Blogs

No website posts for most of Holy Week, but it wasn’t a vacation

April 17, 2017

Padding that’s scraped off from ships hitting the walls in the chambers of the new locks. The ACP is bringing up some employees on disciplinary charges for disseminating photos like this. Although it’s treated as a labor/management matter, it goes to the heart of freedom of the press. Photo from the UCOC Twitter feed.

Six days without a post, but…

an explanation, apology and update from the editor

Holy Week in the Interior.

Was the blow telegraphed by word from someone whom I know and trust that an engineer type was accusing me of spreading baseless rumors from the social media by passing on EFE reports and tales from the Nicaraguan and Honduran press that our exploding transformers in Panama City caused blackouts as far as those countries? Was insight given after the fact by the man from ETESA assigning blame to the company that made the two blown-up transformers that put the Panama City and Colon metro area in the dark? In any case, on Easter Sunday and the five preceding days the power fluctuated quite severely out here in the boonies of Cocle. Was it something local, with branches hitting a line? Was it a matter of “aftershocks” from the blackouts in the city that didn’t turn our lights out at the time? I’m not and engineer but in any case we had nearly a week of brownouts that might as well have been blackouts, which first of all made it hard for me to work my usual long days and moreover made it dangerous to do so. As in, my luck finally taking a bad turn and my main production computer becoming unable to connect to the Internet with one series of fluctuations. This, while the backup computer also remained more or less on the blink. I am going to need to scrape up the bucks to take one or both of the old computers to the shop

Fortunately, I have a new computer to be my super-duper main working tool. Unfortunately, a bunch of passwords that I had forgotten were locked up in the old production machine. Fortune has nothing to do with the amount of labor required to transfer The Panama News production to a new machine — it’s a lot, and I can be lazy and procrastinate. Leave it to the electric company to force me out of my lethargy. But then it was Holy Week, so some of the people and institutions I had to contact were out of touch for a few days, and in any case I was mostly unable to work as the power supply was so low that I was recharging the computer battery through fitful brownouts, working until the charge was exhausted and then resuming work when the off and on power had been on enough for another recharge. It was a great excuse to spend most of Easter sleeping. (The sleep control in my scheme of things is the kung fu attack cat in my life, Grasshopper, who will and did let me know in no uncertain terms that my indolence is an unacceptable reason for him not being fed on time.)

Sorry about that.

But after the new computer was brought online and before the connection to this page was re-established, I was continuing publication on The Panama News Facebook page. You did know that this page is a vast extension, a blog with far more content and all the freewheeling discussion, that also keeps us in publication when hackers get the temporary upper hand, I haven’t raised the money to renew the web hosting (that annual bill will come due in about June), I am working on a new or insecure or other person’s computer or so on. This past week was a “so on,” and if you don’t look at the Facebook page these are some of the stories and photos you missed: