Ohio Valley Politics

I’ve moved on to the Buckeye State Blog.

If you haven’t already heard the news, I’ll be leaving my own little online empire here to help takeover the Buckeye State Blog. There are still a few things I need to get worked out before I really get started there, but as of now I consider BSB my primary concern.

The Nixon picture should have given this away, but this was an April Fools joke.

It’s confession time here at OVP, I haven’t really been honest with everyone about the reasons for the rebranding to “Ohio Valley Politics” from “Left of Ohio”. Now it’s time to come clean.

Early last summer I began to realize the there were just too many high quality Ohio blogs being operated and that, quite frankly, I wasn’t able to compete. I decided it was time to create an exit strategy from Ohio politics before I developed a lousy reputation. Once this difficult decision was made, the location of my self-imposed exile was obvious, I would simply cross the river into West Virginia. It’s nearby and they don’t really have the high number of politically focused blogs that Ohio does, it was a perfect fit.

The next problem became the name. I couldn’t very well continue to call the site “Left of Ohio” if I was covering the state to the right of Ohio and “Right of Ohio” was thrown out almost immediately for reason’s I’m sure you can figure out. However after some though I realized that the name “Ohio Valley Politics” would allow me to continue blogging in Ohio while the details of my move were finalized and smooth the transition when the time came.

This move will be taking place in the coming months and should be concluded before many of us leave on Google’s Mars Expedition.

I just wanted to quickly note that I seem to be having problems with my laptop again and may not be able to keep up with this site’s usual pace for the next few days.

I also want to go on the record stating that I will NEVER buy an HP computer again.

I’ve got nothing better to do, so I’m going to try out a new service called “Cover It Live” to make sarcastic comments about the State of the Union speech. Keep in mind that this is mainly just a test of the “Cover It Live” software.

Update - 10:15 PM 1/28/2008

MSNBC has the text of the speech here. Apparently ThinkProgress broke the embargo.

Update - 10:23 PM 1/28/2008

The four DCCC text messages:

Bush: We share a common goal- making health care more affordable and accessible for all Americans.
Reality: He vetoed healthcare for 10 million kids, twice.

Bush: 116 million American taxpayers would see their taxes rise by an avg of $1,800.
Reality: Middle income Americans will receive less than half that.

Bush: Trust in innovative spirit of medical researchers, empower them to discover new treatments
Reality: Bush vetoed funding for stem cell research, twice

Bush on Iraq: The truth is Bush’s endless war in Iraq is not only costing American lives, but also $11 billion a month.

After calling HP support in regards to my hard drive (not quite) crash I was told to expect a new hard drive to arrive this Friday (I opted to handle the install myself and not have to send the computer back). This worked out great for me because I’d be able to get it installed over the weekend and be back to the normal routine by Monday.

Apparently HP didn’t think that was good enough though, they sent it out overnight and it arrived on my doorstep today, less than 24 hours after my call. Now I thought Friday was great, but getting it today was even better. I might even have it up and running by Friday.

Update - 4:39 PM 10/31/2007

I’ve gone ahead and installed the hard drive myself and it went well. Upon starting the computer, however, I got an error message (in DOS ) saying that the network card may be unplugged and goes into a continuous loop between testing it and the error screen. I got the same error message once before I replaced the hard drive.

I’m hoping it was just because I hadn’t installed the drivers (or even the operating system) yet and that the reason I got it before was because the driver was corrupted, but I just can’t help feeling like I’m in denial.

I just wanted to give everyone a heads up that posting will be light for a few days due to a hard drive crash on my laptop. So far none of my tricks have had any real effect and I’m probably going to have to replace it.

This makes 3 computers in a row that have had hard drive crashes about a year after I got them. It’s not all bad news though, the warranty expires a week from today. If it had to happen at least it happened now.

I’ve also managed to come up with a temporary fix that should help me get to my files and back them up.

So right now OVP is offline. Apparently the server that it was hosted on at DreamHost, Triton, has gone down and people are working to replace it with new hardware.

Again, if your reading  this than the site is obviously back up (I’m writing this in Windows Live Writer to be posted then). I just want you to know what happened if you tried to come here earlier.

Compounding this problem was a separate  issue I created last night while upgrading to WordPress 2.3.1. That’s also been fixed.

I know that there’s a lot of stuff that I’d normally include in an introduction post that I should probably save for the (yet to be made) "About" page, but I do have some things to say about why I made this move.

I’d first like to start out by thanking all the people who read my old site. When I started it I never imagined it would take me where it has.

I also want to quickly point out that even though this site has existed on my hard drive for since early June, things have been happening very quickly recently (for example I’ve only had hosting for about 14 hours now). I’m sure there will be some problems that will come to light now that the site is live. I’m also still in the process of getting things setup, if something doesn’t appear to work right it will probably be fixed within a few days.

Again, thanks for sticking with me. I appreciate it more than you can imagine.