Wednesday, February 11, 2009

New and parallel Devil Last December, as I was about to write my Christmas post, I realized I had run out of storage. I got out my credit card and paid for extra storage to Radio Userland and the code they sent would not work. I wrote to sales, and customer service and it took about twelve days before someone got back to me and gave me the right code. As you can imagine, the experience was unnerving. I had resisted moving my blog even if I knew the software was obsolete, because I like the idea of my site being in a single place, it is a permanent database of things that have happened in Venezuela in the last six and a half years. When I mentioned this, Dean suggested he could find some Chinese students that could help me migrate the whole thing at a reasonable cost. At least three readers were generous enough to offer to host it for free in their servers. Thank you all for your offers to give me a hand. But they key push came from Omar, who wrote that while there is no migration path from Radio Userland directly to WordPress, there is a migration from Userland to LiveJournal and another from LiveJournal to WordPress. And indeed there was, so I began learning my way around WordPress and the first free weekend I had, I moved all of the six and a half years to WordPress and have actually been running the Devil in parallel at http://devilsexcrement.wordpress.com. In fact, I have been posting first at the new site and then later just copying and pasting into the old one. There are some differences. In Userland I had many categories that could be sort of independent blogs, like my orchids page, where I post my pictures there and, but they don’t appear in the main sections. I can not do the same thing in WordPress, so that I will probably keep posting those pictures in the old blog. I was not able to move the comments, maybe there is a way, I just don’t know how to do it. I was planning to announce this next week after the referendum, but then I realized that posts go on the air very fast with wordpress and this will be an advantage on Sunday when people check eagerly for any news. Thus, I will continue posting in both systems for a few months, it is not much of an effort. Sometimes next week I will redirect the domains devilexcrement.com and devilsexcremnet.com to the wordpress site. I am not finished with the new site. It has been a lot of work to migrate everything and make it look good, but wordpress does not use html but CSS and I don’t know much about CSS. So, if any reader knows enough CSS, maybe they can give me a hand in inserting a picture in the heading of the new blog and posting the blog award box on the left side. I would really appreciate it. In the meantime thanks for reading me and if you want to see the posts faster move to the wodpress site and if there is something you don’t like about the new look, let me know, I may be able to change it. I will let you know in a few months when I stop posting in the old site with the old software 10:09:19 PM    comment []

Stern Government Warning: Don’t eat your ballot on Sunday or else! And in a bizarro piece of news, General Gonzalez Gonzalez, the same one that held a press conference to deny the undeniable and who is in charge of the voting logistics on Sunday, warned Venezuelan citizens that anyone eating his/her ballots on Sunday’s referendum would be jailed. Said the General: “They have eaten them. This is an electoral crime” Clearly the General has the best interests of Venezuelan citizens in mind. Who knows, the ink from the machines may be poison or when they extract it, your vote’s secrecy may be lost. These guys really have their priorities straight. 7:23:01 PM    comment []

Chavez personally bans Lech Walesa from coming to Venezuela Last year, Polish Nobel Peace Prize winner Lech Walesa was invited to Venezuela to talk to the opposition and there was an uproar when it was reported that the Venezuelan Government had told him not to come. However, the Government said that it had nothing against Walesa, but they had told the Polish leader that they could not guarantee his personal security. The argument was strange, given that Chavez travels under heavy guard and his buddies Evo Morales, Rafael Correal and Daniel Ortega come regularly to Caracas and are given high level protection. Then this week Walesa gave an interview saying that he was coming to Caracas in response to an invitation from the Venezuelan opposition students and to meet with ONG’s. Walesa said that he would help give students powerful arguments against Hugo Chavez. Well, lo and behold this time around Chavez had no qualms about saying Walesa was simply not welcome in Caracas. Chavez asked his Foreign Minister to stop Walesa from entering the country. The Venezuelan President said that he had to defend the dignity (???) of the country and Walesa could say anythng he wanted outside Venezuela but not here. Once again, like in the case of La Piedrita and so many others it is Chavez that gives orders as if this was his private fiefdom and there were no laws and regulations. It also becomes clear what a liar Chavez and his Foreign Minsiter are in that last year they simply used the argument about Walesa’s security to stop him from coming to Venezuela in an elegant way. 6:47:46 PM    comment []