A number of regulars have noted that, as a way to help me finish this fundraiser with a flourish, they’ll match any donations from the left-leaning commenters who post here daily.
So far, the sum total they have to meet? $0.00.
I know, I know. Hardly shocking, is it? But in the unlikely event anything changes, I’ll let you know.
To the rest of you who have contributed—either with donations or with kind words of support—thank you again! Without you, this site wouldn’t be worth its weight in bad haikus.
[Note: This post will remain up until midnight tonight, when the fundraiser officially ends. After that? We shall never speak of it again…]
MAJOR BREAKING UPDATE: Beetroot has dropped $30 into the fundraising kitty! I thank him—either for his generosity or for his desire to break some of you financially. Or both. Whatever works, right?
BREAKING UPDATE, 2: elendil has contributed $13, though s/he did so to prove a point about…something or other. Having no control over spending in Iraq myself, I just kind of skipped it and rolled around on the floor in thirteen crisp one-dollar bills.
Christ!! I hate playing at these “low limit” tables, never can tell what riff raff will sit down next to you.
I had to go to it twice. RAISE THE LIMIT!!!!!
If you catblog, I will give you ten bucks.
Unfortunately, Jeff, giving money to someone without getting something of greater value in return offends my deeply held beliefs in the free market, anarcho-capitalism and Austrian economics. I’m morally opposed to all forms of donation on general principle. So, you know, don’t take it personally; theory bends for no man, and all that.
Then again, I suppose one could make the argument that I’m the freeloader by continuing to read your material every day, and recycling your arguments and fact-collection about Plame and identity politics and media hypocrisy. Lord knows I won’t be the one to do all that leg work. Sheesh.
And I suppose, if you twist my arm, I’d have to admit that I get a chuckle out of those conversations that are overheard in a Ramadi bunker. That’s gotta be worth something.
So, OK, you’ve got an unconventional business model going on here. A contribution is on its way. We’ll call it a bona fide payment for political-humor services rendered. I can live with that.
Jeff: If you don’t mind me asking, just how much IS your hosting bill?
rls: You’re a poker player? Hell, maybe I should pimp my poker blog here. Hmmm…
You da Man Jeff.
Beck. Something like $250 a month with hosting and ($200 for the dedicated server with boost and $50 for the DSL). I want to change hosts, eventually, but when I wrote Hosting Matters, nobody wrote me back.
“Forget the leather pants, I had you more for a gay puffy shirt with some cute, tight-fitting breeches, like in the Three Musketeers”—Max Sawicky, MaxSpeak
Twenty bucks, if you post the pics. Beats catblogging, right?
I’m hearing that Bill Gates is lookin’ to unshoulder some of the Rich Man’s Burden… Poor little guy.
SB: body
and soul, baby
Thanks, Lloyd.
Joe—I already traded those pictures for a handful of magic beans.
Which, as it happens, weren’t magic at all. Fucking Russians selling shit out of the backs of Chevy vans.
I just bought a motorbike, so now I’m extra lean on cash.
Hope you like Zeppelin…
http://blogfiles.wfmu.org/KF/2006/05/led/Little_Roger_and_the_Goosebumps_-_Stairway_To_Gilligans_Island.mp3
and this is a guy singing Stariway backwards, with the video reversed so that he is singing it correctly…
http://www.looptvandfilm.com/blog/stairway/stairway.html
um, yeah… er, Stairway.
No, no, no, Jeff. This is how you pitch:
I don’t know exactly why you feel COMPELLED to sign over your life savings to me, but when you do, feel free to use blue or black ink.
It’s kind of like, “I don’t know why exactly you are thinking about slipping your arms around my neck, baby; maybe it is my boyish charm or my rugged good looks. Maybe it is the gangsta roll of fifties I left on your dresser. But when you do just let that happen and get really close, I don’t know exactly how many toe-spasming, back-rending orgasms is too many, but it sure will be fun to find out, won’t it?”
My trackbacks always bounce, so in order to leech off of Jeff’s traffic, I’ll have to post a link in comments.
Here. Happy now?
Didn’t you see where Bill Gates wishes he wasn’t the richest man in the world? Maybe we can get you two together and kill two birds with one stone.
Turing Word: myself, as in, I’d like to thank u for lettin’ me be mice elf again.
Do you people have any idea what’s at stake here???
You and me both Kevin
Go ahead and kill that stage frightened, no dancing, excuse making, beer drinking, dorito eating land lobster. And then I’ll donate MORE!!
Ka-ching!
Jeff, why don’t you write books?
Uh, Jeff you know the kids often refer to mdma pills as “beans” (dont ask how I know that). So if you tried to plant those you probably weren’t using them as intended. So let’s ease up on the Russians selling shit out of Chevy vans, ok? I’ve purchased many useful items from Russians selling shit out of Chevy vans including a three head vcr, a hand crank dvd player, used underwear, my wife, a human kidney etc. If you remember where you planted them I would grab them before your little buddy grabs them. After all the last thing you want is to be woken up from a klonapin fever dream by an x’d up armadillo sodomizing you like Tom Sizemore on a two week meth bender.
OBTW I left a little something for you on Paypal, not much but I’m kinda poor. However, I had to give until it hurt because I couldn’t stand the thought of Actus not having an outlet for his genius commentary. Not to mention the fact that it’s a BushKult member requirement.
Keep up the good work, if you weren’t here to stoke the flames of my anti-brown people blood lust I don’t know what I would do.
Jeff–
I sent you a small token of my regard. I expect you to turn it into quarters, like Cartman, and roll about in it in an inflatable pool and mock me, so don’t let me down. For reason, I typed “not sucking.” So don’t start sucking or I’ll demand it back.
Jeff,
I’d characterize your writing as challenging to read, and not just to my vocabulary (I have a doctorate myself, so make of that what you will). In the “elaborate compound sentence” category, it’s Jeff Goldstein FTW… you just don’t find that on too many blogs.
At any rate, my expression of enjoyment is sincere… one donation on the way.
If I send you money, will you promise to stop eating paste?
Mr. Goldstein,
I’ve been enjoying your droll and informed commentary for a number of years now. I have just made a small donation, accompanied by a grossly insulting and bigoted jab. I hope you enjoy it. Thank you.
So Jeff, what does a link on your page cost? I sent you a nickel, do I get a line???????
Have a nice vacation!
Money sent. Spend as needed.
BECAUSE OF THE GAY ARMADILLO!!!!!!!
TW: more. Fucking artificial intelligence, it picks the worst words.
What level of donation does it take to get a Protein Wisdom Prayer Cloth?
You don’t need money.
You only think you need money.
You have money.
You have some money.
You and your money are now together.
You and money are together.
You don’t need money.
More money is somewhere else.
More money is not with you.
More money comes sometimes.
More money may come to you.
More money might come.
More money is already yours.
You don’t need money.
Home.
The highest donation will see the armadillo dance.
That is all I can tell you.
Because I’m cryptic that way.
<delurking>
Donation made. Just don’t pull a Sullivan and go on vacation for a month immediately after your fundraiser.
TW: this is the first blog I’ve ever paid for.
</delurking>
Right, Jeffie. Dancing in the white suit in the snowstorm won’t count (or whatever that one was).
I get paid next week. It’s you or the power bill, and I’m weighing my options.
I have just made a small donation, accompanied by a grossly insulting and bigoted jab.
Hey! That’s my schtick! Right down to the small donation.
Not only that – you are also a self anointed bastard.
Jeff would NEVER do such a thing. The armadillo would, though.
No. You are a complete wanker.
Hmm. Well there’s another .0008 cent in bandwidth costs I’ll never get back…
Jeff  You’re neglecting the most profitable financing ploys:
1. The Oral Roberts: “If Ah don’t raise 1,000,000 dollars, Pajamas Media will call me home!”
2. The biggy, for only the heaviest hitters in blogdom:
JeffSelect…
That’s not your computer monitor, tomboy, it’s a mirror. Stop blogging from the bathroom.
Oh, sure, he asks for money right after tax day.
Ask me again in a month.
Screw the dancing armadillo; how much do you want, and in which nation’s currency, to ban any one Retarded Telephone Pole of my choice from this site for all of eternity…?
That was Frank before he was P-whipped….
cheers,
Dick
You know you can get a 250 GB bandwidth site at Godaddy for $3 per month, $7 if you want access to the logs. A teribyte site is $20 per month, that ought to be more than enough even if you’re Glenn Reynolds. Dreamhost is advertising a terrabyte of hosting for $8 / month.
I’ll have my wife look into it. She handles the hosting stuff.
If it sounds too good to be true, though…
I think I started out at Jaguar at $35 a month. Then, everytime I got a traffic surge (which happens with blogs), the site would crash. So they put me on a dedicated server, and eventually, a dedicated server with two hard drives. Uptime and service are very important. And I hope to find a different host at some point—though I hate the propagation process.
Not sure what it is about my site that is so large; I pulled the blogroll because my previous host told me it was sucking up a lot of resources. That guy was a friend, and he said he couldn’t host me anymore.
My blog and my business site are both on Godaddy for $7 per month each.
Godaddy is a big domain name retailer, they’ve got great up-time stats and their whole system seems to be automated. Your web site will be untouched by human hands.
My sites are pretty low traffic. I know that getting a dedicated server at Godaddy is pretty expensive if you really need that. But it might be worthwhile to get a cheap site and just try it. You can always move it back.
Dreamhost has a reputation for allowing users to run any software at all on their servers. That would be great for testing and for super fancy, but I wouldn’t trust a business to their system unless I had a dedicated server, because if I can run any software, so can the other clients.
This is perfect timing … my subscription to “Field & Stream” just ran out.
Hmmm… moving to the mountains, huh?
Same here as soon as my allergies calm down enough to get a look-see… but CO is way, way, way too close to my Lady’s family which *must be avoided by a 1000 mile radius*. The south has all sorts of varmints crawling around… and then there are the actual critters… so north it is…
So this disability retired bureaucrat needs his cash for trips, moving and re-settling… then if I have *any* money to spare, I will dole it out to such worthies as I see fit.
And so long as Jeff’s fun foods are above Jack-in-the-Box taco’s and Thunderbird, he can not expect anything in the way of remuneration to be until late in the year. The Claritin-D bill alone is going to be *huge*… looking to buy in bulk from Canada as the meth-worried folks here are really, really killing my sinuses with frivolous regulations.
He will *not* be forgotten…
Unless, of course, I forget…
Jeff… Who?
*sigh*
I love it when the Michele Catalano blurb pops up. Makes me think that when Jeff moves to his new server he should just rename the site “JizzWiz”–
But then I figure probably Frito-Lay owns the rights to it, and what a messy court battle In Re: JizzWiz would be, and I think it’s better that he sticks with preteenw . . . I mean, proteanw . . . I mean, whatever the heck it is.
done and done. i subsidized about 3 feet of new moulding for the Protein Wisdom bat cave. enjoy
Gee, at this writing the comment thread has reached 48 without hearing from the usual loiterer, actus. I believe it’s a new Protein Wisdom record.
Do you suppose the absence has anything to do with the subject? Naaaahhhh.
Cordially…
Sent. Not much, but it’s what I can do right now. Now – it’s earmarked for a specific purpose, but spend it as you wish, of course.
Jeff
Ya know I love you and I did hit the tipjar
but, man, like your trackbacks are teh suXor.
here plus twin blogging just below it.
Got any new pics of your little neocon?? Please?
well, so long as you’re doing requests…. I’d give ten bucks for a pic of you in your rimless glasses! c’mon! quit stalling on that one! who else will back me up on this? ladies? Carin?
Thanks, Darleen.
My trackbacks do suck. I’m pretty sure it’s the software—Expression Engine not working well with others—but it could be something I’m doing wrong.
I have some settings on to prevent spam; don’t know if that might have something to do with it, either.
Oh. And no new pics of Satchel just now. Or of me in rimless glasses.
But there’s always the chance some could show up…
I’ve worked on a couple of GoDaddy sites a while back. Unless they’ve changed a lot – don’t do it.
Dreamhost I’ve heard both good and bad about – so I won’t say anything on that one – but GoDaddy’s hosting is a mess if you want to do anything outside of basics.
(word is ‘mean’- heh)
I’d hate to have to choose between a Satchel pic and Jeff in the new glasses, without a shirt.
Hate. To. Choose.
I’m re-thinking this whole electricity thing. We could just let it go, but it would be a hard sell WRT the husband.
Hmmm.
1. So how much did you rake in you modern day Ali Baba?
As if you really needed the money. We are all aware that this blogsite is nothing more than a direct Mobying attempt by none other than George Soros!
Jeff Goldstein = George Soros!!
Why aren’t there pictures with BOTH of you in them?
Ehh? Ehhhhhh?? Speak the truth. Don’t make me break out the …. stick!
2. Anyone else think that Anna Nicole Smith does deserve something? Not for any legal reasons but because anyone who is willing to cavort with a 85 year old weiner deserve something.
Even if it’s a pat on the head, some breath mints and a handful of dead presidents.
3. So. Where’s the ‘dillo? Down in Arizona trying his hand at panhandling claiming the illegal alien ‘dillos put him out of work?
You’ve got the random trackback URL setting on. I switched that on at SondraK’s a while back and trackbacks started crapping out. If you turn that off, they’ll start working again, but I don’t know if that’s going to make your spam explode. You could always turn comments off on old posts, but you have to edit some code to allow the old comments to still show.
Let me know if you need help with that.
PBS went through their “give me money, you’re so smart” schtick for the last week+. I hope those beggars die with a virulent bacteria feasting on their innards. Jesus.
You WATCH PBS? Oh…
Well, I’ve been too busy to blog about anything myself… but then there’s no need to when Mr. Goldstein is always (a) there first and (b) has the topic covered in more depth than any three media outlets combined and with more links than Pam Anderson’s chainmail halter top. And the commenters are (mostly) quality folks, to boot.
I am saving up for a(nother) .45, a Springfield 1911A1 compact, for summer carry. I put this month’s installment off a month, sent you the gelt, and consider it money well spent.
Keep up the good work. The upcoming election season should be good for some great posts.
TW = “numbers”. We’ve got NUMBERS, man…
“when I wrote Hosting Matters, nobody wrote me back.”
Hah, I’d like to upgrade there, but am worried Stacy will reply to my request in her traditional attitude-rich manner.
Like, other ExpressionEngine blogs (e.g., mine)?
Methinks you just need to upgrade to 1.4.1
I donate some advice. Close this blog. It really bites the big one.
Hmmm…a couple of bottles of port, or hit the tip jar. Fine, tip jar. Jeff’s work lasts longer than the relaxation I could get from a pair of bottles of tawny anyway. And no headaches either…well, until I read something from M.F., or I try too hard to decypher one of the Typing Telephone Pole’s comments.
I sent a few bucks your way, Jeff, but via Amazon. That means it was anon….oh crap, I’m giving it away now! Ack, stop reading this!!!!
Oh, man, I conributed before the door prize promise! Rats. Oh well, my love is pure, and virtue is its own reward.
Evidently, the rumor is that someone took credit for my contribution.
I wish you would have said that before I decided that $25 was sufficient.
If I had known there was a “Champagne Room”-type thing going on, I might have given a little more!
T/W:-’these’ – as in , “But, we don’t ever talk about these things…”
What the hell is this, NPR? For cryin’ out loud. I mean really. Harrumph!!
But then again you have never been the ‘genteel’ sort.
I’ve tried to give you little bits via Amazon over the months, and I hope you received them. If those come to you anonymously, then I’m going to take credit for Major John’s donation this time. I bet it was goooood.
Good luck with the fund-raiser mate! Hope it goes better than our sales (so far) of our EP.
You know Jeff, you could be like Clinton. Instead of a night’s stay in the Lincoln bedroom, you could give the “heavy hitters” the ‘dillo’s rag pad that’s piled in the corner….and perhaps a bag of Doritos and a couple of mini’s….
I think they would be beating down your….door!
I had a fundraiser last week and nobody, I mean nobody hit the tip jar.
Of course, it probably would have worked better if I had a blog and the tip jar wasn’t in my kitchen, but still….
Ahh, here’s a buck. Don’t spend it all in one place.
You know Veeshir, if you weren’t so quick to call the police you might have actually gotten something in that jar.
Our esteemed host wrote:
If’n I can get The Liberal Avenger to chip in, will you unban him?
Admittedly my site gets a lot less traffic than yours, about 50 visitors per day, but I have a huge amount of bandwidth I never use each month, and it costs me, for both the domain name and the hosting service, $219.99 a year (due on December 27th, damn it!). The WordPress software was a freebie.
Dear Mr. Wisdom,
If I may call you Protein. I am Barishi M’bingu former treasurer for Idi Amin Dada Oumee. Since Mr. Amin’s hasty departure from Uganda and eventual flight to Saudi Arabia, not to mention his unfortunate demise three short years ago this August 16th, I have been managing the late Mr. Amin’s estate funds.
I have been trying to remove these funds from the state bank of Jeddah unsuccessfully for the last three years. This is where you, my good friend Protein, can help! If it would be possible for me to donate the late Mr.Amin’s considerable funds to your esteemed blog, I would be able via Paypal, to remove these funds from the state bank of Jubbah and I am prepared to pay you handsomely for your assitance.
The present value of the late Mr. Amin’s funds residing in the state bank of Josha total to some $10,000,000.00 American. For your assistance, I am prepared to pay you ten percent of the late Mr. Amin’s fortune, which is being held in the state bank of Jonna.
I am prepared to donate to your blog in increments of $10,000.00 at a time. You will provide me with access to your bank account. I will deposit the money daily over the next thousand days so as not to draw suspicion. Each following day, I will withdraw the money from your account and into my numbered Swiss account.
At the end of this time I will e-mail you the secret code to the new numbered account I have created just for you my good friend Protein! This will give you access to the money in a secret and tax free way. Ofcourse in the meantime, since I am transferring all of the late Mr. Amin’s funds from the accursed state bank of Jarubbah, I will also need access to your credit cards to help me in my day to day expenses, as I’m sure you understand.
I thank you in advance for what I’m sure will be a pleasing transaction for the both of us my good friend Protein! Additionally, as a token of my fiendship and good trust, you may send me your little armadillo friend and I will stuff his little shell with cash and return him to you via UPS red.
If there is an emergency, you may relay a message to me via the democrat national committee, who will be most happy to assist us in this urgent matter.
I don’t buy it, Beggar. I don’t see any glaring misspellings nor any use of all caps.
That cannot possibly be a genuine Nigerian scam.
so mcgehee, you’re saying it’s not a scam? beggar, if Protein turns you down, drop me an email!
GoDaddy’s hosting is a mess if you want to do anything outside of basics.
Jeff only needs to be able to run Expression Engine, right? Godaddy has PHP, MySQL and PHPMyAdmin. I think that’s all he needs.
I think it’s new for them to have PHPMyAdmin, and I’ve never used their copy. I already had PHP, Apache and PHPMyAdmin installed on my laptop, so I used that.
I can see that before Godaddy added their own control panel, it was a horrible mess for people who didn’t have all of that software (PHPMy Admin, an FTP client etc.) already installed on their computers. But they do have all that now. They have a java based FTP client built into their control console.
The one remaining annoyance with Godaddy is that their site is kind of hard to navigate and designed to sell you unnecessary add-ons more than it’s designed to be clear and easy to use. It’s easier to find the page that sells you useless email accounts on top of the infinite accounts you already get with hosting than it is to find the control panel for the accounts you already have.
I just tried their copy of PHPMyAdmin, it works just fine, he should be able to move his database over.
Sent. Best of luck, employee-of-the-month! Keep up the good work, Jeff. It’s a pleasure to stop by every day and read your work.
The problem is not space, Josh, it’s bandwidth. Allah and Michelle Malkin have helped me find a few candidates that sound like they can handle my site.
The problem is, I was doing those Martha Steward diary entries everyday and that was using a lot of resources.
Since the, though, the most I’ve used in a month 113 GB. That could pick up, though, as elections approach.
Well, my point is that per/month bandwidth is very cheap at both Godaddy and Dreamhost.
$20 gets you 1000 GB/month at Godaddy
$20 gets you 1600 GB/month at Dreamhost along with raising bandwidth (an extra 200GB/month per year) and a promise that the rate will never go up.
Godaddy has really nice traffic reports (you can query where your referals came from, the URL or even the search strings over any arbitrary time period), but you have to pay an extra $4/month to access that. You can see graphs by day, week, etc.
Whether these services are good for slashdot moments (high bandwidth days), I don’t know. But in theory, shared hosting could be better than dedicated server hosting because, its possible that they use load balancing and host your site on as many servers as necessary for the load… But I don’t know if any hosts actually do that.
I think dedicated servers cost a minimum of $100/month at both hosts.
Godaddy offers SSL really cheap ($20 per year), while Dreamhost offers that with VPN for the increadibly expensive $40 PER MONTH.
One worry I mentioned about dreamhost is that they let you run almost any software you want on their servers which is a security risk in my opinion – and also suggests that their load balancing must be pretty limited. It’s possible to load balance PHP, but I doubt that you can load balance Ruby on Rails.
Also dreamhost supports streaming, and I don’t think Godaddy does.
Another advantage of dreamhost is that they allow unlimited domains and unlimited subdomains per account.
Godaddy only allows one domain per account, though you get plenty of subdomains.
Anyway, Godaddy claims to be the world’s biggest hosting company. If anyone has economy of scale, they do.
By the way, I loved the Martha Stewart Diaries.
I think I emailed half of them to my much suffering friends – no wonder people won’t tell me their new email addresses.
I’m not so happy with your blogs newest incarnation as a media criticism site. I can’t read a whole article – I’d have to drill a hole in my skull to let the boredom out!
You’re a great and very clever humorist, why spend your time on this boring stuff?
Wait, so does this mean you won’t be donating?
And for the record, I do both. I just think now is a good time to hit some serious subjects of interest to me and, I think, of importance to the turn this country is taking toward the European model of progressive governance.
Well, I’m in favor of some parts of the European model of progressive governance.
I’d still be an employee (and not a business man as I now am) if the United States was like France and a programmer could get a job working 35 hours a week instead of 60-100 hour per week. My worst week, I worked 112 hours, didn’t bath and slept under the desk.
That’s the American model of wage slavery.
I could still be doing that, while wondering when my job was going to be outsourced to China or India.
So that’s a no, then?
How much linkwhoring can I get for an Andrew Jackson?
There you go buddy.
Basically, Jeff,
…should probably answer your question.
Socialists aren’t exactly known for their generosity.
And you know what? I’m just crabby enough this morning to ask: what the fuck is the deal with people so socially retarded that they flit around the internets leaving unasked-for critiques?
“Slashdot moments” tells me everything I need to know. Fucking socially retarded geeks.
That shit might be de riguer at geek sites, but blogs are a reflection of the writer. You come around saying “this shit is boring” and you show your amazing lack of social skills, d00d.
TW: I brought my etiquette book with me.
Ah, Jeff, still pissing off the right people. God bless you. As the moyel said, here’s your tip.
I’m intrigued by this move to the mountains thing. Believe me, if I could convince my wife to go along with it, I’d be doing a Jeremiah Johnson thing myself – assuming current-day Jeremiah Johnson types can receive digital cable, that is.
TW: “married” – this thing continues to be spooky.
Jeff,
Donation sent today. I also linked your telethon, so all three of my readers might make their way over.
Jeff, you got a snail mail addy I can send my donation to? Granted, a bit old fashioned but I do get some satisfaction in writing a check out from time to time.
Cheers!
I’ll donate if you post pictures of the kid using his new bow and arrow. I’ll double it if he manages to hit the side of an Oliver Willis at 10 paces.
I’ll also match any donation from actus.
I hit the button….
NOW DANCE FOR ME MONKEY!!!
Deth. er, I mean Beth, Where can I find a copy of THAT etoquette book. Hell*s Angels clubhouse, maybe? TG
There you go…
YOU DO REALIZE I COULD HAVE PURCHASED SEVERAL PIES INSTEAD?!?
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