Like Tom, I have been away for awhile now. With the kind permission of the other CT’ers, I have taken a leave of absence to work for the federal judiciary. I’m hoping to resume blogging early next fall.
I’m pleased to say that, after a truly epic hiatus from blogging of more than a year on my part, my fellow Timberites have very kindly consented to my coming back on board to post here at CT. Nice one fellas.
For the last year I’ve stood to blogging much as Dick Cheney stood towards serving in Vietnam in the late ‘sixties, but the various pressures and distractions that have kept me from writing have receded significantly, so I’m planning to be hanging about the place, wittering pointlessly about such topics as may catch my fancy, much more regularly than hitherto. No, please, control your excitement, really, do.
As part of my re-entry into the blogosphere – do we still call it that, or is that just a bit too 2003? – I’ve wanted to grab hold of all the posts I wrote on my old blog before joining CT in the first place, to find them a home and serve ’em up somewhere in public so that the peanut gallery can take aim, or indeed link to the damn stuff if it wishes.
Well, one thing I’ve found is that although the cool kids all used Movable Type, Blogger is still a deeply cool product. I’ve not put anything on the site since May 2003, still less ponied up any cash to maintain it, but tomrunnacles.blogpot.com appears to be basically intact. That’s very good, but after that date, I moved everything onto a hosted server which is, due to a series of oh-so-hilarious postal mixups, now defunct. I thought I’d lost all the stuff I’d written subsequently, but then I discovered the truly mind-boggling Wayback Machine, which truly makes elephants look like goldfish: it scrapes the web and archives what it finds, forever. They have a very good FAQ if you’re interested.
This is excellent news, in that if you’re the kind of doofus who forgets to renew his server fees, and I am, you can recover your work – my missing posts are here. It also induces, in me at least, a sense of something like vertigo to think of the sheer volume of data that archive.org has to manage. But finally, it’s a fairly sobering reminder that even if you trash your files yourself, and wait for the google cache to expire, your various web-related foolishnesses may remain visible for the public to cackle at for years to come.
So blog carefully, folks – I certainly hope I manage to.
There’s an interesting piece, "Molecular Self-Loathing", in the Oct 1-7 issue of The Economist. On a personal note, the degree of self-loathing programmed into my molecules is, apparently, this: I turn first to Lexington, notice there’s a cartoon of an aging hippie hitchhiking, thumb out; a car with a USA license-plate is passing him by. I read the whole thing. (To save yourself that trouble, do the following: say "He didn’t think that was so groovy", in a Monty Burns voice. Favorite line: "For their part, the Republicans have been trying to get beyond Richard Nixon’s ‘southern strategy.’")