Hosed by Network Solutions...

A website that was to be used to release a film expected to be critical of Islam has been taken offline by Network Solutions, presumably under the provisions of the "hate propaganda" prohibition in the company's terms of use.

Of course it's hard to tell what the reason for the takedown is, exactly, since the action appears to have been taken pre-emptively, before any substantive content was available at the site, except perhaps a splash graphic for the movie. This is what you see if you go to the site right now:


One wonders how easy or hard it might be to convince Network Solutions that a particular site violates their "hate propaganda" prohibition.

If a site that allegedly insults Islam can be taken down, then one presumes the same standard would apply to sites that insult other religions?

FWIW, there is no issue of First Amendment rights here. Network Solutions is a private entity, not the government. They can do what they like, whether based on skewed idealism, malicious intent, or plain old fear.

Cheers...

One long day that hasn't been long enough...

From time to time, I seem to go out of my way to basically ignore what I value in life and go off to have my own little pity party, and - sad to say - today was one of those times. I was not a pleasant person to be around, generally speaking, at least until the middle of the afternoon.

Be then, what I like to think of as my basically optimistic self kicked in, and that's something I'm thankful for.

My foul mood was built on a foundation of feeling constantly tired, of being behind the financial eight-ball, and not having made much progress thus far on the 40K Job. Be that as it may, as I keep telling others, the only thing I can control about any of this is how I react to it. And acting like a jerk isn't very helpful, nor does it do anything to address the problem.

I have 19 days left until my deadline and my productivity is pretty low. Yesterday, I did no work at all, and today, I've again only committed 1500 words to phosphor.

Then again, it's almost as if I've been looking for reasons and ways to avoid work. For example, today, it was a continuation of yesterday's search for the Elusive Passbook. (As a side effect of going through boxes of papers, the destop that had become so visible as a result of The Great Refenestration of 2008™ is again buried under a layer of stuff, though fortunately, that's not something that would normally contribute to a foul mood.) Then I spent a bunch of time surfing. Then I installed the latest beta of Firefox 3, and played with that for a while.

I should not have spent so much time sidetracking myself, and in this coming week, I will make an effort to put in some translation time - say, 1000 words to start - before turning to anything else that doesn't involve the early morning routine (read: coffee!). And that will be a formidable task, because some things have been piling up: there are checks to write and things to do!

Not all distractions are bad, however. Late in the afternoon, after regaining my mental equilibrium (or a reasonable facsimile thereof) I took the dog for a walk. That was good, and something I need to do to maintain my health. The 1500 words that I've translated (700 of them on one page!) have all been done since after dinner, and I've just experienced an "Aha!" moment with respect to how to handle the title block information on each page (which ought to make life a whole lot easier in that regard).

One good unexpected result of today's search was finding a couple of old address books that the lawyer had asked about. Frankly, I had no idea whether I had thrown them out or what, but I ran across them today, and they may help my case with the surrogate's court. I'll be keeping my fingers crossed.

Cheers...

I'm really wondering just how many words