Back From the Netherworld

So, Rich, where've you been? No posts, you don't write, you don't call. Well, I've been ... busy. 

I could give the fabulous but tired-out excuse of recovering from the horrid curse of cancer, but that would be taking the easy way out.

The truth is much more along the lines of sheer laziness. Unmatched, unadulterated laziness. Even my Facebook postings have dropped off precipitously, but really, that's not a bad thing at all.

Okay, the mea culpa is now officially over and I should like to explain what brought me back. It wasn't guilt or longing or the inevitable build-up of having to spill my guts to an invisible but mostly quiet audience.

 No, it was Google.

One of their robots wrote me a robot email that another of their robots had decided to close down the old blogging tool I had been using since I started this Quixotic quest. They had bought the old tool, ran it alongside their own and now it was time to save money. 

If I didn't move to the new blogger, all my work (such as it was) would disappear into the ether where only roaming robots might bump into it now and then. They made me feel better by including a reference to a tool that would facilitate migrating to the Google Blogger. OH! Well, then, I thought, everything will be fine. No, I didn't, this is not my first rodeo, not by a long shot.

I ran the tool and it asked me to log into my old blog. When I logged in it took me to the new, empty Google Blogger. <Enter here a considerable series of cursing, thundering, bumbling and the eventual use of my fifty-five years of computer experience which can be summarized thus: "Strike the offending software and/or hardware with the equivalent of a ball-peen hammer until you make it do what you want.">

This tool has served me very well over the course of my career and it has a remarkable history of success. But when I looked at the fruits of my labor, I found that Google was not referencing the blog I had been keeping for the last 15 years, but a little experimental one-pager that I had played with and rejected.

Undaunted, I went to move the real blog, but found that the 'tool' was a one-time use and one time means one time. Furthermore, as if to taunt me, the tool had included a link within the old one-pager to my full blog, but it was a link to an uneditable snapshot.

Of course I got the job done, if you thought for a second that I didn't have a backup version of my blog saved unto my own personal hardware, then you don't understand the concept of 'fifty-five years of computer experience'.

What we're looking at here is the new blogger with all my old posts after having to correct many of them for font issues, spacing issues, format issues and issue issues. Good luck to us all.

UPDATE December 13, 2023: I happened to stumble across one other unintended consequence of this blog migration. I noticed some of my included images were missing. Just randomly gone. So I had to check them all. Did I mention how much of a pain this migration was? Did I?