Lots of problems today.

1) My email account was hijacked by a spammer who mysteriously somehow acquired my password, so the hosting service closed it down. It’s back up and back under my control (with a new password), but if you received an email recently from me asking you to invest my $30 million dollars of ill-gotten Nigerian diamonds, I recommend passing up the deal.

2) NYM’s host server went down in a major way with every file corrupted (fortunately, backups did exist). Possibly a cyber attack from disgruntled overseas readers. There has not yet been time to identify the cause.

3) Xena, baddest of the Maine coon cats, who knows no fear, was found this morning perched in one of the 10′ ( 3m.) high little windows just below the gambrel ceiling of my third floor office. Her route included the top of some four drawer filing cabinets and the frame of my wife’s late mother’s oil portrait hanging high on the wall. She also knocked out the wireless modem on her way up. Take my advice: avoid owning coon cats!

A life of crime tires one out

Mattheus van Beveren, Mohammed, leaning on the Koran, Trodden upon by Angels Bearing the Pulpit, Liebefraukirke, Dendermonde, Flanders, late 17th century

I forgot to mention that, just last week, Never Yet Melted attracted, via an older posting from December of 2006, this blog’s first threat from a Muslim.

An anonymous commenter who signed himself as “Inter” wrote, referring to pictures of the Mohammed sculpture in the Liebefraukirke in Dendermonde:

the animal who tagged the picture will burn soon

and

tell you something write your home adrress on the wall … i am ready to come to you and teach you lesson how could you respect the greatest character in the world.

and

burn in the hell

The editor has been off-line for a day due to illness.

Today is one of those days. I’d love to comment on the democrat party’s lemming-like drive toward electoral disaster. Those unable to learn from History, being obliged to repeat it, and repeat it, and… But, Hughesnet is having a problem with its satellite, and my Internet connectivity is only fleeting. Maybe later today.

Never Yet Melted was not opening in MS Internet Explorer last night and this morning.

It turns out the problem is associated with Sitemeter, a popular traffic measuring utility used by many blogs including this one. Sitemeter is apparently migrating servers (which we’re about to do, too), and that maintenance project probably has something to do with IE problem.

Glenn Reynolds, Little Green Footballs, Ed Morrissey, and Michelle Malkin were also affected.

We’ve all had to take Sitemeter down temporarily.

Apologies to all. My hosting company has a hardware problem with the server hosting this blog. New hardware is on the way, and reliable service should be restored soon.

NYM shares a server at its hosting company with a more prominent conservative blog, which was the object of some denial of service attacks last night and the night before, causing the server hosting NYM as well to be inaccessible in the morning for two days.

I’m going to look into what can be done about this.

NYM readers experienced connectivity problems last night and this morning, but they were not my fault!

It seems that my host also does the hosting for Say Anything, and Rush Limbaugh on June 27th, in a program which was re-broadcast on the weekend, referred to, and linked on the Limbaugh web-site, this amusing Say Anything posting.

Well, all those Rush listeners flooded the server, taking NYM down, too. Such is life. These things happen.

Iraqis are permitted to own fully-automatic AK-47s in US-occupied Iraq. But the BATF won’t let you own an Akins Accelerator, a gizmo which attaches to the trigger mechanism of a Ruger 10/22 to achieve full-auto function.

0:37 video

——————————————————-
6/23 CORRECTION:

Mr. Akins has posted in the Comments section, correcting my erroneous description of the Akins Accelerator. Mr. Akins says:

Nothing attaches to the trigger mechanism and it does not achieve full auto function because the trigger is functioned once for each and every shot. The entire barrel/receiver/trigger group reciprocates backwards under recoil removing the trigger completely from the finger and compressing a spring which then forces the barrel/receiver/trigger group back forward again.

Mr. Akins also provided a link to an illustration of what goes on.

link

2007 Ch. English Dog & Ch. English Foxhound
Blue Ridge PIEBALD ’05

I’m taking tomorrow as a day off from blogging, I’m afraid. I will be out of town, and AFK, attending the Bryn Mawr Hound Show.

I’m using a WordPress Plugin which has one little glitch. When you post a comment, instead of the intended “Thank you for commenting. Expect a delay before your comment appears.” message, it sends you a bunch of gibberish.

Otherwise, it works just fine.

What it does is: it parks all comments in Comment Purgatory, where they remain unseen, until I come along and eyeball them. If it is a legitimate Comment, and is not abusive or obscene, it will be approved and will appear. Spam gets deleted en masse.

When I get a chance, I’ll try downloading a new version, but I’m not sure this glitch was ever fixed.

Readers should be aware that blogs these days are absolutely flooded with Spam comments (advertising on-line casinos, insurance, prescription drugs, Viagra, and porn-sites). NYM receives hundreds a day, and Spam filtering software is not completely effective. Faute de mieux, I have recently started running multiple Spam filters. In most cases, comments not simply eliminated wind up in temporary storage, and I have to glance over them before they are allowed to appear. Consequently, a posted comment may not show up for most of a day sometimes. My apologies, but this state of affairs will prevail for a while (until I find a better solution).