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Disgusting

I was browsing my stats and noticed an incoming link to my theme. Always curious as to what kind of sites used my theme I checked it out. I won’t provide the link here because the site I found was disgusting. The site is supposed to be an alternative “news” site but really was nothing more than a racist and bigoted site that talks about “niggers”, “kikes”, “evil Methodists”, and “fags.” Reading the titles of these posts made me want to throw up, and the actual posts and comments were worse. I guess the drawback to releasing a theme is you have no say in what kind of site decides to use it. I, for one, am disgusted by it’s use on this hate speech site.

EDIT: Just an update, I contacted the site’s host, DreamHost and they said they support free speech. This is understandable. I, however, doubt it has anything to do with free speech and more to do with them making money from a client. That’s just how DH operates. Even if the hate speech can incite hate crimes (which, if you look at the wikipedia entry posted in the comments by Mike, actually has happened). This lead me to post some terms in which I explain I have no affiliation with the content on sites using my theme. Kind of an obvious thing, but I just want to cover my bases.

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A Pioneer Passes

I’m not really a fan of opera music but I was reading the newspaper today and read an article about a pioneering opera singer passing away. He was Robert K. McFerrin Sr. Many may recognize the last name, as his son, Bobby McFerrin, had success with the hit song Don’t Worry, Be Happy. He was a St. Louis native.

Robert K. McFerrin Sr., an opera singer from St. Louis who performed at the Metropolitan Opera in New York City, died Friday (Nov. 24, 2006) at Barnes-Jewish West County Hospital of a heart attack. He was 85 and lived in Creve Coeur.

Mr. McFerrin was born in Marianna, Ark., the seventh of eight children. He began singing at his father’s church as a boy and continued to pursue music as a student at Sumner High School. Read more

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My Feed List

I was bored so I thought I’d share with you the websites that are in my feed reader (which is Google Reader). They are:

Anna’s Blog
Caleb Was Here
Give Away of the Day (hat tip Mark)
Homeland Stupidity
All in the Cards
Photomatt
Qn5 Blog
Ryan.Connect
Simply Complex
Sporadic Nonsense
What Makes You Happy?
StL Today Cardinals
Yahoo Sports- Cardinals

I also have on my Google Homepage Wired Top Stories, Slashdot, BBC, and New York Times. All good reads. What’s in your feed reader?

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Senator Talent Gets an F

From the NEA:

Is Senator Talent working for public education? ‘F’ on report card says no

It is report card time for lawmakers of all stripes and U.S. Senator Jim Talent has some explaining to do. He got an F on the National Education Association’s 109th Legislative Report Card for the 2005-06 session of the U.S. Congress, released in Washington, D.C.

Talent’s score was 29 out of 100. The F grade is based on votes on key NEA supported legislation and criteria measuring a lawmaker’s commitment to public education via co-sponsorship of bills, behind the scenes work, accessibility and advocacy.

Talent, whose recent state campaign ads highlight his work, falls short of the mark when it comes to sharing the responsibility of helping make public education work for every child.

Among the votes counted in 2005, Senator Talent voted against the restoration of $4.8 billion for 48 education programs slated for elimination, including those addressing Career and Technical Education, Safe and Drug-Free Schools, and education technology grants. He also voted against increasing Head Start funding and for massive cuts to entitlement programs in the budget reconciliation measure in late December of that year.

In 2006, Senator Talent voted against an amendment that restored funding for college prep programs, raising the maximum Pell Grant to $4,500, and providing up to $23,000 in student loan forgiveness to new teachers in high need schools.

On other lawmaking tasks of interest to Missouri public school workers, Senator Talent voted repeatedly against raising the minimum wage. He also refused to join the majority of his Congressional colleagues in co-sponsoring a bill to restore Social Security benefits that Missouri’s teachers and education support staff and their spouses have earned.

Senator Talent’s report card is available for NEA member’s inspection at http://www.nea.org/lac/senate.html.

Make sure you don’t vote for Talent this November and instead vote for Claire McCaskill.

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Site5 Has Become a Joke

Because of the increasing number of complaints about inadequate service, suggestions for improvements, and general unhappiness of Site5 customers, Site5 decided to remove the service forums from their message board. The other forums are still there, but if you were posting because your server was down, not responding, adding domains, and other service related questions, you no longer have a place to go. Of course, their official reasoning was because it was creating a problem for support.

Today, in their open discussion forum, a post was made asking what others thought about them closing these forums. Many people responded during the post’s short lifespan, including Site5 staff itself. Obviously, once management (I’m talking about you, Mr. Lightner) found this out, it was deleted. Luckily, another forum member posted a pdf on his site of what was said. You can read it here. Now, call me crazy, but having support forums where the community can support seems like it should reduce trouble tickets for support. I can probably come up with 5 occasions off the top of my head in which I didn’t have to open a ticket because I found the information in the forums. If anything, this new policy will only increase support’s already busy workload. Don’t be fooled by the response times on Site5’s homepage. At one time (when I signed up) they were this low, but they neglect their customers in order to oversell their hosting and try new products to entice people, none of which are actually implemented (think RapifReflex, Webmail 2.0, Flashback). They say they respond in an average of 25 minutes, let’s take a look at some of mine:

Avg. Site5 Resp. Time: 211.5 minutes
Avg. Site5 Resp. Time: 354.6 minutes
Avg. Site5 Resp. Time: 84.5 minutes

And most of the time, they don’t even answer your question, so you have to wait another 100+ minutes for another response.

The thread also stated that management will respond to each and every one of the emails that people send regarding this issue. I find this to be a joke as well. I put in a management review ticket months ago with no response. I emailed Matt Lightner and never got a response. I even had a thread put into the Management Review hidden forum and got no response. And like another customer said, site5 webhosting…the only way to deal with bad pr is to delete it. (by the way, this site is hosted on A Small Orange now.)

EDIT: It seems they have added some forums for “customer-to-customer” support. My faith has still not been restored though. Unless they start listening to their customers, stop overselling, and quit with software promises that never get implamented, they are a sinking ship.