The Foundation Beyond Belief is collecting monetary donations to provide disaster relief for victims of the devastating tornado in Oklahoma. Do your part and FBB will act as a clearinghouse distributing the money to charities. Go to the donation page to see updates on the crisis response.

In situations like this, the American Red Cross is always a good charity as well. They also maintain a Safe and Well Listing for those with family in the region.

For those of you outside the US, or otherwise out of the loop here, a tornado blasted through the suburbs of Oklahoma City yesterday afternoon. Some early reports estimate the tornado was over a mile at the base (!) and that it covered almost 20 miles during the 40 minutes it existed. Frankly, these are numbers I would have said were impossible just a few days ago. The chaos is such that death tolls and injury reports are unreliable.

Patheos is making a changeover in its comment system to Disqus. I am, frankly, in over my head on this, so I can only report what Patheos is telling me.

I think the idea is to do the changeover ASAP, and the process will take some 24 hours to integrate all the old comments. During that time there’s a good chance that some of the comments made will be lost in the shuffle.

I’ll update as they update me. For the record, it looks like Libby Anne and Chris Hallquist are more on ball than I am. Let’s face it, they usually are.

EDIT: The changeover is done and Disqus is now “absorbing” the past few days of comments. Makes it sound like we’ve picked up a symbiot or something.

Hello all. Apologies for the state of the forums at the moment; basically the forum host is crap and deals with spam really badly. I stripped out about 200 spam posts last night, and literally thousands of spam tags, and I’ve had to do the same again today. Basically somebody’s got a bot spamming tags and posts faster than I can deal with them, so the forum is essentially unusable until whoever it is gets bored and stops. I can’t even ban the bots as fast as new ones sign up, and I can’t set the forum side to require new commenters to be pre-approved.

Basically the forum host sucks.

That is all.

No, we’re not moving to FtB (although is would be appropriate, wouldn’t it?)

I’ve mentioned a couple of times that I’m buying a house. Well, now I’ve bought a house and we’ll be moving in on Friday. Naturally this means a certain amount of time off the grid, since it will take time to get power and internet set up.

The good news is that I now have a guest room. Remember, it’s first come, first serve this summer when the big NKOTB reunion tour arrives in Albany.