Friday, March 02, 2007

Near Meltdown...

Did you ever see the movie "The China Syndrome"? The concept that a nuclear reactor core could overheat in an accident, and nothing could contain it, and it would melt through everything all the way to China? And how they didn't want to tell anyone about their "incident"? Well the same thing almost happened around here. Kind of...

I anticipated being away from the computer from Wednesday afternoon through most of Thursday. But Os, you ask. How would you do HNT? How would we let everyone know that we're up? What would we do?? I had already anticipated that, and drafted both the anon site and my own HNT on Tuesday. And I got Crimson to agree to post for me. She's done that on a number of occasions, and I don't think you guys have ever really known when. So imagine my panic on Wednesday morning, when I went to finalize my HNT. I'm greeted with this (you'll need to click it to big it):


WTF??? I've been accused of being spam?? I mean, if it were bullshit, I'd understand. But SPAM??? I immediately contacted them through their link and jump through their hoops. They reply by stating that a "real person" will check my site and verify that it is or isn't a spam site. And that it would be done within one business day. Well, based on past dealings with Blogger, I anticipated that to mean sometime during the weekend.

I continued to check to see if I was verified. I got a panicked IM from No One In Particular, saying that she'd been blocked by Blogger. Apparently, they were on a roll. You can see what they post when you go to rectify the situation on her site. So I continued to check from work, and I was still blocked from posting. I IM'ed Crimson, and warned her about it. Then I had to leave, not knowing if the free world as we knew it would come crashing down.

I envisioned this mass hysteria from everyone who had posted HNTs, but had no place to tell anyone. How would people know? What would they do? Well, obviously things worked out OK, and no one knew the near-disaster that could have befallen us. I got a nicely worded email from Blogger Help:
    "Your blog has been reviewed, verified, and cleared for regular use so that it will no longer appear as potential spam."
That made me feel so much better. I've been verified as a real person! Apparently, so has No One! And Jundercovers!

What's needed now is a Plan B. There's never been a Plan B. Someplace to go if something happens and you can't comment, or I can't post, or whatever. I'll let you know what that might be in the future... In the meantime, let us give thanks that we didn't have a "China Syndrome" event!

OK--Blogger's pissing me off even more. I've heard from one blogger who has been informed that she needs to delete certain posts. No, not her HNTs with boobies showing. But the ones where she publicized a benefit concert she was involved with by posting a picture of the concert poster. It's "advertising".

The other thing happening is that I can leave comments on anyone's posts that require word verification. I don't get the little picture of the word. So to all of you that use WV, I tried to comment. Really!


OK--word verification works if I'm using Safari, but not Firefox. Why doesn't shit just work?
A little bit better news, I think. It appears that Blogrolling might actually be working as far as their updated blog notification is concerned. We'll see how long THAT lasts...
Interesting thing I've noticed while perusing the blogs. Doesn't seem that too many people have deleted Betcha from their sidebars yet. It's been almost 2 months, and it's still as frustrating and confusing as ever...
The symphony concert for the 4th & 5th graders yesterday went very well. About 1600-1700 kids, all quiet, all paying attention, and all listening to about 45 minutes of live symphonic music. Really quite impressive. On the downside--my running around out in the cold while setting up and returning equipment to various places reaggravated my cold. I'm going to have to sleep most of the weekend to finally kick this thing. I guess that's not such a downside, is it?
For those of you who understand--six weeks!!!

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