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KGB ReportObservations by and for the vaguely disenchanted.
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Tempting the wrath of the whatever from high atop the thing. ISSN: 1525-898X |
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"Barkes writes like he speaks... incoherently."
Our now-unsupported blogging software is acting up again, making it extremely difficult to automatically post stuff to the site.
As much as it pains me to say this, if you want to keep up to date with my posts, check out my page on Facebook.
I hope to do a serious revamp of the site in the New Year. In the meantime, hope you all have a safe and happy whatever holiday(s) you observe.
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I wasn't planning on it, but policy changes at some backend support firms kind of forced me into making some major alterations here as well. Thing is, you probably won't notice most of them.
For the first time in a while, all the links on the main page work. One of our vendors implemented some URL modifications that I missed, somehow, which required me to dive into the html code, some of which was almost years old. I think I have everything here on the main and archive pages working. The KGB Database Quotations page is aesthetically a train wreck, but the search function works well and we also added more entries there this weekl.
While I was digging around in the code, I decided to expand the Commentwear side of the enterprise. Right now, it's all t-shirts, but at the time of this writing there are 26 funny, thoughtful, gonzo and other assorted types of tees out there. I'll be adding more every day, and will also feature a "Tee of the Day" for those of you who'd rather stay here on the main page.
More to come; stay tuned.
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Some important and can't be delayed maintenance items have arisen, so we're extending our "vacation." We'll be back on Tuesday, July 5.
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Some readers have been objecting to looking for my stuff on Facebook or Twitter. I understand... it takes a while to uncontort one's mind after spending any appreciable time there.
So what I'm going to do is publish KGB Report at the end of the day instead of the beginning. It will contain my social media posts and any other observations that I can't post there without violating some unknown "community standards".
The email version will now just contain a notification that the day's page is available and a link to the page. It takes too much effort to reformat the web code into something that's MailChimp compatible.
Let's try this for a while and see how it goes...
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Egads. It's been seven months since I've updated the blog.
I've learned that setting specific dates for the relaunch of the website is an exercise in futility. Something (or, more commonly, a number of things) always comes up to derail my detailed and well-intentioned schedule.
I won't bore you with the details. You can follow my daily postings on Facebook (although that's becoming a more fascistic platform on a daily basis) and Twitter.
As I've mentioned before, the blogging software I use here has been orphaned, and moving to a new platform requires a not insignificant learning curve. Not to mention the problem of somehow porting thousands of posts dating back to April 1, 1999. Having a multi-century blog may be something of an accomplishment, but only if you can maintain it.
See yinz on Twitter and Facebook, and I'll be back here... sometime.
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The latest software update broke some stuff. Should be back in a day or two.
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Vacation ran over a bit. See you tomorrow.
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This cartoon, which I posted several years ago, just got me a new 30 day ban on Facebook.
Seems like they're sensitive to satirical comments about social media.
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Thought I was ready to go back to regular daily blog production, but several technical and professional issues have arisen.
The regular schedule should resume in two weeks.
Sorry for the inconvenience. Assuming I manage to stay out of Facebook jail, you can check here for updates.
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I think I'm done with Facebook. Just got suspended for a week for a post that violates "community standards." Problem is, the item their moronic AI finds offensive was posted six years ago.
I'm still a bit away from updating the software here on the website, but I'm going to post something here daily to stay in practice.
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Granddaughter Leanna turns 18 on Friday. She's graduating from Taylor
Allderdice High School next month and heading off to Edinboro University
in the fall, probably majoring in math and computer science. Here she's
taking a break from homeschooling with her beagle/basset rescue, Pepper.
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My mother is upset because her home appliances are failing. She bought them when she bought the house, back in the mid-1960s before consumer goods became mostly disposable. She's not upset that she has to purchase replacements; it's just that she'll be 95 this year, and she says she hates buying stuff that will last longer than she will. I'm not so sure... the day after Christmas she went shopping for the half-off Christmas cards she plans on sending next year.
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Speaking of the sixties, I went through all this social upheaval back then. I really don't need to experience it again. At least in the sixties we had good music.
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I tried to get into this, but I just end up fast-forwarding to see the special effects. I don't find the concept of Superman being unable to deal with his moody teenage twins particularly engaging.
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Florida sheriff tells people moving to state not to "Vote the stupid way you did up north."
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Republicans blame Biden for making millions of Americans' arms hurt.
Categories: Andy Borowitz, Florida, Joe Biden, KGB Blog News, KGB Family, Peter, Paul and Mary, Sixties, Superman
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I didn't realize how long it had been since posting here. The problem is the blogging software I use is no longer supported and a post takes over an hour to process and upload. Even in a pandemic, who has that kind of time?
Some good news... after WordPress and its ilk took over the blogging software universe, someone realized that static site generators had some major advantages... the reason I adopted static site software in the first place.
Anyway, I'm tasking myself to adopting new software by the end of this quarter. There doesn't seem to be an easy way to integrate the 30+ years of stuff on this site with a new one, so I'll probably just have a "view legacy site" button that will allow access to this body of work.
In the meantime, you can follow KGB Report on Facebook unless I get put in Facebook Jail again- their AI software isn't very good at recognizing satire.
My wife and I managed to get Moderna's COVID-19 vaccine thanks to my son, who can reload web pages must faster than I can and who has infinitely more patience. Of course, there are all the other aspects of advanced age with which to contend, so I keep my physician and pharmacist on speed dial.
A belated happy new year to yinz all... keep in touch.
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Well, I didn't make the first quarter deadline, so we'll shoot for quarter two.
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This social isolation business may mean I'll have the time to migrate to new blogging software. I've found a few static website generators (I'm not a fan of WordPress or other server-side content management systems) and have actually looked at some of them.
Facebook's artificial intelligence-based post scanner doesn't understand concepts like irony or satire. I got banned for three days for posting this photo, which apparently set off alarms when a Nazi flag was detected:
While the number of people the KGB Report Facebook page reaches is not trivial (>10,000), I'm getting really tired of being warned about posting items which "violate Facebook's community standards," the standards being what a piece of brain-dead AI software can comprehend.
Stay tuned.
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The day I feared has finally happened... our orphaned blogging software has quit functioning reliably.
Moving to another platform isn't trivial... we have over 3,000 posts dating back to 1999. I've researched various software packages, but each one has at least one major deficiency that blocks a successful migration.
In the meantime, I suggest checking KGB Report and my personal account on Facebook for frequent daily updates.
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Taking a few weeks off to rest and recharge. The ol' energy level's been a bit low lately; perhaps age is catching up with me, but I need an extra hour or two of sleep these days to function.
Perhaps getting the air conditioning replaced and being able to sleep in my own bed in my bedroom again will recharge the batteries.
See you after Labor Day... and keep resisting.
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Some ongoing and upcoming developments should permit the return of the web KGB Report in early 2018. Several things have to come together, but so far, it looks promising.
Just because we're not posting here regularly doesn't mean we don't have a daily web presence. Indeed, daily postings on KGB Report's Facebook page generally exceed what our daily output was here, and my personal Facebook page also contains a great deal of eclectic content. (Why two accounts, you ask? I try to keep all the political stuff on KGB Report and off the personal page. I need all the friends I have there...)
Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, etc., etc. See you when this craptastic year 2017 is over.
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Four weeks to go until training is complete and KGB Report's web version returns. We may be able to fire things up a bit earlier, but right now time remains tight.
In the meantime, visit KGB Report's Facebook page which will continue to be regularly updated, as well as my personal Facebook page which is also fairly active.
Thanks for your continued support.
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Unprovided with original learning, unformed in the habits of thinking,
unskilled in the arts of composition, I resolved to write a book.
-Edward
Gibbon
While waiting for the Social Security to kick in and hoping the intermittent consulting contracts continue, I've decided to take advantage of the self-publishing outfits like Createspace and Kindle Publishing and try to make a buck or two by publishing various unpublished works I've written over the years.
I have no J.K. Rowling-like delusions of grandeur here, but I do think one or two of my projects might be slightly successful.
A few years back I self-published Eff the Ineffable, Scrute the Inscrutable, a collection of quotations I'd gathered over the years. On-demand published through CafePress, I sold a couple each month until, for some reason, CafePress somehow damaged the .pdf file and could not generate new copies of the book.
My new untitled quotations collection will be in e-book form, link-accessible by subject and author, thus eminently more usable than the print-based "Eff". Categorizing each quote is not precisely a trivial effort, and I have to write the software to generate the book in a Kindle-usable format. I also want to add another 2,500 or so quotations to get the total up to a nice, round, marketable 40,000.
So please indulge me should I miss a day or so here on the blog. I'm fairly active here and here on Facebook, where I generally hang out ro maintain the few feeble remaining social contacts I have.
Will keep you all posted. And thanks for your continued support.
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KGB Report will be off the air until January 4. I'm taking an actual vacation break.
Merry CHristmas and Happy New Year!
2016 promises to be interesting...
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I originally scheduled my FIOS installation for July 13. Then I got an email asking me to reschedule; the customer service person to whom I spoke said my original installation order "dropped out of the system."
I rescheduled for today. I received an email this morning saying the technician would be here between 11:30 am and 2:30 pm. At 2 pm I went online and saw the new scheduled time was between 6:30 and 7:30 pm. Another check at 7 pm... underneath the photo of a smiling lady greeting a Verizon technician with the words "Congratulations-Your FiOS Installation Day Is Here!" was the notice:
We are sorry that we were unable to install your Verizon services. To reschedule your installation appointment for a later date, please select a new date that is convenient for you.
How about never? Is never good for you?
In the five years since I've been back here, Comcast has never been late on a service call. They've screwed things up from time to time, but immediately apologized and gave me credit on my bill to compensate for the inconvenience.
Bah. I don't need another hole drilled into the house, anyway.
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Fascinating how we can receive high resolution photographs from a 12-watt radio transmitter on a spacecraft 3 billion miles away, receding from us at 75,000 miles per hour, but cable companies can't equalize the volume levels between channels.
Anyway, I'm switching internet service providers tomorrow, a process that should take four hours and begin sometime between 11 am and 2 pm.
This process should involve simply unplugging from one router and plugging into another, but things are never as simple as they should be, and I can't shake this sense of impending doom.
Anyway, we'll be back on the air as soon as possible tomorrow. We're signing off early because the cellar needs to be cleaned so the installation technication doesn't flee in terror or call the board of health.
Stay tuned...
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A configuration problem rendered the quotations system inoperable for the past day or so. It's been corrected. Sorry for the inconvenience.
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It is not true that life is one damn thing after another- it is one damn
thing over and over.
-Edna St. Vincent Millay
KGB Report welcomes you to the Eve of 2015: May this arbitrary, transient point in your solipsistic sense of the space-time continuum delineate the initiation of a series of random events which trend in a manner which you perceive to be favorable.
After two years without missing a single daily post, I'm taking tomorrow off, immediately eliminating the pressure of attempting to attain illusory perfection in 2015. If there's something you can skip tomorrow, I heartily recommend it.
As long as it doesn't involve personal hygiene.
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Always bear in mind that your own resolution to succeed, is more
important than any other one thing.
-Abraham Lincoln
An optimist stays up until midnight to see the new year in. A pessimist
stays up to make sure the old year leaves.
-Bill Vaughan
Be at war with your vices, at peace with your neighbors, and let every
new year find you a better man.
-Benjamin Franklin
Before celebrating too much, you should be certain the statute of
limitations expires on January 1 and not the date of the original
offense.
-Unattributed
Celebrate what you want to see more of.
-Tom Peters
Drop the last year into the silent limbo of the past. Let it go, for it
was imperfect, and thank God that it can go.
-Brooks Atkinson
Every New Year is the direct descendant, isn't it, of a long line of
proven criminals?
-Ogden Nash
For last year's words belong to last year's language and next year's
words await another voice.
-T.S. Eliot
Good resolutions are simply checks that men draw on a bank where they
have no account.
-Oscar Wilde
He who breaks a resolution is a weakling; He who makes one is a fool.
-F.M.
Knowles
I am resolved to grow fat, and look young till forty.
-John Dryden
I have never heard anything about the resolutions of the apostles, but a
good deal about their acts.
-Horace Mann
I made no resolutions for the New Year. The habit of making plans, of
criticizing, sanctioning and molding my life, is too much of a daily
event for me.
-Anaïs Nin
I think in terms of the day's resolutions, not the year's.
-Henry
Moore
Many years ago I resolved never to bother with New Year's resolutions,
and I've stuck with it ever since.
-Dave Beard
May all your troubles last as long as your New Year's resolutions.
-Joey
Adams
.New Year's Day... now is the accepted time to make your regular annual
good resolutions. Next week you can begin paving hell with them as usual.
-Mark
Twain
New Year's Eve is like every other night; there is no pause in the march
of the universe, no breathless moment of silence among created things
that the passage of another twelve months may be noted; and yet no man
has quite the same thoughts this evening that come with the coming of
darkness on other nights.
-Hamilton Wright Mabie
New Year's Eve is like the death of a pet- you know it's going to
happen, but somehow you're never really prepared for how truly awful it
is.
-John Oliver
New Year's Eve we got five dollars for the evening- but that was from
eight to unconscious.
-Sid Caesar
New Year's Eve, where auld acquaintance be forgot. Unless, of course,
those tests come back positive.
-Jay Leno
New Year's Resolution: To tolerate fools more gladly, provided this does
not encourage them to take up more of my time.
-James Agate
New Years Eve: when the beautiful promise of tomorrow is transformed
into the ugly reality of today, and the disgusting miasma of now becomes
the rosy nostalgic netherworlds of yesterday.
-J.C. Duffy
Resolutions, like the good, die young.
-Fulton J. Sheen
Resolve to be honest at all events; and if in your own judgment you
cannot be an honest lawyer, resolve to be honest without being a lawyer.
-Abraham
Lincoln
Resolve to be thyself: and know that he who finds himself, loses his
misery.
-Matthew Arnold
Resolve to edge in a little reading every day, if it is but a single
sentence. If you gain fifteen minutes a day, it will make itself felt at
the end of the year.
-Horace Mann
Resolve, then, that on this very ground, with small flags waving and
tinny blasts on tiny trumpets, we shall meet the enemy, and not only may
he be ours, he may be us.(From the comic strip Pogo)
-Walt Kelly
The Christian resolution to find the world ugly and bad has made the
world ugly and bad.
-Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
The proper behavior all through the holiday season is to be drunk. This
drunkenness culminates on New Year's Eve, when you get so drunk you kiss
the person you're married to.
-P.J. O'Rourke
Time has no divisions to mark its passage; there is never a thunderstorm
to announce the beginning of a new year. It is only we mortals who ring
bells and fire off pistols.
-Thomas Mann
Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year.
-Ralph
Waldo Emerson
Year's end is neither an end nor a beginning but a going on, with all
the wisdom that experience can instill in us.
-Hal Borland
Yesterday, everybody smoked his last cigar, took his last drink and
swore his last oath. Today, we are a pious and exemplary community.
Thirty days from now, we shall have cast our reformation to the winds
and gone to cutting our ancient shortcomings considerably shorter than
ever.
-Mark Twain
Your success and happiness lies in you. Resolve to keep happy, and your
joy and you shall form an invincible host against difficulties.
-Helen
Keller
Youth is when you're allowed to stay up late on New Year's Eve. Middle
age is when you're forced to.
-Bill Vaughan
Categories: Holidays, KGB, KGB Blog News, KGB Opinion, Quotes on a topic
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Dreamhost is upgrading our shared web server's operating system tonight at 11 pm EDT and says KGB Report may be unavailable for approximately 30-40 minutes.
Life is full of disappointment.
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Forgot to mention- today is also the birthday of Hunter S. Thompson and Nelson Mandela.
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Yeah, I'm still limping along with Thingamablog, the now-ophaned blogging software that creates scads of individual .html pages instead of depending upon host-based applications to produce on-demand SQL-generated output. Call me old fashioned.
Anyway, Thingamablog takes about two minutes to generate the files associated with a new post. But a post containing a new category? It was absurd. The other day it hit the wall, as far as I was concerned- nearly three hours to completely regenerate every file on the website.
Fortunately, I discovered the cause of the problem: the "Latest Posts" entry over on the right column, which lists the most recent blog entries. It appears the software needs to scan the entire database to produce that list. For every page that contains the "Latest Posts" code.
And if your website has over 4,600 pages...
So, "Latest Posts" now appears only on the front page and the archive index page.
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Some other configuration notes:
Hotlinking to images on the site has been re-dis-enabled. Perhaps re-dis-enabled isn't a word, but it's accurate.
We've blocked a bunch of Russian and Asian scrapers, scammers, and would-be hackers by blocking access from a lot of sites in those areas.
http://www.kgbreport.com/wp-login.php is a text file that contains the single line
"This isn't a wordpress site. Sorry."
So give it up, willya?
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One of 52,045 quotations from the KGB Quotations Database, selected by Random Text. Click here to search for words, authors or phrases. Search page design and software contributed by Rafal Sulejman.
Current weather
from my backyard in South Park, PA.
How Network Solutions, Inc. Made Me A Child Pornographer
Brief History of the Gregorian Calendar
Requiem for a fictional Scotsman
Oh My God! They Killed Library!! Those Bastards!!!
Pissed off?
Americans United for the Separation of Church and State
The Late Show with Stephen Colbert
Evolution is science. Intelligent Design is religion.
Click for the list of topic categories...
Old stuff, as far back as the 20th century...
