Hosting Woes

Note: the post below is replete with opinion based on a year’s suffering through with Fatcow (sucks dead bunnies through a straw). Be warned.


Napolean is reported to have said,

Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by stupidity.

By this time, there is some small degree of doubt on my part that stupidity alone can account for all the misbehavior of my former hosting company, Fatcow (sucks dead bunnies through a straw). After all, I canceled the account last month and was assured (“assured” by a Fatcow representative–now there’s a laugh!) that I would not be charged by Fatcow for any further service.

I shoulda known.

Sure enough, a charge showed up yesterday on my bank account. From Fatcow. Wonder of wonders, it at least reflected ONE of the two offers of three free months’ service (not quite 1/3 and a little more than 1/4 of an annual charge had been deducted from my account–IOW, not anything like an honest 3 months’ service, let along the SIX monts’ service Fatcow–sucks dead bunnies through a straw–people had CLAIMED they were crediting my account with. Oh, and yes, the account charged is a debit account. Philosophical reasons. Just ask sometime.) But… if they were going to steal from me–and they were stealing from me–why deduct ONE of TWO offers for free service?

Idiots? Diabolical? Diabolical idiots? I’m going with door number three.

So, I called Fatcow (sucks dead bunnies through a straw) to discover what tales the people there would spin (surely you do not think I would expect anything approaching honesty or accountability!).

It’s all my fault, I discovered. Of course. I canceled at the wrong time. Why, I should have known that they’d be swamped in December and allowed for the inevitable failure of the cancellation to wend its way through to actually being effected! Shame on me for expecting that the poor, beleagered minions of Satan at Fatcow would have the time or inclination to actually DO THEIR JOB any time in December! No! Impossible! What in the world was I thinking?!? Why, as much expect honesty from a politician *spit* or news from a Mass Media Podperson!

But wait! There’s more! Not only that, but Fatcow has also supposedly issued a refund for the theft!

“Gimme your money!”

Days (or weeks or months) later, “Here’s your money back. I’ve used it in the meantime, but you have it back, now dontcha?”

Except… I don’t have my money. They stole theirs (with a canceled authorization) some days ago, but the return they say was effected… isn’t in my hands.

Question: If someone steals money from me and then shrugs me off with a callous, “The check’s in the mail,” type answer, what am I to think?

Riiiiight. As I said, “I don’t care what your records show. Your records have lied–or Fatcow reps have lied–repeatedly to me in the past. Give me my money.”

Pushed that last one hard enough I at least got someone to say (do you think I can believe them? Me neither) that Fatcow’s legal department would give me a call.

Now, that’s a call I welcome. What could be more fun than talking to the lawyers of the most disgusting, incompetent, dishonest business I have ever done business with?

Just waiting for the state attorney general’s office to open so I can lodge a complaint for fraud, theft, whatever I can.

Fatcow sucks dead bunnies through a straw.

Methinks a comment that differs to no small degree from the opening quote could well apply to all the lies, distortions, incompetence and outright idiocy I have experienced at the hands of Fatcow (sucks dead bunnies through a straw). At least some of the “I’ve followed policy and helped you all I can” B.S. I’ve had to put up with, now even past when I had severed all ties with Fatcow (sucks dead bunnies through a straw):

When a stupid man does something he knows is wrong, he always claims it is his duty.–G.B. Shaw

Update: Well, Fatcow (sucks dead bunnies through a straw) did finally come through with the refund. Finally. Doofuses.


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Trackposted to Nuke’s, Outside the Beltway, Diary of the Mad Pigeon, The Virtuous Republic, Rosemary’s Thoughts, Allie is Wired, Woman Honor Thyself, Shadowscope, Pirate’s Cove, The Pink Flamingo, Big Dog’s Weblog, Wolf Pangloss, and Conservative Cat, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.

Only 3,346 to go…

…to reach 200,000 comments on this blog (not counting, of course, the Haloscan comments “lost” in a failed import in January, 2006).

Why! That’s nearly 1/3 the number of SPAM “comments” Askimet has blocked in the last year!

*heh*

Blogging News

OK, this is probably not really news to anyone who’s not had their head buried in a blog move/maintenance daymare, but in case you’d not yet heard, Moveable Type has now gone open source. So, folks who’re “personal use only” bloggers have another powerful, professional level software besides WordPress to elect.

I don’t plan on moving twc to MT, but I might just set up another, private blog using it, just for fun.

Click the link above for the whole story.

A Moving Experience

Nah, not an emotionally moving experience, just a (so far) successful one.

BlueHost just ain’t half bad, folks. The support folks seem to actually be invested in providing… service!?!

Quite a change from what I had grown accustomed to elsewhere.

We’ll see how this all turns out. So far, I seem to have my blog mostly functional (save for those issues noted in the Thursday Thirteen post yesterday) and so have enabled redirect at my domain management service… we’ll see.

Canceling my Fat(head)cow “Sucks Dead Bunnies Through a Straw” account either today or tomorrow. That should put paid to the whole shoddy experience there.

Of course, I fully expect the billing folks I talk to to refer to the “six months’ free service” I supposedly have coming (promised by several “support” folks) for all the hassles Fastcow has caused in the past. But why would I want even “free” service somewhere I’m sure to get more BAD service? It’s like getting a coupon for “All You Can Eat” from a restaurant where one got food poisoning. Who’d want it?

*heh*

T-13; 1.52: Q&D Thirteen

The quick-and-dirty low-down on the twc hosting transfer (just some more inside-blogging yadayada):

  1. The “Fantastico” install of WordPress 2.3.1 at BlueHost was the easiest WP install imaginable. Just CLICK and it’s done. But little things continue to nag…
  2. The Thursday 13 category has bit the dust. It was there last night between 8 & 10, but… (yeh, it’s still sorta there, but linkage to T-13 posts is broken *sigh*)
  3. …everything went *POOF!* at eleven
  4. Nobody likes large sql files. Nope. Nobody (apparently).
  5. A 10MB XML file (done as an export from the WP dashboard) is also apparently too large: maxed out my CPU usage importing the thing. Failed repeatedly.
  6. Export each and every WP database one at a time
  7. Import each and every WP database one at a time.
  8. FINALLY (I think, I hope, darned well better have) managed to get Fat(head) Cow “Sucks Dead Bunnies Through a Straw” to let me download all my media files, theme files (for the lil tweaks I didn’t want to have to redo), etc. Finally.
  9. Upload of remaining files a snap. BlueHost didn’t keep timing out the way Fat(head) Cow “Sucks Dead Bunnies Through a Straw” does ALL the time.
  10. Everything’s there, now, but… so many things are mixmastered beyond recognition.
  11. None of my personally-managed blogrolls/links are properly noted. None.
  12. Categories and their linkage to posts–all screwed up.
  13. But… at least it’s mostly done. Mostly.

Noted at the Thursday Thirteen Hub.

Edu-rant/0PEN P0ST

Note the 0PEN P0ST info below the edu-rant.

Found this (just a snippet here) over at Jerry Pournelle’s Chaos Manor. Fits well with Fred Reeed’s rant posted the other day as “Enstupiated” Americans.

At one time you could study to be an American, and if you adopted the American Way, which was never narrowly defined but we sort of knew what the American Way of Life was, your origin did not matter a bit. You spoke English, you adhered to Judao-Christian ethics, you vaguely recognized the sovereignty of God and the notion of Divine Providence and some notion that there was a power higher than the will of the people, but mostly the local will of the people and consent of the governed prevailed. Courts decided cases on as narrow grounds as possible precisely to avoid setting out vast and vague rules that enhanced the power of the bureaucracy. But that was long ago.

But, you see, we can no longer require that immigrants learn this stuff, because we no longer know it. Heck, college grads nowadays mostly can’t even read or reason through exceptionally simple documents (now labeled “complex reading” in order to make the idiot grads feel better about being stupid, no doubt). From an AP story, “Study: Most College Students Lack Skills”


Nearing a diploma, most college students cannot handle many complex but common tasks, from understanding credit card offers to comparing the cost per ounce of food.
Those are the sobering findings of a study of literacy on college campuses, the first to target the skills of students as they approach the start of their careers.
More than 50 percent of students at four-year schools and more than 75 percent at two-year colleges lacked the skills to perform complex literacy tasks.
That means they could not interpret a table about exercise and blood pressure, understand the arguments of newspaper editorials, compare credit card offers with different interest rates and annual fees or summarize results of a survey about parental involvement in school.

Well, duh. Anyone who can and does read knows by now that you have, at best, a 50-50 chance of having an intelligent conversation with recent college grads. NONE of those “complex literary tasks” listed above are. Complex, that is. Not. One.

But this is no surprise, is it? After all, all the national adult literacy surveys of ther past 15 or so years have shown that America is becoming an illiterate nation. And that 50+% of college grads who can’t handle reading and understanding simple documents? I’ll bet you at least 90% of pubschool (prisons for kids) administrators are grouped in that class. And how many of those illiterate dunces are “teaching” in our nation’s classrooms?

No wonder, given the assault on Western Civilization mounted by Loony Left Moonbats, Mass Media Podpeople (“disinformation for sub- and illiterate sheeple”) and their ilk, that people who can’t read and comprehend, don’t. And so, it’s even less wonder that most American’s have no idea what the Founders and Framers were up to; have less idea what a wonderous thing was handed to us in the Amwerican State Papers and other founding documents and acts of those early Americans.

It’s not just history, folks, it’s a wealth of cultural memes and other gifts that are simply not at all available to people glued to their TVs or listening to cRap “music” (or darned near anything “pop-cultural”).

Illiterate college grads? Heck, illiterate college profs. Kris, at Anywhere But Here, cites one example. Why do I call a grad class English prof who had no idea what the story the class was assigned (by her) was patterne after “illiterate”? Read the post at Kris’ place.

I have a ton of those myself. My fav is of the head on an English department at a well-respected East Coast university who asked me once if my citation in an (online) argument of “sound and fury, signifying nothing” were a reference to Faulkner. Seriously. This head of a well-respected English department had never read Macbeth.

Let that soak in: head of English department. Had. Never. Read. Macbeth. Or any other Shakespearean work, it turned out…

Second-greatest influence on the English language, and the self-made idiot had never read a word of his work.

Once, simply saying, “Once more unto the breach…” brought a meme into play. Not just the words from Henry V,

Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more,
Or close the wall up with our English dead!
In peace there’s nothing so becomes a man
As modest stillness and humility;
But when the blast of war blows in our ears,
Then imitate the action of the tiger:
Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood…
“Henry V” (5.3.44-51)

But also the history of the conflict behind the play and what importance it had for our own culture and system of government.

You can bet your bottom dollar the Founders knew-and understood-the impact Henry had on England, and what his reign meant in terms of an Englishman’s (by extension, all Americans) rights and duties… as well as the proper rights and duties of a reigning monarch.

And I know my grandfather knew, for he explained much of my foundational knowledge of such things to me when I was a child.

But people who cannot read, who cannot follow a line of reasoning, will fall prey to anyone who tickles their ears. Exactly like most of our contrymen today.

As I said before, this is an 0PEN P0ST, all weekend long. Link to this post and trackback. TMH tells you how:

Kindly add a reciprocal link to this post. (What’s a trackback? Bad Example explains.) If your blog software can’t send trackbacks you can use Wizbang’s Standalone Trackback Pinger. If you have trouble, please leave a comment…

See linkfest for more linkfests, as well as the Open Trackback Alliance Open Trackback Alliance

TP-ed at TMH’s Bacon Bits (and others as time permits later).

Stop the ACLU…

… v. the ACLU et al

From John Stephenson at Stop the ACLU:


Straight from Malkin

Debbie Schlussel, blogger/investigative writer/lawyer, is extending an invitation to citizens interested in intervening in the ACLU’s NSA lawsuit. She practices in Eastern Michigan, where the suit was filed.

Also be sure to read Schlussel’s exposé of some of the shady plaintiffs in the ACLU’s suit.Stop The ACLU will be the first intervening party. Per email of Debbie:

Jay:
For sure. I will make you and/or Stop the ACLU the first intervening party (It will be Stop the ACLU et
al vs. . . . .). But I gotta work on this over the weekend. I’ll get back to you on this.


Want in? Check the post at Stop the ACLU for more info.

This was a production of Stop The ACLU Blogburst. If you would like to join us, please email Jay at Jay@stoptheaclu.com or Gribbit at GribbitR@gmail.com. You will be added to our mailing list and blogroll. Over 115 blogs already on-board.

What’s for lunch?

Serving up…

Symantec:

Symantec Corp. has fessed up to using a rootkit-type feature in Norton SystemWorks that could provide the perfect hiding place for attackers to place malicious files on computers.

The anti-virus vendor acknowledged that it was deliberately hiding a directory from Windows APIs as a feature to stop customers from accidentally deleting files but, prompted by warnings from security experts, the company shipped a SystemWorks update to eliminate the risk.

Although I used to use Symantec security software quite extensively, I’ve disliked Symantec security programs for several years now. Part of that is due to the fact that almost ALL of the systems I get calls on to resurrect from malware attacks are “protected” by Norton/Symantec security products. YMMV.

Update your AV products. Oh, and if you use the Microsoft Anti-spyware “beta” do note that you need to jump through the validation hoops again for another six months’ license.

“If you k new Wiki like I know Wiki…”

“Wikipedia founder admits to serious quality problems”

You may have noticed that I sometimes link to Wikipedia articles. What you will not have noticed is that I only link to those Wikis that I have first read and verified to contain at least some accurate and useful material, and always the material that’s germane to the reason I link them. I’ve felt that in context, that usually works.

But along the way, I have read a LOT of Wikipedia articles that are pure balderdash.

Click the link above to read a very brief article on the weaknesses of Wikipedia, and an admission of one of its founding lights.

Be careful out there. While a Wikipedia article may have useful information, there is usually more reliable information to be found elsewhere. And there is always more complete info to be found outside either a Wikipedia article or the more traditional dead tree encyclopedia. More information is a Very Good Thing when attempting to resolve conflicting views on any topic. Dig in. letting yourself be spoonfed info is a poor way to develop a world view.

Send the ACLU another warm fuzzy

Still short shrift mode. Jay, at Stop the ACLU, is having a busy week, too, and sent the info below out a day early to clear the decks for his schedule.


One of our contributors, Craig McCarthy, set up a petition to stop taxpayer funding of the ACLU, quite a while ago. We are trying to help Craig reach at least 25,000 signatures. We are not that far away. Just two days ago, I put up as one of Stop The ACLU’s best posts of 2005, my interview with former ACLU lawyer, mr. Reese Lloyd. I had no idea it would be such great timing. Mr. Reese strkes again in a podcast with Congressman Hostettler.

Rees Lloyd made the comments in an online podcast hosted by Rep. John Hostettler, R-Ind., in which the two discuss the congressman’s legislation, the Public Expression of Religion Act, or PERA (H.R.2679). The bill would prohibit judges in civil suits involving the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause from awarding attorney’s fees to those offended by religious symbols or actions in the public square – such as a Ten Commandments display in a courthouse or a cross on a county seal. Lloyd, a California civil-rights attorney, is an officer with the American Legion who wrote a resolution passed by the national organization supporting Hostettler’s bill. As WorldNetDaily reported, Hostettler’s proposal would amend the Civil Rights Attorney’s Fees Act of 1976, 42 U.S.C. Section 1988, to prohibit prevailing parties from being awarded attorney’s fee in religious establishment cases, but not in other civil rights filings. This would prevent local governments from having to use taxpayer funds to pay the ACLU or similar organization when a case is lost, and also would protect elected officials from having to pay fees from their own pockets. Hostettler says some organizations have created a new civil liberty – a right to be protected “from religion, which is found nowhere in the Constitution, nowhere in the Bill of Rights.” The Indiana congressman blames “a very select group” for “perverting” the original statute, including the ACLU, People for the American Way and Americans United for the Separate of Church and State. “They use this statute to extort behavior out of individuals,” the congressman said, citing the Indiana Civil Liberties Union threatening local educators. The group sent a letter to officials saying they would be sued and be forced to pay attorney’s fees should any graduation prayers be offered at commencement ceremonies. The threat sent the message, Hostettler said, that individuals tied to school districts could be impoverished personally. Said the lawmaker: “When officials see the potential threat of a lawsuit, they stop allowing children to write papers for English class – when they’re asked to write about the most important person in their life and they decide to write about Jesus Christ.” Hostettler’s bill would allow cases to move through the courts without public officials worrying about being held personally liable for thousands in attorneys fees. “Let’s let these cases go forward; let’s let the courts decide what’s constitutional and what’s not, and let’s not leave it up to the ACLU,” he said. Hostettler explained that while government entities can pay attorney’s fees charged to individual elected officials, they don’t legally have to, which puts the politicians on the hook. Saying most taxpayers are in favor of allowing public religious expression, the congressman noted the irony of those same taxpayers being forced to pay the ACLU to sue their local governments. “The current threat to public officials is very real; it’s ongoing,” Hostettler stated. “It’s been the case for several years that public officials are scared to death to suggest any type of public recognition of our Christian roots. It’s a problem that needs to be addressed in Washington, D.C.” PERA would prohibit damages, court fees and attorney’s fees from going to plaintiffs in establishment-clause suits while keeping the original purpose of the civil-rights law, Hstettler says, to provide a means for those whose religious liberties have been blocked to find justice. The congressman wonders why the ACLU would oppose his legislation since it still provides for “injunctive relief” – e.g., a court can rule in the ACLU’s favor and force the removal of a Ten Commandments display – but takes out the monetary incentive for lawsuits. “If they’re not out for the money but are really out to preserve our civil liberties … then the ACLU should not be opposing my bill,” Hostettler commented.

In the podcast, Lloyd decried the “terrorizing litigation tactics of the ACLU.” Said Lloyd: “Not only can the ACLU brings these suits and compel taxpayers to pay them to destroy the public display of our American history and heritage, but so can Islamist terrorists or Islamist sympathizers in our midst. “All they have to do is walk into court, make their claim that they’re offended by the sight of a cross or other religious symbol, and they’re going to win the case because judges follow one another under stare decisis,” or deference to precedent. The judges would then order that fees be paid to the Islamists, Lloyd contends. Lloyd said this issue came into focus for him when he witnessed the fight in San Diego, Calif., over a cross on a veterans’ memorial on public land in the Mohave Desert. “For me, that was the one step taken too far,” Lloyd said. “Now, for the first time, the ACLU was attacking the very veterans who secured their freedom.” A civil-rights activist since the ’60s, Lloyd worked with the ACLU in the ’70s and was “very supportive” of the 1976 Civil Rights Attorney’s Fees Act because it was a “noble attempt to assure that people who had legitimate civil-rights violations and injuries could secure legal representation.” Stated Lloyd: “The ACLU has perverted, distorted and exploited the Civil Rights Act … to turn it into a lawyer-enrichment act.” Lloyd says the American people are “oblivious” to how many millions of dollars in taxpayer funds are going to the ACLU each year. The attorney pointed out many attorneys in cases brought by the ACLU are volunteers, so the fees the group is awarded normally do not go to reimburse an attorney but rather directly into the organization’s coffers.

Hostettler’s bill, which was introduced first in 2003 without success, currently has 35 co-sponsors in the House of Representatives and sits in the House Committee on the Judiciary.

The Center For Reclaiming America claims that they have over 100,000 signatures backing this bill. Honestly, I don’t know what they are waiting on. If we can up our petiton from 19,000 to 25,000, I will personally take the signatures to Congressman Hostettler myself….I promise you. I only live two hours from D.C. SIGN OUR PETITON TO STOP TAXPAYER FUNDING OF THE ACLU ….and spread the word as far and wide on this petition as you can!


Folks, even if you did get your CHRISTMAS card mailed to the ACLU, this petition is yet another way we can show them we care, we really do care. There. That oughta make the All Communist Lawyers Union feel all warm and fuzzy.

🙂