The rebirth of my blog
I been away a long time

For 3.4 decades now I’ve maintained multiple sites on the internet, hosting “my stuff”: music, writings, web sites, personal email server and so on. After 2002 it seemed less and less relevant to be “out there”, and I let most of them slip away, archived by archive.org, and most recently - most of my energies were sucked into working on bufferbloat and other projects like cerowrt.

I maintained what was left of my original sites, wrote code and sent a lot of gmail instead.

So my personal sites - which also served as ways to organize me and my canon, vanished. My emails, badly indexed in my sent folders, languished. One server crashed. Then the backup server crashed. Then the backup server for the backup server, crashed - and then my lab, something like 15 machines, with the last backups for all those backups, got stolen from the back of my car while moving it from one location to another.

This was a severe disincentive to write anything new - my subconcious does not let me do anything unless there’s septuple backup! So I gradually started moving things into git.

I kept writing things that didn’t fit into an email format (and sometimes sending them via email anyway!), but kept taking notes on the harder stuff I needed graphics and the like to pull together.

I’d just like to sit down and WRITE, and not have to worry about the formatting (or backups) at all. You know, when you had an editor that could, like, spell check? And you had a real, live, editor that could reformat it for publication? And, after you got through that process, a check arrived in the mail?

Over the decades I’ve used things like straight html, php, org-mode, ikiwiki, blogger, and now I’m trying hugo.

But after sorting through just what I had on two laptops alone - Wow! What a backlog! NOT counting all the pieces I have spread across three servers in california, I had fragments of pieces entitled:

The Internet Okies, An anti-spam malfunction, What would you do with a billion dollars?, The Broken Window Economy, cell, The coming complexity collapse, contract slavery, Cybersecurity vs Cyberdefense, ECN has mass, It isn’t what you start, finish, First post!, Frack or fight, On freedom to travel, Gilmores List, GRO considered harmful, Makers of the world, Unite!, What is meaningful work?, Not sponsored by, The Patent meltdown, Putting solar where it belongs, Refugees, Research and running code, Rollback copyright!, The Shattered conversation, fiction and other stories, Support worthy registars, Tahts List, All the talks I’ve done, The antipatent office, Open Source - Where we went wrong, You WILL be tracked !!

Some mostly done, some not, some awaiting a new perspective, some, some piece of data on some other machine that I hadn’t found yet.

Big Chief, in finally escaping the asylum, and ready to explore the world of One flew Over The Cookoo’s nest again, said - “I been away a long time”.

And I kind of feel that way. Why on earth did I stop writing?

I had gone to great effort to convert both my blog on blogspot and my old ikiwiki one into hugo, then never got around to pushing it.

I hope to get that done next month. Stay tuned.

January 1, 2016
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