General: November 2004 Archives

but here are a few links to keep you busy.

For an update on the opposition Arlen Specter's prospective Senate Judiciary Committee chairmanship, visit NotSpecter.com. There's more not to like about Specter than just his position on abortion -- he's wrong on tort reform, equal opportunity, and countless other legal issues where he lines up with the forces that have been turning our judiciary into a swamp of subjectivity and anti-democratic arrogance.

Tim Carney, formerly with the Evans and Novak Political Report, is a frequent contributor to NotSpecter.com. I met him during the Republican National Convention, and he was following the Oklahoma Senate race closely. He's got a column worth reading that puts Coburn's victory and the Specter controversy into context.

Yasser Arafat, world's oldest terrorist, is fully and utterly dead, to the delight of millions, including Roger L. Simon, who has apt comments here and here. Rather than reading the nauseating encomiums of Jimmy Carter and his ilk, take time to remember one of Arafat's victims, an American teenager named Abigail Litle.

Heard Tulsa Mayor Bill LaFortune on KFAQ this morning. This is the second week in a row that he's come on at 8:45 on Friday, which means no time for rebuttal before the weekend -- he gets the last word. He spoke about several city vacancies: an airport board member, airport director, airport legal counsel, and the deputy mayor. He also reaffirmed his support for Jim Cameron and Lou Reynolds on the water board, and reaffirmed his opposition to recall of Councilors Jim Mautino and Chris Medlock. I'm hoping to have time to get into all that this weekend.

Another thing I hope to get to -- at a Tulsa City Council committee meeting on Tuesday, Josh Fowler, a Broken Arrow resident and executive director for the Homebuilders Association, expressed the radical view that there should be no land use regulation at all. As a conservative, I'm sympathetic to leaving the free market as unburdened as possible, but as the saying goes, "My liberty to swing my fist ends where your nose begins." So I hope to write about the philosophical basis for land use regulation and what kind of system we ought to have.

I was sorry to learn today that my hosting provider, BlogHosts, is going out of business. BlogHosts provided great service at an incredible price. They started up in early 2003, and I think I must have been one of their earliest customers.

The official reason for closing down:

Several technical problems with our backend have corrupted critical portions of our billing and support databases. While we have tried to recover this data several times and enlisted the help of an outside agency our efforts have been in vain. Although security has been very good we've found several discrepancies in our logs indicating the damage may have been intentional. For these reasons we have decided to stop taking new orders and will eventually cease operation altogether.

My guess is that they had a hard time managing rapid success. The web took some nasty hits during election week, with traffic reaching all-time highs. I kept getting reports from people who couldn't get through to my site.

For whatever reason, BlogHosts hasn't notified its customers directly. I found out by accident when I went to the site to see about help with a Movable Type upgrade.

So I'm looking for a new hosting provider. A search through Technorati is turning up a number of suggestions, which I am adding here for my own reference and the reference of others trying to find a new cyberhome. I am not vouching for any of them, but I'll be checking what each one offers.

www.contrasthosting.com
www.wiredhub.net
www.cyberwurx.com
www.totalchoicehosting.com
www.psek.com
www.dreamhost.com
www.surfspeedyhosting.com
www.textdrive.com
www.squarespace.com
www.webhostingbuzz.com
www.mindstormhosting.com
www.cyberpixels.com
www.liquidweb.com

BlogHosts will shut down on January 1, but I hope to migrate to a new server long before then. I'll give you some warning -- you shouldn't notice anything more than a temporary outage.

Ran out of time -- off to KFAQ for the weekly BatesLine update. Check back about noon for more about the Oklahoma ballot.