So, I became a citizen in 2001.

The Senator for Ataturk was Wes Erni, who wasn't really reachable by most citizens, but the Senate, requires a certain level of experience in Talossa, either 6 months as SoS or 2 years as a citizen.

The SoS was Daviu Focteir, also from Ataturk, and he didn't want to be in the Senate. In fact, the only people who wanted to be in the Senate in Ataturk, couldn't.

But Daviu was busy with school, and I had this new thing, the Talossa Database system, which sought to automate the Clark.

So, he let me be SoS for 6 months (spoilers, he never really returned as SoS),  so that:

1 ) I could work on the Database
2 ) He could focus on his studies
3 ) I could replace Wes Erni as senator.

This all came down with the 3th Clark of the 29th Cosa.

Wes resigned, and I stepped up.

Over the next 21 Clarks, I was the Senator of Ataturk, and I worked hard to get Ataturk to organize. I called citizens, I was the most active posted in the Ataturk board on Wittenberg. Well, I was also the most active Citizen on Wittenberg, but that's another story.

Then, the Halloween crisis occurred. I didn't leave with the Republic, despite history books saying otherwise. I stayed in the Kingdom, for about 15 days during which the King attacked me daily.

I ended up needing to leave, and I was replaced by Marcus Cantalour, in the Senate.

Still, I kept the database, and even when I was told to put it offline, I kept it up. And today, it is back online.

I have met Daviu in person. I have met former King Ben and former Queen Amy. I have met Tomas Gariceir who stayed at my house for 2 nights. I have met Ieremiac'h Ventrutx. In fact, he worked for my company for what, over 10 years?

I have spoken on the phone to over 50 Talossans over the years.

Most Talossans can easily reach me. I haven't been active much lately due to personal issues which I can tell other people from Ataturk, but which are mostly over.

Most of you probably heard of me, either for what I did good, like the database, like being the longest serving Secretary of State, or being the former Resident Worker. Or you heard me for being one of your horrible Republicans (like I said above, it's more complex and I am willing to talk about it).

Or maybe you remember my monthly magazine six years ago? https://zespenat.ca/ which I ran almost alone for 4 issues?

Even those in the Kingdom in the 18 months or so that I was in the Republic might remember that as the Republic's foreign Affair minister, I was the first official to try to negotiate a peace treaty... with the guy who eventually became our King.

When I came back, I was happy to see that our Ataturk Senator was active.

I was happy that he wasn't just a politician: he helped with the website, and seems like a nice guy.

We connected. I helped him, he helped me. We even connected on Linked in! He was the only Talossan I didn't know in a work capacity I accepted there.

Nice guy.

I decided, I am not as active as I was, I won't run against him.

But it was a lie.

Who is Svastian Pinatsch? We learned that the name he gave is not his real name! ( I don't mean his Talossan name, that's fine, I mean the original name he put. Even his Linked In name is fake)

Now, should people be Talossans if they don't give their real name? That's debatable.

But should they be Senators if we don't know who they are?

Absolutely freaking not.

Now, I don't want power. I was offered to Prime Minister a few times, and I don't want it.

I don't care for it. All I want, is to work on my pet projects, like the database system, and make sure the citizens of Ataturk are well represented. By someone they actually know.

In the upcoming election, vote for the Candidate whom you know his name. Vote for me, vote so that you know who your Senator is.

Because this is the debate.

I am not running for power, for a party, I am running for the right for Ataturk Citizens to know who their senator really is.

I am hereby announcing my intentions of running for the Senate Seat for Ataturk.

AD, we are as a crossroads, I am not sure that you see it.

We had a King, who, in 2004, started attacking his most trusted supporters and no way to remove him or do anything. Most did nothing. I almost did nothing, but then people left for the Republic of Talossa and I stayed as his Secretary of State, he was left without a target, attacked me.

Ok, so that wasn't a very regal king, at least, not in the end. Some will say that he was bad for years, I wouldn't know.

So a new one was selected, and recently, he vanished and stopped being active.

It's ok! He can if he wants to. Recently, I've been dealing with my own issues, my own life crisis. I didn't want to tell everyone here about it, but it's pretty much soon to be over.

But here is the thing, my obligations were two fold: vote in the Clark, a duty I didn't neglect, and maintain the Database. I even helped the transition from one SoS to another.

If I hadn't been able to vote on the Clark, I would have resigned, or been expelled.

But the King vanished without explanation and leaving us without our head of state.

So, that's another king that didn't work.

Wait, between those two is was a kid who probably didn't know much about us.

So, what is the crossroad?

I see 4 paths before us.

Path 1 is we do nothing, and the kind comes bach. We might lose a few citizen, but we will have lost face. Unless he provides a very good explanation, how can we trust him?

Path 2 is we abolish the position of the King. After 3 monarchies ending in fire, perhaps it's time to rethink the process? That's the Republican point of view, and YOU don't want that, and a few don't want that either. We might lose a few citizens, but we would not have lost face

Path 3 is we elect another King for life, ignoring the result of the referendum. Again, we might lose a few citizens, but if the new king messes up again, it might be the end of Talossa. It was almost the end in 2004, what's do say that the new one, whoever it is, won't end up destroying us?

Path 4 is the compromise. The idea, we elect the King, like we would have done anyway, but instead of electing him for life, we put a term limit of 7 years.

Now, here is the genius of this:

King Robert I, in his first 7 years, wasn't to bad, it's over time that his attacks began, first on the liberal party and the Penguinean, then on a citizen I won't name, then on his own PC party which led to the Halloween crisis.

What if he had been replaced after 7 years, for 7 years? Someone else might have done some good.

As for our current king, remember his first 7 years? Even if he was re-elected, If someone had replaced him after those, he would have been remembered as our greatest king! He oversaw the reunison! He led us throught stability.

After 14 years, he could have just let the position to someone else, instead of trying to just stay in place when he doesn't have the time, or no longer cares for it.

Stay long enough in a position, and you can no longer see anyone but you in it. Trust me, I know. I was SoS way too long, but I still gave it up, and look at that, we've had two GREAT SoS in a row.

Sure, they were rookie at first, but both rocked.

The question isn't, should we have a new king. It's obvious we need one who is more active.

The question is: shouldn't we bake some sort of renewal, so the king, whoever it is, doen't get too bored over time?

Well, that's part of the compromise, and it's why I voted for it.

These are some of them:

http://talossa.ca/wittenberg2/

http://talossa.ca/wittenberg/


http://www.talossa.ca/files/oldwitt.php
http://www.talossa.ca/files/oldwitt2.php
http://www.talossa.ca/files/oldwitt3.php
http://www.talossa.ca/files/oldwitt5.php
http://www.talossa.ca/files/oldwitt6.php
http://www.talossa.ca/files/oldwitt7.php

This is the index of message IDs:

1) 121-971
2)5557-5573
3) 14342-19921 (real end)
4) 121-587 (07/15/2001) (all contained in #1 above, so I didn't put it online)
5) 7837 (01/14/2002) - 10618 (04/02/2002)
6 ) 7837 (01/14/2002) - 10624 (04/02/2002)
7 ) 8398 (02/03/2002) - 19817 (802/18/2003)

Wittenberg VII: I believe MPF administered this one for at least part of its existence.  It was around ca. 2000-2001 and did not last even a year, perhaps.

Wittenberg VIII: The most infamous of all Witt incarnations, a perfect storm of viruses and a failed backup caused the Great Wittenberg VIII Crash of 10 November 2001, which wiped out our records of 9-11.

Wittenberg IX: This was the first Witt that used the single-cascading thread format we use today.  The internet was well into this forum format, but the vast majority of Talossa railed against this, and this Witt lasted literally about a week.  No archive was made of this Witt, as there was nothing of any consequence that went on there.  We went back to using Witt VIII.

IX was online ca. February 2003.

Wittenberg X: Wittenberg VIII was taken offline permanently on 21 February 2003.  Wittenberg X went online on 20 February 2003 and was the Witt that saw us through Halloween and was the Witt 'commandeered' by the Republic in 2004 under circumstances so extenuating it is still a sore spot to many on both sides of the question, but for very different reasons.  Beyond 1 June 2004, the preservation status of this Witt is unknown.


----

I was indeed the host for all of those...

> Wittenberg VIII: The most infamous of all Witt incarnations, a perfect storm of viruses and a failed backup caused the Great Wittenberg VIII Crash of 10 November 2001, which wiped out our records of 9-11.

NO, no no.. that's NOT what happened... First of all ZERO Viruses are involved

A quote from my probably never coming book, "The Resident Miracle Worker and this downfall":

The Wittenberg Crash of October 10th 2001
As I mentioned earlier in the chapter "switching to php", Perl, the language Witt VII was programmed in, really liked flat files.
This means that instead of using a database system for storing its data, it uses plain text files.
For example, here is a message from Ben in one of the old archives (all of it is supposed to be on a single very long line). I removed Ben's email address:
857|07/18/2001 02:18:52 EDT|R. Ben Madison|[Ben's redacted email] |RE: a Talossan flag question|> For our flag, what would be the correct vexillogical "blazon"?<p>Per fess vert and gules, I believe.<p>Ben<p><p>|0|||||848||0|wittenberg|129.89.118.61,<b>Ident:</b>[],<b>Host:</b>[]<br><b>Agent:</b>[Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows 98)]<br>|R. Ben Madison|13
If you divide the line with the |, you will find some of the fields:
⦁   857: that is the post ID
⦁   07/18/2001 02:18:52 EDT: the time is posted
⦁   R. Ben Madison: the user posting the message
⦁   [Ben's redacted email]: the user's email
⦁   RE: a Talossan flag question: the post title
⦁   > For our flag, what would be the correct vexillogical "blazon"?<p>Per fess vert and gules, I believe.<p>Ben<p><p>: the post text
⦁   0: the number of replies
⦁   ||||: empty fields used for the replies
⦁   848: the parent post ID
⦁   |0|: another field for internal use
⦁   129.89.118.61,<b>Ident:</b>[],<b>Host:</b>[]<br><b>Agent:</b>[Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows 98)]<br>: the IP address and info about that IP address
⦁   R. Ben Madison: the actual username (which might have been different from the name)
⦁   13: the user Id of Ben.

This looks all nice and easy, but it causes multiple problems:
⦁   The separation character needs to be "escaped" because if it is used in the content, it may break the format
⦁   It means that to load a single element, you need to search the whole file, possibly loading the whole file into memory.
In a database however, each field is stored individually, properly protected from each other and you can select which rows you specifically want.
But more importantly, it really rare you have to load the whole database into memory...
Now, when I add a row to a flat file, I open the file in what is called "append mode". It means that the file is opened, and the pointer is placed at the end of the file.
Then, the new data can be added to the file safely and securely.
But the Wittenberg perl script didn't do that. Instead, it loaded the full list of messages into memory, and then, when a new message was added, would write the whole file on disk.
Worse, opening a file in write mode erases the content of the file, so even if you don't write anything, the content is gone.
A few weeks before the crash, users were complaining about the speed of posting message or even of browsing Wittenberg.
That's because every time a user wanted to load Wittenberg, the full data file had to be read into memory.
But then, on that October 10th 2002, something else occurred... the file became too big for memory just as a user was posting a reply.
That person posted a message, Wittenberg was loaded into memory, failed to load and as such, failed to write.
But the file had been opened and as such, we lost everything. All of the 5556 first messages of Wittenberg VII were gone forever...
My only backups covered messages 122 to 971, leaving 4584 messages lost to us.
I reacted quickly. I create an automatic backup so that the next time Wittenberg would crash, we could have a backup of the state of Wittenberg right before the crash.
There were other crashed in the future, but none of them led to data loss. I would simply archive the backup, trim the older messages and restore the backup so that the show could go on.
I also found a different control panel software for my servers which supported daily, weekly and monthly backups to roll back to a previous day if a crash occurred right before the backups are taken.
I also from time to time proactively archived (removed) from time to time the older messages so that the crash would be prevented.
I had intended to keep full archives from that point on, but to this day, I cannot find my earliest archives.
As result, I have all messages from #7837 (on February 3rd 2002) until Witt VIII was turned in February 18th 2003 (with message #19921), but I cannot find my archive from the period of the crash (message #5556, on Novembr 10th 2001) until the #7837 of February 3rd 2002, other than for a small snapshot of the 15 first messages sent after the crash.
This leaves an additional 2264 messages lost due to careless archiving on my part, though one day, I might find them in an old hard disk somewhere. You would be surprised at the number of hard disk I have stored in my safe (it's over 40, BTW).
For example, I found the archive from #7837 (01/14/2002) to #10624 (04/02/2002) only recently while writing this book, and another for #8398 (02/03/2002)-19817 (02/18/2003).
For months, I thought that the earliest archive was from #14342 (10/10/2002).
This new find from November 2014 will give us almost 9 months of additional history to study since my original republication of Witt in early 2014!