I've been overextended this month, and have ended up neglecting the blog, but I did want to say happy New Year. I hope your holidays, whichever ones you may celebrate, were enjoyable and safe. I'll be posting more this week.

As both of the longtime readers who still check this site know, I’ve made a number of attempts to get Free Will up and running at speed again over the past two years, all of which have ended up slipping away from me for one reason or another. The last serious effort was probably right after the election, when I wrapped up my work on a campaign which had entirely precluded blogging, given the scope of my time commitment. That was a sad thing for me, because my work encompassed some of the most interesting issues and controversies at the time, and I would’ve loved to have been addressing them here instead of there. What I wrote about the election, however, seems to have held true:

There are going to be very practical limits to Barack Obama’s political capital, because his party wants “change” that looks nothing like what voters want, and Obama is going to be helpless to find a happy compromise. There’s clearly no mandate for socialist reforms: 84% of Americans prioritize economic growth over an “equitable” distribution of wealth. The bailout package was opposed by a hearty majority of voters, as is an offshore drilling ban. Democrats weren’t elected to “give their ideas a chance”. Half of all Americans believe that this Congress, a Democrat-controlled Congress, is no better than a random sample from the phone book, and three quarters believe that their elected legislators don’t even understand the bills they’re passing.

To predict that the Democrats will massively overplay their hand in this environment is to predict that the sun will rise tomorrow, that the next Pope will be a practicing Roman Catholic. They will inevitably confuse this for the mandate that they also wrongly thought they had received in 2006.

...and that’s exactly what’s happened. Obama’s promises of transparency, restraint, and fiscal responsibility were farcical, and in the aftermath of the incredible failure and predictable corruption surrounding the stimulus, Republicans have won gubernatorial races in Virginia and New Jersey while House Democrats were barely able to form a majority to pass their flagship bill: a poorly understood and most likely unconstitutional package of health care reforms that satisfies no one and that is loaded with unpleasant surprises for an already disgruntled electorate.

As for Free Will, I’m back in a place where I feel like I would be in error not to resume blogging. There’s too much going on, and this blog, which was originally created so that I’d have a venue for discussing on politics and economics in a way that engages people who are actually interested, is something I should be doing. You might notice that I’m fiddling with the templates, simplifying the layout and cleaning up the markup in ancticipation of finally getting things up to snuff around here. Very shortly, I’m going to have the RSS feed fixed and incorporate some new features, but for the moment, the index and comment templates are updated, and I’m going to resume posting on a regular basis, as well as import some things I’ve written for other purposes on recent issues.

Free Will is back online.

I hope everyone's getting to enjoy a great Christmas (or your holiday of choice) and New Year's with their loved ones.

My checked luggage is still in D.C., but I spent all night going by rental car from Houston to Dallas, listening to crazy Mexican Christmas carols on the radio to stay awake.

Barreling up I-45, I began to detect a theme: the Sam Houston Tollway, Sam Houston University, Sam Houston National Forest, a sixty foot, gleaming white statue of Sam Houston. Also, it's crazily confusing if street signs dramatically change colors, typefaces and positioning six times in twelve blocks, as they seem to do in the vicinity of Addison.

In any case, here's this year's amusing Christmas photo:



Backstory here.

Drive safely, I hope to blog Friday.

HELLO WORLD

That's right, the blog is back online. I have, literally, not had time to repair a MySQL table until now.

Life gets better November 4th. Or, depending on how "big picture" I want to be about it, much, much worse.

It Is Alive!

So, I've been a bit, shall we say, lax on the posting lately, but I've started a new position as a customer relations manager for a small web firm, and simultaneously have been trying to manufacture a spring break for myself. Back to your regularly scheduled programming, though.

Chocolate and Ham Are Good For You

A Happy Easter Sunday to anybody who happens to be checking in. Hope you got to spend it with your loved ones!

It's Because This Site Is Moderately Awesome

John Hawkins at Right Wing News has pegged Free Will as his site of the day, after running across an old t-shirt design of mine that is, I will have you know, still for sale.


Readers dropping in from Right Wing News are invited to stick around, readers who don't check RWN regularly, well, they probably should.

Better Than "Paula Zahn Nude"

Unusual traffic lately. Some of the keywords that have brought people to the site:

lemon light bulb science fair experiment

is will smith and eva mendez sleeping around

daylight saving time has saved nothing

does mike ditka have any fuller family relatives

ninjitsu academies in lebanon

nazi persecution-related income

assud bunny fan pages

It's understandable that the "lemon light bulb" thing would come up, since I published my horrified discovery that as a boy, I was scammed by the children's science book industry. The champion, however, is the guy who came looking for "governor ryan of illinois bodyguard team", and was doubtlessly disappointed - the bodyguard scandal, like virtually all Illinois scandals in living memory, it seems, belongs to Rod Blagojevich.

The Very Best of Wishes

Nobody deserves to deal with cancer, but, in fact, it is cancer that does not deserve the great Tim Blair. Pray that we'll soon learn of Tim getting outstandingly well. He is, sincerely, one of the most clever bloggers to be found.

Happy New Year!

I hope everyone got to spend the holidays as they wished and had a great time with family and friends, and equally hope that the new year goes fantastically.

Last year's New Year's resolution: To get back in touch with old friends, which went well.

This year's New Year's resolution: To work out regularly again.

My New Year's prediction: Fred Thompson will assassinate Hugo Chavez. Personally.

Merry Christmas, Everyone

If you should see a man dressed up as Santa Clause today, just remember how hard Rare Exports, Inc. worked to get him there:


Have a great holiday and stay safe, especially if you're trying to navigate the ice in the midwest.

Happy Thanksgiving, Everybody

With the Christmas music already starting and the City of Binghamton's tree already up, I may as well go ahead and wish you guys a Happy Thanksgiving so I can take the next day or so off. Enjoy your pumpkin pie, pecan pie, pumpkin cheesecake, whatever the case may be, and if you decide to deep fry your turkey (totally worth it), remember to measure the fluid displacement first and not set it up on your porch or in your garage, so that you don't have to explain to your insurance adjuster how you burned your house down. (It'd still be totally worth it.)

No Time To Explain, Just Follow Me

Sorry posting has been slow the last few days. Ironically, I'm tied up writing. Soon.

Veteran's Day

A very happy Veteran's Day to all the servicemen and women who read this blog, as well as their families! I hope everyone put the day to good use.

Boo.

Happy Halloween!

Sweet Merciful Glaven

You may have noticed the blog has been, uh, a bit up and down this week. That's a consequence of an emergency move off the existing servers due to the shocking incompetence of the system admins when the server crashed. Unfortunately, the move didn't go smoothly, either, meaning I've spent a few days figuring out how to recover the full data from the original blog and get it installed, with the help of the new team, who have proven quite responsive.

Blog's back.

Even Rocky had a montage. Montage!

Getting this blog fired up again has been a major, ongoing project. Cleaning out SPAM, fixing the email inbox (which was broken, oddly enough), getting little things like blogrolls and randomized lists updated, planning out a new advertising scheme... Also, for some insane reason, the majority of Google datacenters decided to begin reporting this site's PageRank as a '0', though several still correctly report '5'. That's something that's on the short list.

In any case, Free Will: The Store is operational again, featuring some new designs, including an updated 'Free Will' t-shirt.

 

 
Some of the older designs will be restored soon, I need to update the product lines a bit. (The "Mmm... Murder"/'slab of ribs' design is still up, but is now also available on a barbecue apron.)

BRB

OK, so I haven't been around at all this last week+, and there's a number of compelling reasons for that: I've been violently ill, I've been getting student loans and admissions in order for transferring issues, I've been planning a vacation back to Illinois to see my family, and, as much to my surprise as anybody else's, I quit my job in outrage over the comically incompetent and apathetic handling of the same safety issue that made me ill in the first place.

Believe it or not, I'm ecstatic: After I went down to NYC in April, I realized that my job was having a really negative impact on my personality, but I didn't realize how much until I officially didn't work there anymore. I'm apparently visibly happier, so much so that strangers actually stop me and tell me so. It's also worth noting, for reference, that the words of a drunken Ukrainian guy I ran into after a hockey game have been proven true:

"To get to the women, two things: You show a lot of money, or show a lot of happy."

I've had more women make passes at me in the last two weeks or so than in the last couple months combined. Since we already know that a briefcase full of cash is one of nature's most powerful aphrodisiacs, Almir's words are not just theory, they're law.

That said, it's actually been a very busy few days, and I have a new laptop to show for it which I'm really enjoying, a 14.1" Hewlett Packard Pavilion. I wanted something as a satellite to my bruiser of a desktop, but had been burned (almost literally) in the past buying so-called "desktop replacement" laptops, which are too heavy to be effectively portable and too inflexible to be true desktop replacements, not to mention the problem of their rapid loss of financial value. I'm also discovering that Windows Vista, at least for my purposes so far, is not nearly as bad as I'd feared. In fact, the Aero interface is usable enough that it's the first version of Windows since Windows 95 where I didn't feel compelled to go through and switch everything back to "Classic Mode". We'll see.

Anyway, things will be returning to normal very shortly.

So, uh...
Yeah, fun to sit down and see your site triggered a hosting bandwidth limitation, and then have to go into your own server's hosting to upgrade yourself.

The Return
OK, so we're back online.

Basically, sometime in mid-March, the upgrades to ExpressionEngine combined with the new version of MySQL on the new hosting caused a death spiral that brought down the server several times. SPAM traffic is a big part of this, and while I've been able to implement some new solutions to kill off 80% of it, I'm still keeping comments and trackbacks disabled until I can be assured it's safe to put the blog back in the water. Part of the permanant solution will be incorporated into the upcoming redesign.

It's been an exciting month for me personally, and getting things revved back up here will just make it more so.