Why did no one tell me we entered an alternate universe today?

OK, first Deborah sends me this opinion column from ABC News about the bias and decline of the media, and then I find this commentary from CNN about how Obama is a big fat (rich) liar. Even weirder...I found the latter on the front page of digg (which in my opinion stands for something like "democrats in good graces"). And neither of the articles are from Fox News....what's going on here?!?

The newest 3 letter word

Jobs is a 3-letter word? Funny how you don't see this all over the news. Probably won't even be an SNL sketch about it.

TB

Person A: [Wearing a Tampa Bay Rays hat]
Person B: What does that stand for? Don't tell me....The Bears!

USDA

Person A: What does "USDA" stand for?
Person B: United States Department
Person A: of....?
Person B: America

*names have been changed to protect the ludicrous

Brinkster

My webhost is Brinkster. I have highly recommended Brinkster to the few clients that I have as a web developer. They have a great referral program.




So go get yourself a Brinkster website. Seriously, they're great.


However... like every good thing, there are side effects, and Brinkster is no exception. So, here is my disclaimer: Brinkster may cause headaches.

For example, your website might all of a sudden go down without you doing a thing. You won't know about it until a user tries to go to your website and sees nothing but the domain name listed there. So you will go to chat with Brinkster support and ask what's up and they will tell you the following:

"Windows updates were run on the computer and this caused the operating system to crash. We rolled back the updates that were run on the server this morning. This corrected most of the errors, but left the computer unable to communicate with the rest of the network or go online. We have built a new server to replace the one you were on and are moving the website files from the backups made a few hours before the crash. Once the files are restored, the website will be online. We truly apologize for the down time you have experienced today."

If you have an ounce of common sense, you will proceed to inquire whether they sent an email out explaining this because even though you didn't see one, you give them the benefit of the doubt and figure that you just didn't see it. Brinkster will respond:

"No we did not. Unless users were coming into chat earlier in the day.

We do not have an email system in place to do this."

Then you will proceed to bang your head against the desk, thus creating the aforementioned headache. That their server crashes and leaves your site down for hours is bad enough, but for them to knowingly not bother to have a basic system that at least informs their paying customers of the situation is simply inexcusable.

There are other things that may induce the side effects as well, but I won't bother to write them down because someone already did.

But by all means, if you need a website, go with Brinkster (using one of my reference links, of course). Just be wary of the potential side effects.