The Cranky Professor

Sorry about the wrist. It's funny how it flares up and then eases off, not always 100% correlated with the amount of exercise.

So, you're back in business. Looking forward to words of wisdom.

I just bought Collapse by Jared Diamond. So far I've just read the first few pages. I loved Guns, Germs and Steel (read it twice) and I expect this one to be interesting as well.

......Mine is usually psychologically-induced, I'll admit. Ugh. Under your prompting I've updated the template (which is MUCH trickier now - I'm having to create templates and such) with the email contact info first. Blogrolling can come later.

.....I'm interested in the Diamond, too -- I liked GG&S. --MCT

I reread Thucydides a couple of years ago. I had a really bad experience with it when I had to read it in a freshman lit. course back in the mid-fifties. Talk about totally lost!! The recent read made a whole lot more sense--and I disciplined my self to read it by making it the only book I took on a weekend trip to a friend's wedding. I got a lot of reading done on the planes and in airports. I used the same method for getting through the Iliad, except that went with me on a trip to China, where I would have nochance to buy anything else to read.

Good luck in your DB recovery -- I'm sure you'll get most if not all back in the fullness of time.

If I might offer a couple of recommendations:
Get MT-Blacklist installed *pronto*.
The installation instructions are horribly skimpy, but Google around for supplementary advice. The paradoxical thing is that the installation is actually very simple, despite the confusing instructions. In any event, installation will have to be done sooner or later, and if a spamstorm hits first you'll be in a world of pain -- since the current version is technically a beta, and has no facility to despam automatically beyond the last few dozen comments.

The other thing is more a matter of design, in that the line separating your posts from the comments link confuses which link goes with which post (as the preceding comments illustrate, since they were intended to apply to the post below, not above). Putting the line *below* the comments link should take care of the problem.

.....I agree on the design point -- can you believe that this is the DEFAULT TEMPLATE for MT 3.14? I haven't had time to figure out the template stuff yet (other than adding my contact info and the blogroll), but I would indeed like the line to move. I haven't gotten blacklist 2 installed yet, but I'm working on it. GOSH the instructions are bad. Given that Jay Allen is working directly FOR them now you'd think it'd be easier -- but then again, MT's instructions are right at the degree of obscurity that I might suspect them of trying to force us into paid installation...I could NOT have gotten the blog running again without help on the movabletype.org/support site (and even those helpful souls took a couple of tries). And I, after all, wasn't a total newbie.