Patterico's Pontifications

9/9/2012

SiteMeter Communication Sucks

Filed under: General — Patterico @ 4:19 pm



So I had a technical problem with SiteMeter. It’s not really important what it was. (They failed to add hundreds of thousands of hits to my total; the hits showed up on monthly/daily reports but were absent from the total.) I wrote them about it. Several times. They never wrote back, beyond canned responses that did nothing to address my individual question. (They talked about a server move losing stats for a day or two. But I lost a good month’s worth of hits.)

I don’t recommend their paid service. If you want to use them for free and are fine with a complete and total lack of communication — and a service that may underrepresent your totals without explanation — fine. But if customer service matters to you at all? Find someone else.

Obama Bounce? Maybe Not So Much

Filed under: General — Patterico @ 1:41 pm



There are polls out showing a bounce for Obama. Allahpundit has some cautionary words about that:

Why not go full eeyore in honor of the occasion, then? Four reasons. One: O just took a roundhouse from that terrible, terrible jobs report. That’s bound to temper some of the new, Clinton-fueled enthusiasm for him. Two: Gallup’s and Rasmussen’s surveys are based for the most part on interviews conducted before O’s own widely panned speech last night. If the public was as underwhelmed by it as the commentariat, the bounce may well deflate early. Three: Gallup’s poll is of registered voters, which always skew Democratic. A 48/45 Obama lead among registereds is a de facto tie among likelies, which is precisely what Rasmussen’s finding. O’s back to even, not out to a lead. And four: Romney’s finally beginning his massive attack-ad offensive against Obama in eight key swing states today. When push comes to shove, it doesn’t much matter how O’s doing in the national daily trackers. It’s the swing-state polls that count.

. . . .

Update: A few readers have e-mailed to note that Gallup’s job approval number is based on a sample of adults, not registered voters. Right; it’s the head-to-head with Romney, where O now leads by three, that’s based on a sample of registereds. Apologies if that wasn’t clear. The point is, if we’re seeing his job approval rise among adults, that’ll probably have some similar but lesser effect among registereds and then a similar but still lesser effect among likelies. Not a huge bounce, but a little something.

Bottom line: Give it a few days and let’s see where we are.

P.S. Just idly wondering here: is Gallup the only polling company that the Obama Administration has attempted to intimidate?

Jerry Brown Challenges Chris Christie to Fitness Contest

Filed under: General,Morons — Patterico @ 1:34 pm



I hereby challenge the fattest guy I can think of to a fitness contest!

“I’ve slowed down a little bit, but I have to tell you — I ran three miles in 29 minutes two nights ago,” Brown said last week. “I hereby challenge Gov. Christie to a three-mile race, a push-up contest and a chin-up contest. Whatever he wants to bet, I have no doubt of the outcome.”

Brown says he is responding to Christie calling him an “old retread” — and willfully misinterprets this as an attack on Brown’s fitness, so he can take a cheap shot at Christie’s weight.

Once you see that Brown’s excuse for this is trumped-up, Brown’s gambit seems pretty amusing. He’s taking the most out-of-shape guy he can find in politics and challenges him to a fitness contest. That would be like Christie, a great speaker, issuing a debate challenge to the stupidest guy in politics. (Which is Joe Biden.)

Proud, proud I am to be a Californian with Governor Moonbeam in office.

Newt: Clinton Speech Made Obama Look Bad

Filed under: 2012 Election,General,Obama — Patterico @ 1:01 pm



Which is true, if you think about it:

The Clinton speech at the Democratic National Convention was “eerily anti-Obama, if you just listen to the subtext,” the former House speaker said on CNN’s “State of the Union” Sunday morning.

He added: “Here’s Clinton saying, ‘I reformed welfare because I worked with Republicans; you didn’t, Mr. Obama.’ He didn’t say it that way, but think about it: ‘I had the longest period of economic growth in history; you didn’t, Mr. Obama. I got to four balanced budgets by working with Republicans; you didn’t, Mr. Obama.’”

The comments follow recent efforts by GOP candidate Mitt Romney to use the economic success of the Clinton years as a counterpoint to the lackluster job growth during Obama’s tenure. On NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Romney said Clinton “really did elevate the Democrat convention in a lot of ways and, frankly, the contrast may not have been as attractive as Barack Obama might have preferred.”

Clinton may — I say may! — not have intended to make Obama look bad. But when you look at the facts and what he actually said . . . he did.

See If You Can Identify the Problem Here

Filed under: General — Patterico @ 12:44 pm



How to be a surreptitious hacktivist — and tell the world about it:

Working from a beige house at the end of a dirt road, Jeff Bardin switches on a laptop, boots up a program that obscures his location, and pecks in a passkey to an Internet forum run by an Iraqi branch of Al Qaeda.

Soon the screen displays battle flags and AK-47 rifles, plus palm-lined beaches to conjure up a martyr’s paradise.

“I do believe we are in,” says Bardin, a stout, 54-year-old computer security consultant.

Barefoot in his bedroom, Bardin pretends to be a 20-something Canadian who wants to train in a militant camp in Pakistan. With a few keystrokes, he begins uploading an Arabic-language manual for hand-to-hand combat to the site.

“You have to look and smell like them,” he explains. “You have to contribute to the cause so there’s trust built.”

Then you have to tell all the details to a newspaper reporter.

WTF? (Why the face?)

P.S. This somehow reminds me of the post from yesterday, about the dad who wrote a NYT op-ed about how his daughters don’t see him eating pot brownies. I just can’t quite make the connection, man.


Powered by WordPress.

Page loaded in: 0.0675 secs.