Huh. I suggest…

…everyone take off at least ten days from blogging at least once a year.
It’s rather interesting to see how your filters shift when you leave the Feed for a while.
Of course, it helps if your hard drive is totally fried at the outset and you lose all your feeds, all your email contacts, your entire ecology of computing/communicating (including all my music…grrrr). Thanks to all who sent me replacement mail and encouragement as I try to rebuild (keep it coming at jbat at battellemedia dot com if you haven’t already!). I did have a nice week in the Sierra, fishing and such with my family, and that is impossible to lose to a faulty hard drive.

I am still in the process of rebuilding. Before the crash, I bought copies of Ecto and Shrook, but I am now back on the 30 day trials, as of course my proof of payment were…in my email files, which are still in terminal limbo. That is quite a story, yet to be resolved. I’m somewhere in Act Two. There is not yet resolution. But I’ve decided to ignore my past life – all 40 gigs of it – and move on. I backed up most of my important writing work – I lost only about two weeks, not bad considering – and I’ll consider it a blessing if Ontrack can fix it. Drivesavers, alas, could not.

Here’s the frustrating part: My data is just fine. No fires, no trucks rolling over my drive, didn’t trip and toss my laptop into a mountain stream. Nothing like that. Just a bad tape between my motherboard and my drive, which shorted out some random part that – I’m told – is very very hard to replace, as it’s rev’d about sixty times a year, and only the rev *I* had in my particular machine can be used to make the drive spin again. Jesus.

Anyway, I’m back, sort of. I missed you all. I’ll be less than prolific, as my next two months will be focused on writing again, but then again, I’ve said that in the past, and then ended up posting every day. Thanks Andy, Gary, Danny, et al, for taking good care of all the Searchbloggers out there while I was gone.