As a school board member I always thought the official slogan of Board members ought to be: “Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t meant they aren’t out to get you!”
That was a joke of course but in the absence of a good explanation almost anything will do to fill the void. My last post joked that the recent requirement visitors have had to endure was the result of the blog suffering from some voodoo. Hey, in the absence of a good explanation Voodoo works for most of us.
Well, this time the paranoia wasn’t justified. I received this helpful email a short while ago.
“Harry,
The reason the password request is displaying on your page is a result of your post on July, 20 titled 339 Visitors. The image that you tried to display in that post resides on a protected area of your website requiring a user name and password.”
That explained it immediately. You won’t see it now but until I got this message there was a tiny blue underline a sixteenth of an inch across where I had attempted to imbed a graphic from an off limits page that showed the growth of visitors to this blog. I was in such a hurry that when it didn’t show up I didn’t think much of the almost imperceptible few pixels. Now I’ve removed them demonstrating yet again the value of Occam’s Razor. Wikipedia has an academic explanation of the Razor but to greatly oversimplify it suggests that the simpler the explanation the more likely it is.
In this case putting a link into a lincolndemocrat statistic page that is only meant for my eyes is a pretty simple explanation compared to explaining how my website could be knocked off kilter by someone else inserting a pin in the likeness of a computer monitor with Abe Lincoln on it.
It was a Mr. Potter who explained this……Now wait a second…. I love Harry Potter and my name is Harry and the fellow who helped me work the magic to correct the glitch has that as his last name……You can’t tell me that just a coincidence. Who cares what Occam said? And besides, that’s such a silly name.
