It’s been almost four years since I last published anything on this dopy little blog. Busy time. Lots going on. Nothing dramatic. Just life.
I haven’t been camping. That hurts.
But lately I’ve been having thoughts about this blog, about the traveling I’m not doing, and about the writing I’m not doing. A week ago I took a look at the laptop that I was using for my creative writing, and I discovered (very much to my surprise) that it was twelve years old. Still worked. Well, maybe the system clock was drifting in unpleasant ways. And I couldn’t plug it into the monitor I was forced to buy last year when my old one died (hey, it was only eleven years old). And, of course, it had been a long long time since that machine had seen anything that looked like a security patch. Not good.
It didn’t take much thought before I decided to pick up a new machine — a MacBook Pro, M3 Max, with pretty much the default hardware after that. Fortunately, because of a flex spending program at work, and because of cash back on my credit card, this thing didn’t hurt my bank account as much as you might think.
Since then I’ve been poking around in old data archives — I have a RAID device that I’m pretty sure goes back to 2010, and I really need to decide what to do about it and the data that’s on it (about 3 TB). Mind you, the thing works just fine. But those are still 14-year-old spinning platters if I’m remembering correctly. Really need to do something about that.
None of which answers the question, “Why am I resurrecting this blog again?” I mean, other than I need to justify expensive new hardware.
The answer is complex, but it is a confluence of concerns about AI, extreme distaste for social media, and my age which is rapidly approaching retirement, so what in the world am I going to do after that? I won’t blame you if you find that sentence is confusing. Suffice to say, if I keep writing out here, I’ll have more to say about all of that.
Meanwhile, on to the real point of this blog post. A test. Can I still post to my own blog website? I think yes, but I won’t know for sure until I press the “Send to Blog” button. So, you know, testing, testing. Let’s see what happens.