The Seldom Killer

I bought a new combo scanner/printer on Friday evening, so pretty much spent the weekend scanning a load of old photos I'd excavated from some boxes a few weeks ago. Inevitably going through old things has stirred up memories and I've been reminded of certain landmarks in my life.

One of these is the fact that I started blogging almost nine years ago, which I'm sure most people reading this probably didn't know. The exact date of my first blog post is unclear, but I do know that it was some time in early December 2000. I'd been thinking of starting a blog for a while, inspired by friends who were already been blogging — I was travelling around North America and it seemed like a convenient way to keep people updated as to what I'd seen on my adventures — but I was daunted by a complete lack of any technical knowhow, until one evening in Toronto, in my friend Stacy's apartment (she lived above a gay bar that played very very loud disco most nights and purportedly had a fabulous drag queen brunch that we regrettably never made it to. There's no point to that story; but I just remembered it, so I'm sticking it in here, so I don't forget it again). Stacy introduced me to a website that not only hosted your blog, but also did all the difficult coding and formatting work for you. My little blog wasn't ever read by anyone because I'd decided not to tell anyone about it until I felt I'd found my "voice" and only a few weeks after it was begun, it became lost to time as its host site became engulfed in another takeover of the sort that happened all too often back in the days of the newmillenniumdotcomboomcraze, and they stopped offering their services for free. So I started again, this time at blogspot, where I truly became bitten with the blogging bug, and ended up posting to a series of different blogs in various guises. (Don't go looking for them, I'm pretty certain they're not there anymore, especially the one I became most well-known for, because I deleted that one in 2003.)

When I got back to London in early 2001, I went out for drinks in Hoxton with some internet friends. Actually, I had completely forgotten all about that particular night, until I went through those old boxes a couple of weeks ago, and happened across a note I'd written about it. The note didn't say much, it simply named the bar where we'd met (that's not there anymore, either), but finding the note reminded me for the first time in years of the people that I'd met that afternoon. Some were, as mentioned, already friends, and some were completely new to me, and most were people that, if not still in regular contact with, I at least know how to find them. But there was one woman whose blog I became quite a fan of, and who seemed to have disappeared off the radar.

Imagine my surprise when I pop onto Twitter at 3 o'clock on Sunday morning to read this and this. And there was my answer. Someone I hadn't thought about in literally years until a couple of weeks ago was suddenly front page news of the Sunday Times. It's not exactly the way I expected that question to be answered, but at least it was answered. Certainly not the twist in the in memory lane that I was expecting.

My Flickr Pro account expires in four days. I have been making intermittent attempts to pay for the upgrade all bloody day and the payments section site is refusing to work for me, just as it was doing a few days ago.

I have had this problem with upgrading my Flickr account every. single. year. without fail (except for the years when others have kindly paid for my upgrade as presents or prizes). It's incredibly annoying that the only part of the process which doesn't fail is the fact that it always fails. Frustrating, or what?

So if any pictures disappear off my site for a while, that'll be why, until I can get the upgrade sorted out.

(I scoured the archives for a photo that would honor Veterans, girls in cheeky uniforms or posing with soldiers, but didn't find anything. Settled on this one which looks like the sort of pic a GI in WWII or Korea might have carried with him.)

That was almost a whole month without me posting anything here, or on Flickr. To be fair, there were some fairly extenuating circumstances which led to my absence: to wit, my hard drive failed and, lo, there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth. Actually, mostly there was a lot of facepalm action as I berated myself for not backing-up the data properly. The fact that the hard drive flaked out the very day before I had timetabled some overdue backing-up may have been highly ironic, but it was ultimately neither here nor there in the great scheme of Things That Involve Actually Maintaining All The Work You've Created.

Fortunately, some of my best friends are geeks, and I mean that in the highest praise, as the sterling efforts of one such geeky friend recovered most of the data for me. Having resigned myself to losing everything, getting anything back at all was like a magical bonus, so hooray for that!

The only problem afterwards was that I'd lost my blogging momentum and have been suffering from a distinct lack of inspiration for anything to write about, which is pretty stupid, given some of the interesting things I got up to during my internet hiatus. Which I would summarise for the twenty people who actually read this thing, except that at the moment my internets seem to be broken and none of the sites I wanted to link to are loading. And I'm already feeling fed up today (as I've been whinging about on Twitter, which is the only site that seems to be loading for me), so I'm going to cut my losses while I can and just post this damn thing as is before the blogging hiatus gets dragged out even more.

Oh, I did update my sidebar today (which, for the benefit of people reading via RSS or Livejournal, is here), so there are now tons of links for you to peruse if you've run out of anything to look at. Or if I don't update for a while again.