Quite apart from the ungrammatical message, the “contact us” link goes to — you guessed it — the same error page. Oy. There’s no blog or forum where I can find out what’s happening, either. I mean, I don’t demand 100% uptime, but I do at least want to know what up.
This only gets to happen one more time (and that’s only because I am very lazy), then I’m switching to Simpy.
Update: changed my mind, as per the strikeouts. I just like Simpy better; I trust it, and Otis, more. I’m a tool, I should have done this from the start. Until I work out how to do the linklog posts, if you really need to watch me surf the Simpy feed is http://www.simpy.com/rss/user/sennoma/links.

I mentioned a while back that I chose Ma.gnolia over Simpy in part because the latter’s RSS feeds didn’t work with Bloglines, so it seems only fair to note that this is no longer the case: Simpy’s feeds now work perfectly with Bloglines (at least the full links feed I tested does). Moreover, since Ma.gnolia feeds initially didn’t work with Bloglines either, and the Ma.gnolia team replied to my email to say “it works now, we dunno why”, I figure it was likely something Bloglines did. I meant to email Otis — see for yourself how responsive he is — but forgot; if I hadn’t, I’d be using Simpy now. This would mean finding a way to convert XML to HTML to replace the Ma.gnolia linklog widget, but there’s an API and an active dev community so even if FeedDigest doesn’t open up signups again I’m sure I could cobble something together.
For now I’m satisfied with Ma.gnolia, but I’m keeping my backup with Simpy and keeping an eye on developments. Honestly, Simpy is less flashy and commercial and has that hacker feel to it (these are good things, imo); I feel I can trust Otis, whereas I just don’t know what the Ma.gnolia folks have in mind. I should probably switch, but I’m too lazy to do it right away — so this entry is my way of trying to be fair to Simpy.

If you’re reading this by RSS, you are using the old feed (https://sennoma.net/main/index.rdf) — it should perform exactly as the new feed (https://sennoma.net/main/index.xml), and should do so indefinitely, but if I were you I’d update the subscription anyway. The spousal unit worked some unholy juju to make this happen, and you know how unreliable black magic is.

When I started this site, I intended to go for the funny a lot more, and to get much more closely in touch with my inner asshole. Turns out that isn’t good for me, and “malice aforethought” doesn’t describe me or what I want to do here very well. It wasn’t a great choice of name: I am not a malicious person, nor do I want to play one on the internets. So, after due consideration, I’ve changed the name of my blog. (If you link me, I’d appreciate it if you’d update. Sorry for the inconvenience.)
Most of my posts here concern science or politics, so I was going to call the site “The Art of the Soluble” after Peter Medawar‘s remark that “If politics is the art of the possible, research is surely the art of the soluble. Both are immensely practical-minded affairs.” Unfortunately, Sir Peter used that title for a famous essay, so I consider it taken. (Comparisons are invidious, particularly when I suffer by them.) Thus thwarted, I settled on another horrible pun (an open reading frame is, basically, a stretch of nucleic acid that can be translated into protein), and unless someone is already using it here I will stay.
Other changes: I am no longer anonymous, in English or Esperanto. (I still think my original idea for a website would have been interesting if I’d stuck to it, but I didn’t, so.) I am becoming very interested in the role of blogs and other online communications tools in professional scientific research, and it’s simply easier to use my “real” name with my colleagues. I also plan to add a links feed from my Furl account (update: I’m using Simpy and Feed2JS now, and posting linklogs every so often instead of a feed so that I can have comments and trackbacks) and update the blogroll and the categories. Let me know if there’s anything else you think I should do (comments are back on, muchas gracias to the spousal unit for the various upgrades).

I don’t know if it’s just me, or if there’s a flood of spam across the whole internets, but I can’t be arsed to delete two dozen comments a day. (And most of it porn, have you noticed? I have a depressing vision of thousands upon thousands of greasy pimply rejects hunched over in their smelly bedrooms, one ear on the doorway in case Mother comes by and only one hand on the keyboard. *shudder*)
Anyway, no comments until the spousal unit has time to upgrade the MT install for me, which could be a while because she has approximately six million better things to do with her limited free time and I am too damn lazy to do it myself.

The categories are all screwed up, the blogroll needs fixing (many good blogs not included simply because I cannot add them to my Bloglines feeds or I’d never do anything but read online), the bio needs updating (I have a new job, in cancer biology) and I want to add my del.icio.us links as a sidebar feed.
Resolved: must get to all that. Some time in next decade or so.

OK, hiatus over. One of the main reasons for taking a break was that politics was making me nuts, and I wanted to step back and find a way to cope. I didn’t have time to cover all the political issues I felt were important, nor even time to do justice to the most urgent of those issues. Being unable to provide comprehensive coverage made me freeze up (again). I still don’t have time to cover everything, but no one who wants to be politically well informed is going to rely on me as a news source anyway. For the most part, I’m just going to point to the most pressing issues, or the ones that press my particular hot buttons, and leave it at that. For everything else, see my blogroll. I chose the “primarily political” links with great care, and I really do think that between them they provide more comprehensive coverage than any mainstream news source, and I guarantee that they provide better analysis.
The other thing I’m going to start doing is passing on the various petitions and letters I sign. I’m on a bunch of mailing lists, all of which pretty regularly send me information about current issues and links to web pages where you can take some kind of action — sign a petition, send a letter, and so on. Without exception, they also ask me to “tell a friend” (or five friends, or everyone I know, or whatever). It’s clear that such networking is a powerful tool for political and charitable organizations. I’m not going to sign anyone up for these lists, which is of course what happens when you “just use this handy web form” to send emails — but I will post the links here. I don’t kid myself that I’m doing much by responding to these prompts, but I’m doing something, and that’s better than nothing. Right?
(Oh, and I’ll bribe the spousal unit to fix that thing with the spurious links too, but don’t hold your breath ‘cos she’s plenty busy.)

I was going to apologise for the lack of updates, but the hell with it — I don’t do this for you. Stupid readers, who needs ’em? (That was a joke! A joke! Wait, come back…)
Anyway, the spousal unit has the basics, to which I’ll just add that work is a lousy way to make a living. I am one fucked unit, and not likely to get any less fucked any time soon. If you’re reading this, I probably owe you email too — sorry about that, I’ll do my best. It’s not that I don’t love you any more, I’m just nackered.
See yer in a few weeks then, when I’m in better form.
P.S. the linky weirdness below is a glitch that appeared when I (by which of course I mean the spousal unit) had to delete trackbacks; I was getting so much spam that it took down a server. Bastards. Anyway, fixing a little glitch on my site is not high on our list of priorities right now, so it’ll be staying that way for a while.

Just a quick note for anyone sending trackback pings (hi, T, pericat!): they work, but don’t show up until I rebuild the site. I have no idea why this should be so, or how to fix it, and no way am I upgrading asking the spousal unit to upgrade me to a later version of MT until the bugs are ironed out, so in the meantime please just bear with me. I get email notification of comments and pings, so I’ll rebuild as soon as I see a ping.
Tangentially: Jay did a wonderful thing building MT-Blacklist and setting it free, and I’m appropriately grateful for all the time and hassle it’s saved me; similarly, niggly bugs and all, I like MT. I haven’t paid a dime for either product, so I can’t — and don’t mean to — complain here. But at the same time, I won’t be paying SA for software that I can see in advance is substantially more problematic than the setup I have. I think the company’s track record indicates that they will listen to feedback and solve the problems, so I’m just going to sit back and be a late adopter this time.