All,

A journalist for Prospect is interested in getting stories about families who are struggling to refi their mortgages.

You can contact her on twitter (@MonicaBPotts) or email: mpotts@prospect.org

Plus One Press let me put up the excerpt of the day here. [link]

A wee Diana Wynne Jones / Cooking the Books giveaway - [link]

I wrote a tribute to Elmore Leonard as my favorite author a while ago. [link]

It's time to help Ginger kick some cancer ass. And also some mice ass. And get a new dishwasher if she wants it. And also treats for Mr. Peabody. Let's spread it all over the internet and help one of our own who has never asked for help. Even if you can't help right now, could you please share the page on your own Facebook? Thank you!

(I asked and received Ginger's permission to set this up. I have co-conspirators who can out themselves if they wanna.)

[link]

After receiving a very sweet email from Shir, it got me thinking...

So I'm volunteering to be the keeper of the email list of "people who want to be notified for fundraising efforts" for individual Buffista causes.

Often we lead the efforts in secret to surprise the recipient, but that means many people are excluded because the lists are ad-hoc and I generally end up writing to the same 40 folks again and again because I've got their email addresses.

This is entirely opt-in. And it will mean that if a fellow Buffista wants to kick off a campaign on behalf of someone, they can ask me for the latest email list and I will provide it. That way you will not be left out of the loop of any efforts, and we can effectively raise money in secret without excluding anyone inadvertently.

I am so grateful for all y'all.

If you think you know who used chemical weapons in Syria you are wrong, no matter who you ascribe responsibility to. My latest on my personal blog

[link]

So yesterday the entire account went down, including b.info. The plan is to get b.info hosted somewhere entirely separately from here, because that's the whole point. Not yet achieved, though.

In the interim, I created buffistas.tumblr.com. And I can assign buffistas.info to that, so that's probably simpler than what I was pursuing fruitlessly in the first place. No, you don't need to be "on tumblr" to get it, or anything. And Im 99% sure I can publish straight from there to other places, so while posting multiple times is the last thing on my mind when I'm cursing out technical support, that should be handy.

So for now: buffistas.tumblr.com is where status is. Follow it if you tumbl. Soon, buffistas.info should point there.

Hey awesome people - we are at $4,365 for the Ginger fund (I've been transferring the money to her directly out of Paypal as it comes in).

I've seen many of you excellent folks sharing the link on Facebook - thank you! We've received a lot of funds from friends of friends, so even if you can't donate, please consider Tweeting or Facebooking or Tumblring the link so that the widest circle possible is being covered.

[link]

Here's what went down last night:

Looking at the logs, it looks like there was an issue with the vserver host machine. The machine was rebooted

So, out of our control.