Established A.D. 2000, March 19. Now in our ninth calendar year! Number 445 (Vol. 9, No. 40). This edition is for the week of September 29--October 5, 2008.
OCTOBER BIRTHDAYS Ashley Lewis, Oct 2, 24 yrs Hugo Morley, Oct 2, 41 yrs Josh Montogmery, Oct 4, 25 yrs Lisa Rio Zubeck, Oct 5, 43 yrs Josh Sullivan, Oct 13, 27 yrs Autumn Rio, Oct. 18, 26 yrs Paul Guzzo, Oct. 20, 33 yrs Corey Castellano, Oct 27, 45 yrs Mike "Deadguy" Scott, Oct 28, 37 yrs
Once again, and hopefully for the last time for a while, I'm under the gun time-wise (mostly due to hurried development on the new Schlockarama section), but I do have a few thoughts to post in today's brief headline section.
Bail-Out
As of this writing (Wed), Congress has still not agreed on a "bail-out" package to rescue the nation's dire economic situation. The newest proposed revisions are scheduled to be voted upon over the next couple days.
The threat of failure, of course, carries with it the predicted second coming of The Great Depression. I know I said last week that this bail-out was a necessary measure, and with money markets having seized and banks no longer writing loans, I still feel that way, I don't see how it is avoidable. Higher FDIC guarantees on deposits ($250K, up from $100K) are a good start, but it's going to take more than that and in a hurry to get money flowing freely again.
I only hope the powers that be on Capitol Hill know what they're doing with the new proposals.
Paul Newman
News of the great actor's passing came very late last week and was not mentioned on the homepage, although it was on Readers' Comments. However, Mike Smith did his usual fantastic job covering the highlights of this man's career in last week's Rant for those who might've missed it.
R.I.P. AOL Hometown
I just got an email from America Online announcing the end of an era: their webhosting service, AOL Hometown, which came free with every account, and where Nolan's Pop Culture Review got its start over eight years ago (as Nolan's Newsstand), is shutting down permanently at the end of this month, October 31st.
Anyone who has perused my oldest Archives can see AOL's footprint on every page, mostly by the "page created by Easy Designer" link at the bottom of all those pages. (Easy Designer was their proprietary website-building and upload tool.) The links no longer function, but I left all those pages intact for historical/archival purposes 'cuz I'm just nutty like that.
Of course, it also obviously signals that AOL is no longer the world wide web behemoth it was when dial-up was the primary means of accessing the internet. Now, basically what they're "selling" is their browser, and of course, maybe a few tens of thousands of accounts left in America still on dial-up.
In 2000, AOL came with a "generous" 2 MegaBytes of webhosting space, haha. Now a single photograph can take up that much space. By 2002, the hosting account had grown to about 12MB. By the end of last year it was, I'm guessing, about 5 --10 gigabytes, about standard for entry-level webhosting via ISP provider these days.
For any of you out there with presences still on Hometown (our own Terence Nuzum and Mike Smith being two), it might be advisable to start making back-ups of your files and, if it means anything to you, looking for another webhost. Of course, if you're already affiliated with sites like MySpace, that may not be necessary.
Schlockarama: Grindhouse
I've been working slavishly on the new codes for this section and I'm really happy with the results, but man it was a job! However, the breakthroughs in development that came out of all this will affect how the rest of the site is run as I gradually upgrade all the PCR writers personal templates to this more interactive automated system. In any event, Terence and I are running the "beta" version through some tests, and we hope to be up and running with it full-bore before the weekend.
More To Come... Retrorama takes us on a trip through a favorite and historical Florida theme park, look for it Thursday......Due to work schedule conflicts, the embattled Dragoon comic-series finale may or may not make it up this week, but the boys are doing the best they can......Is anyone looking forward as much as I am to the Biden/Palin debate Thursday night?.....
Please consider making a donation to help support Crazed Fanboy! Click on the "donate" link below and give whatever you can. I sincerely thank you for any and all consideration.---Nolan
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