Archive for December 6th, 2007

Come Join Us at Dreamhost

Posted on December 6th, 2007

If you have ever wished that you had your own web site hosted by the same people who host www.raggedclown.com, I have a special offer just for you…

RewardsFirst a few words about DreamHost and how I chose them.

  1. Every previous web hosting service that I have ever used ended up being bought by Verio who got bought by NTT who decided that my hosting service would be so much better (for them) if they made it suck. So far, that hasn’t happened to Dreamhost. For me, the primary requirement for a web hosting company is that it not get bought by Verio. Verio sucks.
  2. It doesn’t cost too much. My account costs me something like $100 per year which gives me (essentially) unlimited email, domains, sub-domains, POP accounts and so much bandwidth and disk space that I have never even bothered to find out how much. There are no additional costs for hosting additional domains (the registration fee for new domains is, like, $20 or something).
  3. They have good support. So far I have had only one problem and they fixed it within about 3 seconds of me noticing it. I had some questions when I first opened my account and they answered them immediately to my entire satisfaction (unlike Verio who have yet to answer my question from 1998).
  4. They have a ton of software to play with. Here’s a smattering of what they offer:
    • Wordpress
    • Ruby on Rails
    • Python
    • Subversion
    • A Jabber server
    • Media streaming (like QuickTime and RealAudio)
    • PERL
    • PHP
    • MYSQL
    • JOOMLA
    • Some shopping cart thingie
    • Some polling thingie
    • CRON
    • Shell access

    plus all the usual POP, IMAP, FTP, web mail and all that stuff - all set up with their fancy One-Click installer. You also have control over all the DNS configuration.

If all that weren’t enough to persuade you, Dream Host has this promotion scheme whereby you con your friends into getting an account and they give you a $97 referral fee which you use towards your own account fees or give to your friend as a discount or split in any proportion you may choose.

If you’d like to take advantage of all this goodness - and a $50 discount - go sign up now and tell’em “The Clown sent me”. Just click on the big banner on your right or the funnier one just down there and enter the promo code “CHASINGREWARDS50″.
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Rewards

Dreamhost. It doesn’t suck. It hasn’t been bought by Verio.

The Bali Declaration

Posted on December 6th, 2007

“The amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere now far exceeds the natural range of the past 650,000 years and it is rising very quickly due to human activity.”If this trend is not halted soon, many millions of people will be at risk from extreme events such as heat waves, drought, floods and storms, our coasts and cities will be threatened by rising sea levels, and many ecosystems, plants and animal species will be in serious danger of extinction.”

“The prime goal of this new regime must be to limit global warming to no more than 2 ÂșC above the pre-industrial temperature, a limit that has already been formally adopted by the European Union and a number of other countries. Based on current scientific understanding, this requires that global greenhouse gas emissions need to be reduced by at least 50% below their 1990 levels by the year 2050.

The Bali Declaration

The Republican candidate for President of the United States of America is…

Posted on December 6th, 2007

I just read Romney’s speech on Faith in America and I have to say that I am terribly impressed. I think he just won himself the republican nomination. It was an excellent speech.

It’s in the nature of these things, though, that one has to find a nit to quibble with. I didn’t so much as find this one as it found me. It’s the Under God thing.

“The founders proscribed the establishment of a state religion, but they did not countenance the elimination of religion from the public square. We are a nation ‘Under God’ and in God, we do indeed trust.”

The Under God thing itself doesn’t really bother me (the federal courts have declared that it’s just ceremonial deism after all). I understand that it bothers a lot of my atheist friends but it doesn’t bother me. After all, I spent a couple of hours singing (and dancing to, if you can imagine that) God Save the Queen with my daughter on Monday. No. What bothers me is the dishonest suggestion that the Under God thing is somehow related to the founders. “The founders….We are a nation ‘Under God’.

I assume that Romney is not ignorant of the facts. Therefore he is being dishonest.

That quibble aside, I applaud his speech heartily. Now…

…about that flip-flopping….