FDR
I belong to the Democratic Party wing of the Democratic Party.
- Paul Wellstone
I am a Democrat without prefix, without suffix, and without apology.
- Sam Rayburn
