Out of the interim

As some of you may have noticed, yesterday morning my blog was taken down.  I imagine the reaction ranged from sheer joy to “wtf” depending on how useful you view my blog to be.  After my own “what the what” reaction I attempted to first: figure out what the hell had happened and second: I export my blog just in case.  Then I started answering the flurry of emails asking what the heck happened and then came the waiting game.

A lot of people asked me how I was feeling and surprisingly I didn’t find myself to be angry at the fact the blog was suspended.  It was quite annoying, but at the very worst it would just require me moving my blog away from WordPress and have to actually host it myself, so more of a pain in the ass more than anything else.

From reading up on the internet it appears that suspended accounts happen a fair bit in the world of WordPress hosted blog, mostly when people run afoul of the automated spam filtration device.  A few of you should know how that feels when your comments end up in the commenter spam filter.  Of course it wasn’t clear based on the cryptic email that was sent by WordPress if my “spam” status was based on some crawling bot or if some helpful reader had marked my blog as spam which then was immediately taken down.  I’m not sure if we’ll ever find out, but just a note, if my blog ends up “suspended” for multiple days and you visit here using “laurendo.wordpress.com” try “laurendo.com” because if this happens again, I might just bite the bullet and move the entire blog to a self-hosted site and you won’t be able to navigate to the updated blog from the wordpress site.

Anyway tonight there is a meeting at City Hall West starting at 6:30 p.m. about the Cross Alameda Trail on RAMP.  Really important that this Cross Alameda Trail gets built as it will (finally) add a bike land to RAMP.  Right now, one does not exist.  And it will add a pedestrian pathway to the south side of RAMP.  Currently people walk over wood chips which are scattered there by the City occasionally.  But it also coincides with the School Board meeting tonight which is a big one tonight.   This will also be the first meeting for new School Board member Phil Hu who will be asked to make a decision on whether or not to hire interim Superintendent Sean McPhetridge as the permanent superintendent.

I’ve always enjoyed Dr. McPhetridge even when he was the Assistant Superintendent with the District.  As the interim Superintendent he has — so far — done a really good job of trying to balance all interests particularly given that quite a few issues have not been of the easy variety.  Also, I have to say he handled the appointment of the new Board Member quite well given that — at times — the audience got a little unruly.

It will be interesting to see how the vote plays out for this appointment and whether or not some members of the School Board are going to want to spend the money for a protracted Superintendent search as opposed to going with the bird in hand.