Spontaneous Monotony

Plenty of people (and media organisations) have been quick to condemn the looting in New Orleans (‘the worst kind of behaviour’ is the tactful comment from a police spokeswoman) , but can I just offer a voice of support for those responsible. Let me make it clear that the carjackings, and shootings, have absolutely no justification, but as for the looters?

• Without the food and dry clothes that make up most of the looting, many of these people may die. Surely that is a greater evil than a store being short a few sweaters
• Given the rate that the flood waters have been rising at, the stuff that is looted today will probably be underwater tomorrow. Better that it helps someone in need
• Since most of these businesses have either been damaged by the hurricane or destroyed by the floodwaters (or both) the owners will be claiming on their insurance anyway

In a belated urge to help, the National Guard has been sent in… to protect the empty businesses. Never mind evacuating people, or helping the engineers plug the levee gaps, oh no. Putting people’s lives before already-totalled businesses is obviously beyond them.

According to the BBC’s website, the organisation will put its content online, though an as-yet-unrevealed ‘MyBBCPlayer’. Despite the director-general’s assertion that this represents ‘innovation’ (it doesn’t, and has been possible for years) the BBC is still content to derive its existence from the outdated and unfair TV tax, which everyone in this country has to pay for the ‘privilege’ of owning a TV whether or not they actually watch the BBC’s output. Since we are supposedly a ‘free market’ economy, and in the interests of fairnesss, the license fee should be scrapped, and replaced with a subscription so that the BBC has to produce programs that people actually want to watch- and those who don’t want its poor quality output and leftwing bias aren’t forced by the state to continue subsidising those who do.

[EDIT] This is the 250th post. Hurrah etc.[/EDIT]

Thanks to the easy-to-use (once I ignored the author’s cack-handed CHMOD instructions) StyleCatcher plugin I’ve been able to find this reasonably decent-looking theme for you to enjoy (admit it, lilac and grey wasn’t very nice). The best thing is that I can change it with a couple of clicks- so it eliminates once of MT’s main weaknesses by making restyling even easier than Wordpress (no files to upload). Sweet – no wonder it’s got a plug on SixApart’s news page.

[UPDATE] Best of all, it even seems to be valid!

[EDIT] After adjusting the sidebar a bit, I decided to revalidate. Guess what made it invalid? THE URI OF THE VALIDATOR RESULTS!!! Ah the irony.

Aside from a few template tag issues, my upgrade to Movable Type 3.2 is now complete. I will be able to do the other stuff (like getting a new stylesheet) when the SixApart server comes back online (it’s timing out at the moment, probably due to the weight of upgrade traffic :P). Most of the stuff is behind-the-scenes (better spam comment filtering among other things) so you’re unlikely to notice a huge functional difference.

As of yesterday, Movable Type 3.2 is out of beta stage, and has achieved the status of not being a buggy POS (in theory). So (after a very careful data backup) I’ll be upgrading at some point tomorrow, which may cause 10 minutes or so of strangeness while I do any necessary re-configuration. Apparently it comes with (among other things) better spam protection, which should be good because MT-Blacklist (as well coded as it is) can only stop a spammer the second time they try, and isn’t much use against rotating proxies. Onwards and upwards!