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Category Archives: Technical Difficulties

Navel-gazing if you’re a computer or know one. Boring but included for sense of completion.

Absence Makes Blogs Shorter

Brick has been sporadic for some weeks. With luck, it will be more active in December.
Want an excuse? How about National Novel Writing Month. It’s 50,000 words to create a first draft of a novel (around a 200-page book) in 30 days. November is the one. My third try, and I went past 50,000 by [...]

On the Wall

Should I get back into more frequent or even regular Brick postings, it will be in part because of waking today to an image of the artistic caveman.
It may have been the last scene of an otherwise forgotten dream, or just an isolated visual, conjured just before sitting up.
The fellow chooses a charred stick from [...]

I’m just saying, I’m just saying

Copyright 2008 Ben S. Pollock
An evaluation of the run-off candidates for mayor of Fayetteville, Arkansas. The election is Tuesday the 25th, and early voting is under way. Though not today: The courthouse is closed.
Brick never makes endorsements. Still, comments I’ve avoided should be made. The incumbent Dan Coody wants a third four-year term and faces [...]

The Server Ate September

OK, kids, here’s a lesson — back up even files other entities are saving for you. Here’s what I learned from my service, Hosting Matters:
The primary drive on this server failed over the weekend, and all sites were restored [on Sept. 22] from the last error-free backup, from Aug 29, which would account for both [...]

Where Has September Gone?

That’s what I’d like to know. Sometime in the last couple of days, all of the Brick essays I published in September have disappeared. Poking around my Web site indicates that the problem originates not with WordPress but Hosting Matters, which operates my domain overall.
This posting serves first as a test for whomever might be [...]

Don’t Stop the Presses

Copyright 2008 Ben S. Pollock
I’m not nearly old enough to say I’ve seen it all, or even seen a lot. But when I worked there, my college newspaper, The Stanford Daily, had a noisy Teletype for AP and UPI stories, complete with increasing numbers of bells to rate degrees of breaking news. My first full-time [...]

Roger That 404

When you click from one Internet page to another and you get a message saying “we were unable to find” it, sometimes including the phrase Error 404, there’s a problem, Houston.
Brick is having just that issue. Please bear with me, and WordPress, while I try to figure it out, or get them to fix it [...]

Pod-ner in Time

Isn’t the Internet wonderful, with all of that information available in an instant? Crusty people like me have taken to it in varying degrees of speed and intensity, while everyone under 30, from most of my office to three nephews and niece (in their 20s), didn’t need to learn it, for high electronics is their [...]

Travel Plans

Wednesday, My Beloved and I head to Philadelphia for the annual conference of the National Society of Newspaper Columnists. It starts with a Thursday night reception, but I need to be at the hotel at 2 for the board meeting.
I have created Brick subsets for two previous conferences, in Dallas and Boston, and a weekend [...]

Mea Gulpa

Writer Salman Rushdie is coming to town, and I recalled I wrote a column about his troubles. It was a peach, in my fuzzy memory, so surely I had posted it online, right?
Well, it is there, now. It was from 1989, and I had to type it in earlier today because I wrote it [...]