I've got one word to describe everything that's gone on recently....

Yeep.

Personal yeep: it wasn't just the power supply. Actually, what the other problem was was in doubt for a while... originally it was supposedly a problem with the head on the hard drive, and then the installation of a new hard drive and replication of the same problem on the new drive showed that it was actually a problem with the motherboard, specifically the drive controller. Best guess is that the power supply decided to take the motherboard with it. Thanks to the age of the motherboard, it's almost impossible to find, which means that I'm kind of upgrading against my will. Ah well, mobos and CPUs aren't actually that expensive nowadays compared to how it was, say, five years ago. Not as much drive to upgrade nowadays, either, but when you need to replace it anyway...

As for the election: Yeep. No, I wasn't expecting that... I don't think anyone was, not really. I personally lean towards the "the Bush campaigning drive pushed them over the top" and "the DLC tactics were dismal failures" schools of thought on this one, as well as the theory that the Democratic base stayed home because the Dems hadn't adequately distinguished themselves. In some respects, though, I think this will be a good thing for the party in the long run, because (just like the Republicans when Gingrich took the reigns) they'll have to take a long, hard look at themselves, their party, how they're seen by the public and the media, and what distinguishes them from the Republicans. Does this mean that they have to move hard left? Not necessarily... what they might need to do is redefine exactly what "left" is, and find a common issue to coalesce around, just like the right did with the tax issue.

Also, I'm expecting the divisions in the Republican party to start showing more than they had before. The Republicans were united around two ideas: to gain power, and to lower taxes. Outside of those two issues, though, there are divisions in the party same as always, and there's definitely going to be conflict over exactly whose agenda is going to be prioritized and how conflicts between agendas will be resolved. The social conservatives are going to look at this as their opportunity to push through their agenda, and the fiscal conservatives/quasi-libertarians may go along with that for a while, but will eventually balk when the religious conservatives start hemming in their cherished freedoms. The neo-conservatives will likely have a reckoning to deal with as well, because their single-minded focus on fighting the left and gaining power isn't going to mean anything when the left is out in the wilderness and the power is theirs. Especially if things start going wrong and they have nobody to blame but themselves.

And, yes, I expect that to be the case.

So, I should be up and running on tuesday. I'll start updating more then. Oh, and before I forget, in case I didn't mention it before: I've noticed by my tracking page that Tapped has linked to me and that a fair number of people are following that link. So I'll just thank Tapped for looking past their loathing of the template and seeing fit to linking to my site, and assure these new readers that this is not the normal update schedule. (Plus, I've been getting weird errors with Blogger, but I won't worry about those right now.)