The editorial staff must run off to attend pack trials at the National Beagle Club in Aldie this morning. Posting will resume later.

Never Yet Melted March 4, 2008:

Fight Fiercely, Harvard

concerning the scandal about Harvard’s admissions of basketball players on the basis of lower academic standards.

New York Times
March 9, 2008:

Editorial Notebook
Fight Fiercely, Harvard
By PHILIP M. BOFFEY

concerning the scandal about Harvard’s admissions of basketball players on the basis of lower academic standards.

If we are not rained out, I’m going to be working all day on Saturday and Sunday at the Blue Ridge Hunt Point-to-Point and Hunter Pace Races.

link

Internet access was completely down for most of a day because freezing rain had buried the satellite receiver dish in a thick coating of ice. The editorial staff foolishly went hunting on Sunday in very cold weather and high winds and is consequently experiencing fever, cold, and sore throat.

I was up, ready to blog at 6 AM this morning, but my host server was still down from the previous night, and it did not come back up until people arrived at the office after noon Central Time. By then I was out hunting with the Nantucket-Treweryn Beagles.

Satellite problems are preventing uploads of any size, so there will be no new illustrations until this problem is resolved.

Trees and limbs are down everywhere. We lost power yesterday evening, and the stand-by generator took over, but (who knew?) my UPS was not generator-compatible. It died late last evening. So until I re-routed wiring to my PC and the wireless network, I was off-line.

Connectivity (especially upload connectivity) is awful right now. Our satellite dish is covered with ice.

Our host server was down earlier today. Apologies to readers.

I do think there have been many fewer incidents, though, since we moved to our current hosting service.

All the really cool blogs run ads. Capitalism is a good thing, and I don’t see any reason why a blog shouldn’t pay some of its own expenses via advertising. And, besides, I have an addiction to blog gadgets and counters and the like, and I’ve been hankering for some time to play with advertising tools and run amusing ads.

So I’ve established a relationship with Blogads, and created a space over in the right column for future advertising. Watch for further exciting developments.

The Never Yet Melted blog is in the process of migrating from our previous hosting service to a new host. We believe that our new hosting service will prove more reliable, and that those mySQL 127 Errors will occur much less frequently.

However, there are currently a few problems involving inaccessible image links and special characters not displaying properly. It will take a little while to sort all this out. We apologize and request your patience.

The Management

The Blog links are out of order at the moment, as technical modifications are underway this morning.

I found this morning that I’d had another of the SQL database corruption incidents overnight.

The last backup, it turned out, was done in the midst of an upgrade, and was consequently defective. And my support guy is out of town at a conference.

I’m lucky that I was able to get things fixed myself.

I need to restore some posts, and then we will be back in normal operation again.

My apologies to readers for the inconvenience.