Blogging

Drafts Folder

Sometimes when I have an idea for a post, but don’t want to actually write something just then I’ll save it for later. Sometimes when I don’t have an idea for a post just then, I’ll just go to the Drafts folder and get one.


1) The Big Leagues post has zero tags. So, what was I thinking there? Fortunately inside the draft there is text. It is almost a complete post that starts out like this, “Really hard is an understatement when it came to the…” I’ll probably get back to that one.
2) Next down, Almost Did It Again, is tagged TV. Inside the post body is one word, “Travelers.” Its dated almost 5 weeks ago and there is absolutely no way I know what I meant there. Marked for deletion.
3) Artificial Intelligence. Look at all those tags. I think I was going to complain about something timing-wise on the dryer or the haptic buttons, but I can’t get enthused with this topic anymore it will be deleted too.
4) Lastly is Boom! and it has neither tags nor any text in the body. To top it off, the Draft was saved 233 weeks and 5 days ago (7/6/2020.) But this one is so memorable that all I’ll ever need is the title. I will definitely write this one next year. Real soon too, look for it in January.

2002 All Over Again?

I started blogging in January of 2002 and if I remember right the first few posts I wrote back then were about the cold weather in Aiken, so here is a throw back to those early days:

Last weekend we had some uncharacteristic weather for Portland, snow. Maybe an inch with two inch drifts, we really didn’t need to go anywhere, so we didn’t. The Mini would not have had a problem in it. I kept the snow tires we bought for Klamath Falls living and mounted them on the car back in December. But, the chance of finding another driver out there with something other than all-seasons and snow driving experience were pretty slim, so we stayed at home. Along with that snow came bitter cold and then a couple days later on Tuesday we got freezing rain which continued all the way through Thursday morning.

Yesterday the high, for the first time in nearly a week, made it a couple degrees above freezing. Today, Friday, we made it to around 35 and actually got some melting. Tomorrow, hopefully it will actually get to the predicted 41° and maybe we can get out and do some grocery shopping.

40 Posts to the End?

I joined Instagram in early 2018 as a way to kind of recreate a photo of the day blog I had back in the very early 2000’s. I wasn’t really thinking of it as a social media thing. So much so that that first post didn’t have a caption of any kind and nary a hashtag. Slowly I started to add captions, descriptions and hash tags, but I still really wasn’t using it as a “social Media” platform. I started following some accounts and started gaining followers, but I was not doing a lot of commenting. I was only liking photos that I actually liked, not just automatically liking something because because the follower was liking everything I posted.

Slowly over time Instagram has added more and more ads and has tried to become more of a video site instead of a photo one. Now every third post in my feed is a photo from some influencer I don’t follow or video of some sort or an ad for something. Bleh. I’m thinking that I’m going just quit the ‘Gram.

From that first Instagram post in February 2018 until yesterday, or 1,990 days, I have posted 1,960 pictures (pretty close to one a day.) The number 2,000 seems like a nice round number for my last IG post. I could do it ten days from today, but then the post count will be 1,9xx, so I’ll wait until I get an even 2,000 posts and then quit.

I’ll still leave my account there though in case someone I’m actually friends with wants to DM me. Also, because Donna uses it to look at a couple of accounts that she’s interested in too. Maybe I’ll create a second account with no posts at all just so I can click on explore and waste some idle time.

I’ve Been Blogging Too Long

It has been 8,108 days since I wrote my first blog post, Happy 2002, on January 1st of that year. That post consisted of 34 words. Since then there have been, not including this one, 6,047 more posts written with a total word count of 1,401,582 words. The average post word count overall is 232. Some posts have had a lot fewer words, including some with no words, just a picture. Others have been so wordy that you might not want to read the whole thing. The shortest post, That Hosting Company VIII cont., was a mere 4 words and the wordiest post, BMW Ultimate Drive for the Susan G. Komen Foundation was 2,374 words.

One of my and my wife’s favorite features on the blog is the “On This Date” widget in the right column. It is set up to throw a link to a couple of posts from the same date as when you are looking at the page. It is kind of fun to get tossed back into the past and see what was going on it 2002 or 2008 or 2014, etc.

Yesterday’s headliner in the past links was Sorry To Leave You In The Lurch that concerned a nail in the Miata’s tire, Netfix movies and the TV show LOST. There were seven links to other places on the web in the post and not a single one lead me to where they were originally when I wrote the post in 2008 or 15 years in the past.

The first 2 are for Netflix movies and I linked to them using a URL shortener TinyURL and the first movie’s text is just called “this movie” while the second one lists the title and it is called The Good German, but send me to a Netflix error page. The last five are basically just screencaps from the show LOST.

When I take these time jumps to the past me and there are links that don’t work for various reasons, no S at the end of HTTP, the site is no longer there, etc., I will usually try and fix them. This time there are seven and that many caused me to write this post, but because I’ve got nothing else to do and even though these new links may fall by the wayside as well in the coming years, I still went ahead and put my Internet Sleuth Hat on. So if you click on Sorry To Leave You In The Lurch you too can be whisked away to 15 years ago and get a peek into my 2008 mind.

P.S. The word count for this post is an above average 423…

Times Miata Driven since 10/28/22: 9

 

Post #5,459

In the right hand column the is a widget called “a decade ago” and the one for today is Post #3,290 which signifies that from January 1st 2002 when I started this nonsense, until September 29th 2009 I have authored three thousand two hundred ninety posts. That means over those 2,829 days I averaged 1.16 posts per day.

The title of today’s post represents the grand total of posts I have created since 1/1/2002. So in the last ten years I have added a total of two thousands one hundred and sixty nine more. This means over the ensuing 3,653 days I have averaged 0.59 posts per day. Just a little more than half my previous output. I think I must be running out of words…

Keep It Simple Stupid

I’ve been really having a hard time blogging. There has been plenty of stuff to write about, but I open up a browser check a few websites and then login here to write…and stop. When I verbalized this to my wife yesterday she said, “Why don’t you post a picture and just one sentence?” Well I already try the one picture thing with Instagram, so maybe I need to just write a simple line or two each day to get the ball rolling again. After all that is how this whole thing started, below is post number #1 of The Miata Diaries, the predecessor to Life of Brian.

Happy 2002

Tuesday, January 1, 2002

New Year’s Day. Cold, maybe mid forties. The Miata sits in the garage all day. The farthest I venture is around the block on rollerblades. Donna goes to the store, but uses the MSV.

Tagged: Miatatude

Quadruple Threat

I’ve got the final stage of the Vuelta a España up on the big screen, the Red Sox baseball game on the “radio”, a window open with ESPN’s FanastyCast keeping track of the Purple Whales vs. the Red Bank Raiders while I’m typing this post.

If you are as impressed with this as I am, buy me something off my Amazon Wishlist. 🙂