Written Last Night

Everything is back to normal, it appears. I received an automated reply from Blogger when I sent my "Help!" e-mail; one of the suggestions was to delete my Blogger cookies. I dutifully did so and Voila!...I'm back in the blogging world!

So, what follows is the post I wrote last evening and added to VERY early this morning, like 0300. Read this with a grain of salt; it's a lesson in PANIC.

Boy, all HELL must be going down in Palo Alto. Blogger is down. G-Mail has slowed to a snail’s pace, if and when it decides to load at all. This has been going on since around 10:30 p.m. MST, and it’s 1:30 a.m. as I write (in Word). I feel like a fish out of water as I’ve put all my eggs in Google’s basket. Now that’ll teach me, won’t it?

I also spent way more time than it should have taken writing the post that will be either immediately above or below this one, depending on which I decide to post first…assuming Google comes back to life. And why did that post take so long to write? Check out the sheer quantity of links in that post, all of which were obtained in an excruciating slow manner, from Google, of course. Things were SO slow I got paranoid and downloaded Firefox, thinking IE had succumbed to some sort of nefarious nastiness, which it is prone to do, so I’m told. But no, Google and all its apps run just as slow in Firefox. I’ll write more about Firefox in another post, after I’ve used it for a day or three. I’m probably the last guy in the US to download and use it, but that’s me: a late adopter.

I’ve just tried to load a few Blogger-based blogs and all the results are the same: nothing. Or rather, the connection times out. There’s gonna be about 14 million people seriously upset at Google later on today, say in about three hours, when they get up at 0500 on the Right Coast and attempt to read their favorite blogs, or worse yet, post to their own blog.

Boy, am I ever glad I’ve taken to writing my posts in Word and then pasting them into Blogger’s “Create” window. I’d have had a serious case of the a$$ if all those links in the post above (below) had vanished into the ether because I couldn’t connect to Blogger.

OK, I’m done bitchin’ about Google.

Truth-telling time, Guilty Pleasures Division. Yesterday (which is still in progress at 0200, for all practical purposes) I put on Sky FM’s All Hit 70s channel (“All Hits All The Time” no kidding, they actually SAY that in the WINAMP channel listing) and left it there all freaking day…it’s been on for about 14 hours straight, with an hour or two off to watch the news. Average White Band; Pointer Sisters; Bee Gees; KC and the Sunshine Band; Earth, Wind and Fire; Donna Summer; Barry White; A Taste of Honey; Hall & Oates; Commodores; Kool and the Gang…you know what I’m talking about, right? All the music us politically-correct wanna-be hippies wouldn’t have ever admitted listening to back in the day. I love that stuff, and I know ALL the words. Now you know one of my deepest, darkest secrets. That, and the fact I bought the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack. Don’t tell anyone, OK?

This just in (three days ago) via Scrappleface:

Bush: NSA Won’t Listen In On Senate Alito Debate

by Scott Ott

(2006-01-24) — President George Bush today promised Senate Democrats that the National Security Agency (NSA) would not secretly listen in to their floor speeches during debate over the Supreme Court confirmation of Judge Samuel Alito, even though Democrats have promised to make the legality of NSA wiretaps a major issue during the debates.

“We don’t want to impinge upon the Democrat’s civil rights,” said President Bush, “So I’ve received assurances from the NSA and most other government agencies that no one will listen in on their speeches.”

The president said that Democrat Senators could “speak their minds without fear that anyone will ever hear a word they say.”

{smirk}

Google Update, 0300 hours, 1/27/06: Google Web Search, Blog Search, Froogle, Image Search, and other services seem to be up and running well. If I click “preferences” on the Google main page, the page loads slowly; saving the preferences has taken at least six minutes, so far. Blogger is still down, as is my G-Mail. Interestingly, I received two e-mails at 1230 and 0130 hours. I was able to access those notes, provided I waited at least half-hour for them to load. Searching for “Google Outage” on Yahoo search reveals nothing but the May, 2005 outage.

I’m going to bed. I hope this stuff is over by the time I get up later today.