First, apologies to those subscribers who’d been receiving our e-mail alerts in a garbled fashion recently. The electron-gurus who run things at the soulless downtown compound that is the Stephens Media LLC world headquarters upgraded our nifty blog-writing software to a new version, and those who elected to receive HTML-format alerts got them — coding and all. The problem is fixed, we’re told, but if any of you still have problems, let us at Various Things & Stuff know, and we’ll promptly yell at somebody.

Second, you may have noticed the conspicuous lack of Denver bylines on our scribblings this week. That is because we are the one (and only) Nevada political journalist who is not covering the Democratic convention, and who will not be covering the Republican festivities next week. We asked — twice! — but our bosses refused, choosing instead to count golden doubloons in the walk-in vault at headquarters.

However, there are plenty of other places to find Nevada-centric, convention-related material this week, from news organizations that are willing to spread a little cash around, or at least ask readers for it. Our colleague Hugh Jackson of the Las Vegas Gleaner is blogging away, and he’ll have some scribblings published in CityLife later this week and next. Anjeanette Damon of the Reno Gazette-Journal is there, and posting copiously on her blog. Political reporter Molly Ball of the Review-Journal is writing away on the newspaper’s convention blog, and political columnist Erin Neff is also blogging on her own corner of the R-J site. (Gossip columnist Norm Clarke, who spent years working in Denver, is back in his old haunts scaring up celebrity news, too.) And you can catch convention news all over the website of the Las Vegas Sun, written by political reporter J. Patrick Coolican and Washington bureau reporter Lisa Mascaro. (There’s video coverage with multi-media reporter Matt Toplikar, too.) Of course, it almost goes without mentioning that my colleague Jon Ralston is all over Denver, with e-mail flashes, columns and TV appearances. (Let’s hope he doesn’t run into trouble from any of his “friends” who post at Wonkette.)

Don’t fret, however. We’ll still be blogging away about non-convention related news and issues from right here in Nevada. On with the show…