Latest Polls

I'm still not doing much with this blog as the back end is still in shambles. With my schedule this week, I have minutes-long blocks of time to blog, and the back end takes minutes-long to do little beyond producing error messages. I've been putting some items on my old site, and I may switch to that site for the medium term if I judge that this situation is not changing (perhaps through the end of the election period?). The old site is here.

I've put some polling data over there if you are interested.

More like this

A couple of weeks ago, it was impossible to find a pundit or poll maven who saw a Trump victory as a possibility. I made the audacious claim at the time that this was incorrect, and I've been taking heat from it since then. Much of this widespread misunderstanding is ironically caused by the good…
As mentioned a while back, I'm experimenting with "active learning" techniques in my intro courses this term. Specifically, I'm doing a variant of the "Peer Instruction" method developed by Eric Mazur and others. There are a few complications imposed by our calendar/ class schedule, but I'm giving…
The always interesting Timothy Burke has a post that's basically a long links dump pointing to two articles about the state of humanities in academia, which includes a sort of aside that is more interesting to me than either of the linked articles: This leads me to the second piece I really liked…
Last week I had a visit from a friend of mine, who was on something of a farewell tour. After several years of planning, he'd packed in his dependable but much-begrudged corporate job, and was setting sail for Asia, to see more of the world. He's already seen much more of the world than most…

Yay! Is this the old OK, where it just works, the more recent OK where it is broken but we got used to it, or the new OK where it is even worse but like rats in some long term experiment on stress hormones we are even more used to it?

(I suppose I'll find out in a few minutes!)

Coming from a wordpress background and moving to MT at Sb was a bit traumatic for me. I'm not sure if the problems we are having are MT related or database/server related. Not that they are unconnected... I suspect the problem is in the database because:

1) There is a correlation between commenting time outs and back end problems;

2) The comments are the largest part of the database;

3) The blog otherwise runs fairly well.

The glitch is this: Several months ago, all of the sudden, the "new entry" call on the back end went from taking a second or two to 25 seconds or more. Why would that be?