When Blogography broke down (again) on Monday, I was half-way tempted to just leave it broken.

This was just the excuse I needed to hang up blogging once and for all, as lately it seems more like a chore I have to do rather than an activity I want to do. But I've gone through rough patches like this before and have always cone around, so I thought it best to get things running again. If I'm going to quit, it should be a decision I make instead of a decision I'm forced into.

So here I am.

Still.

Guess there's no better reason to do a meme than that...

1. There's something about you. What is it? A sense of adventure.
2. You know the way you do that thing? What is it? It's all in the wrist.
3. What grey areas of your life scare you the most? None of them. I accepted long ago that things are rarely black & white, and am perfectly content with that.
4. What is something that you wish you knew the answer to, but would never try to find out? What it feels like to free-solo climb Half Dome in Yosemite.
5. Everyone has that 'thing'. Their 'it'. What is yours? Not being afraid to step outside my comfort zone.
6. What is that one thing you just can't seem to put your finger on? How people can hate something so vehemently that they have made no effort to understand.
7. If you could leave this world discovering one thing, what would it be? Extraterrestrial intelligence.
8. Why do you love them? They earned it.
9. Why do they love you? I earned it.
10. This time of the year makes you... Bored.
11. The way to your heart is... which way? By showing kindness to others.
12. It gets under your skin when...? People behave badly or stupidly or rudely in public. By clipping your toenails in a restaurant or letting your kids run ape-shit in a grocery store or talking on your phone during a movie or whatever... you're infringing on other people's peace and making it hard for everybody to just get along.
13. Why did you leave? It wasn't my choice. I was forced out.
14. What is something you stopped believing in? American justice.
15. What is something you'll never give up on? Humanity's ability to eventually sort itself out... as unlikely as that may seem.
16. You forgot what they said, you forgot what they did, but what feelings do you remember? Rage.
17. Open up. About anything. I have no desire...none whatsoever... to be in another romantic relationship. Ever. I have been so much happier since I've stopped trying. Friends, family, and occasional kindness of strangers are all I need to feel complete.
18. Whenever you smell it, what does it remind you of? Maui.
19. Close your eyes and smile. What memory did you think of? Africa.
20. You'll never understand why... There are people who have absolutely no regard for others. And usually they are politicians who are supposed to be doing exactly that.
21. What was the moment when 'it' hit you? Bangkok, Thailand, 1998.
22. What's keeping you from moving on? Responsibilities.
23. No one likes to dwell, but if you could go back, what would you change? I would not have wasted my precious time on those who ended up undeserving of it.
24. If you could predict your future, you'd want it to look like...? Like Back to the Future II... THE FUTURE IS NOW, BITCHES!
25. If the eyes are the windows to the soul, if I looked in yours, I'd see...? Hope.

See you tomorrow, I guess.

And so... updating WordPress ended up being a very bad idea, because Blogography done broked real good last night.

Which happens from time to time, I know, but it's no less irritating. Usually I would just stop the world and re-install everything from scratch, but that's not an option right now. Maybe come the weekend...

Sorry if you're one of the thousands of people who can't start their day without a dose of Blogography. Guess you'll be taking the week off then?

Happiest of New Years to you!

When it comes to New Year's resolutions, I'm pretty boring because I have the exact same New Year's resolutions every year. The same five goals going on for heaven only knows how long. This year is no different, so here we go...

• Try a Pop-Tart flavor I've never had before. DONE! 2014 was Pop-Tart's 50th birthday, so I tried both the Chocolate Vanilla Créme (delicious) and Milk Chocolate Graham (not so delicious). I also tracked down Red Velvet (not bad at all) and got in on "Spookylicious" when it was released for Halloween (meh).
• Travel somewhere I've never been before. DONE! Finally fulfilled my lifetime dream of visiting Africa when I went to Mana Pools, Hwange National Park, and Victoria Falls in Zimbabwe (after a stop in Johannesburg, South Africa). Also managed to visit Glasgow, Scotland and Nice, France.
• Visit a Hard Rock Cafe I haven't seen before. DONE! In the Spring I went on a Hard Rock run through Europe and checked off Glasgow, Florence, and Nice. Then made it to the new Hard Rock Hotel in Palm Springs, followed by a visit to the Casino property in Northfield Park. Also visited the relocated cafe in Pigeon Forge, the new cafe in Johannesburg, and rounded out the year with the Mall of America and Sioux City properties.
• Drink a beer I've never drank before. DONE! Tried a Trappistes Rochefort (Belgian) while in Nice. I had an excellent pint of Scottish ale while I was in Glasgow, but can't remember the name to save my life. I had some kind of South African microbrew that I didn't care for at all, but fell in love with Zambezi Lager, which was a refreshing oasis in the African heat.
• Get another Apple product. DONE! Finally bit the bullet and got a 11-inch MacBook Air for travel. Also got an iPhone 6, which I have mixed feelings about. The larger display is nice, but the larger size is definitely not.

I should probably add "keep blogging" on there somewhere, but that's pretty much a given at this point.

And what am I looking forward to in 2015?

   
• Travel! It's going to be really difficult to top Africa, so I'm not even going to try. Where that leaves me for my Fall vacation I have no idea. Maybe if I try something a little less ambitious this year I'll be able to afford a trip to Antarctica or India next year?

   
• Movies! Well, new Star Wars: Episode VII is obviously topping my list of films I want to see this year. And lest we forget, Avengers: Age of Ultron and Ant Man are dropping in 2015 as well. And then there's the long delayed Jupiter Ascending that probably won't live up to my expectations, but I'm wanting to see it anyway. I don't know how to feel about Terminator: Genisys, but am onboard with Jurassic World. Also on my radar... Kingsman: The Secret Service, Mission Impossible 5, Ted 2, and Seventh Son. And then there's The Fantastic Four. Sony's already screwed up the property twice, so I'm holding out little hope that third time will be a charm... but who knows?

   
• Music! Topping my most anticipated list would be Macintosh Braun's Arcadia, which has been teased for far too long. Interested in seeing what Imagine Dragons come up with for Smoke + Mirrors. Rumor has it Duran Duran, Drake, and Garbage are going to released something this year, which would be welcome. As would a new album by Slayer, but talk seems to have died down as of late. Lastly, Ludacris is going to be dropping Ludaversal this year after a five year wait... definitely looking forward to that. Meanwhile, rumors that Depeche Mode were heading to the studio this year turned out to be false, which is sad because I so want them to redeem themselves to me after their disappointing past two releases. And finally, from the Hope Springs Eternal Dept., please, please, please, let Tom Bailey make a new album this year. His set of Thompson Twin calssics on the Retro Futura Tour was so mind-blowing that I'm dying for new material.

   
• Fiction! One of the definite highlights of the past four years has been working on THRICE Fiction. I can honestly say that neither RW nor I had any idea what this would become when it started, and we're so very grateful for the successes we've had. None of which wouldn't have been possible with the wonderful writers and artists who contribute to each issue. Big plans are afoot for 2015, and I couldn't be more excited for where we're headed. As always, you can download every issue for FREE on our website.

   
• Apple! Please oh please let this be the year we get Apple TV.

   
• Ink! Last year I got two new tattoos. This year will probably be the same. I am hoping to finally find time to get my upper-right arm worked on this year, as that's been a long time coming.

   
As always, wishing everybody only good things in 2015. Something tells me this is going to be another year to struggle for me, but hopefully not as awful as most of 2014 was.

This post is scheduled to publish at 9:10:11 12/13/14.

Since that ain't gonna happen again for a thousand years, I felt obligated to play along.

Back in the olden days there was an activity called blogging. This was where people wanting to share their experiences, knowledge, and observations would create a website and, using a content management system, would post such experiences, knowledge, and observations for all the world to see.

Blogging was not always easy. Especially if you were a blogger that blogged every day. Because, unless you're an astronaut or Hugh Hefner, eventually you run out of blog-worthy things to blog about.

Enter memes.

In order to generate ideas for blog content, bloggers started developing quizzes, challenges, questionnaires, and all kinds of other idea-generating material to blog about. Not everybody appreciated memes... many people downright abhorred them... but when it's 11:55pm and you're desperate for something to blog about, memes could be your best friend.

One of the most popular meme generators on the internet back in the day was The Friday 5. Every Friday they would post five questions for you to answer in a blog post, which was an easy way to get it over with and move on to your weekend. Unfortunately The Friday Five was eventually discontinued, and there were many sad pandas across the blogosphere.

And so I decided to do something about it.

I created a new Friday meme generator and called it FridayQ.

It ran a little over a year from June 4th, 2004 until I got tired of doing it and shut it down on July 22, 2005.

For years after it died, the FridayQ lived on as hand-coded pages here at Blogography. I never deleted them because I had a lot of blog posts that referenced FridayQ and I didn't want to go back and have to change 52+ entries. Alas, when I converted my blog to WordPress back in February all the FridayQ pages were lost and, for reasons unknown, were never backed up. After 8 years, 6 months, and 22 days, the FridayQ was finally dead for good.

Until...

Yesterday I was updating the web code for my blog stats and noticed that somebody was trying to reach FridayQ. This got me curious as to how many other searches it was getting, so I checked. Turns out there were dozens of them throughout the year. Mostly from my own blog, but there were other surviving blogs out there still linking to the site as well.

Maybe I should look into restoring FridayQ then?

And so this morning I did just that.

I visited the Internet Archive Wayback Machine to see what I could recover. None of the graphics were there, but all of the pages had been saved. Sure, the archives were out of date by a few months, but that was an easy fix. All I had to do was go through my Blogography archives and copy the original questions. Easy.

But what about the missing graphics?

Time to pull all my old hard drives out of storage.

Surprisingly, every drive I tried actually worked. And I found a backup of the FridayQ images on my fifth drive...

Good thing I'm a packrat who doesn't throw old tech away, huh?

I uploaded the pages to Blogography, updated all the links, and voilà... FridayQ is served!

You can visit them for yourself by clicking here.

If you want to read all my crazy answers, you can check out my "meme" archive for 2004 and 2005. They're solid gold, people. Solid gold.

And now I just need to decide what to do with this box of old hard drives. They're probably not going to stay working forever. Hell, half of them require a FireWire port which doesn't even exist anymore (thankfully I have a FireWire to Thunderbolt converter!). Two of them are SCSI drives that would require pulling one of my old Macs with a SCSI interface out of storage to read. Hmmm... perhaps I should back them up to the cloud or transfer them to modern hard drives or something? They're all ridiculously small by today's storage standards... I could probably fit all of them on a single terabyte external drive no problem.

Blergh. One more thing added to my list that I don't have time for.

Like blogging every day. =sigh=

Any time I need a reason to keep blogging when most everybody else has quit, all I have to do is look at my visitor stats. For reasons completely unknown, people keep reading. Yes, the death of Google Reader had a big impact on my visitor counts... but the number of "unique visitors" stopping by keeps inching upward.

In short? Lot's of people visit here.

The bulk of my traffic has always come from Google searches but, in the past, those people never stuck around much. They'd get what they came for and move on. Now-a-days, however, a surprising number of people do stick around and keep reading. I'm not exactly sure why. Most of the time it's via tag links. Somebody arrives because a search led them here, they like (or hate?) what I have to say, then click through so they can read more posts on the same topic. And those topics can generally be ranked into a "Top 5" like this...

1. Travel/Photography.
2. Television/Movies.
3. Apple/iPhone/Mac.
4. Hard Rock Cafe (includes traffic at DaveCafe).
5. News/Politics.

The first four categories are not that shocking. They encompass 75% of what I blog about (the remainder being day-to-day "DaveLife" crap).

The last one, however, is a bit surprising because I don't often write about politics. And yet, when I do, it usually ends up getting linked to from... somewhere... whether it's somebody agreeing or disagreeing. Writing about Rick "Piece of Shit" Santorum, for example, always result in linkbait because I'm so passionate about loathing the asshole, and people who also loathe him just love to share. That being said, posts that Conservatives could latch onto are the ones that seem to get the most attention. For example...

• Republicans. After Mitt Romney's failed bid for the White House, this entry got a lot of traffic... and most all of it was from a Conservative blogger forum. It set off a debate amongst members because there was a lot of Republican in-fighting as to whether the future of their party is embracing more moderate ideals... or clinging to the things that their party has historically been known for. At one point some guy called me an "arrogant asshole who doesn't know shit!" which was pretty great.
• Violence. After the horrific shooting of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, I wrote a post kinda defending Sarah Palin for her "Don't Retreat, Reload" rhetoric that many people were using to pass blame for the tragedy. The twist is that I can't fucking stand the woman. Pretty much hate her and her stupidity on every level. It was for this reason that the entry was popular with Conservatives because they could hold it up and say "See? He hates her and still says it wasn't her fault! Which was a gross simplification of what I actually said, but there you have it.
• Bullet Sunday 276. A reader wrote to tell me that a mashup I made of President Obama and The Punisher got posted to Breitbart or FOX or some other far-Right site. They (of course) never linked back to Blogography, so I didn't get any traffic from it.
• Cliff. I made a DaveToon commenting on the absurdity of the "Fiscal Cliff" deal that got passed around quite a bit. Which always bugged me, because what I really had to say about the issue was in the words around the cartoon. Still, the popularity of the thing led me to allow hotlinking to images on my blog again (after having blocked it a decade prior). And while Democrats and Republicans alike seemed to like the cartoon, it was the Republicans that were linking to it most... though probably for the wrong reasons.
• Divided. Very rarely do I write something in the hopes that lots of people will read it. This post was one of those times, because it brilliantly (if I do say so myself) illustrated the difference between the two halves of Washington State and how they view each other. I had thought that I presented both halves equally, but Conservatives thought it painted them the winners so I got a lot of links out of it. INTERESTING FACT: There were already a few maps of "United States of Canada" vs. "Jesusland" in existence when I wrote my entry, but I thought they were all ugly, so I re-drew it using a map that had been open-sourced. It continues to get links to this day.
• Chew. This entry got a bit of traction when a Conservative blogger linked to it as an example of "Obama voter remorse." That she missed the point of my entry entirely was not surprising. What was surprising is that she added Blogography to her blogroll (at least until she quit blogging years ago).

All the Right Wing love is nice, but I don't think I'll be signing up for the Tea Party just yet.

Anyway...

Guess I should send out a big "thank you" to Google for keeping people reading my bullshit.

Though I suppose having nearly 12 years of content to search through plays a part as well. When you've been blogging as long as I have, you've pretty much discussed just about everything there is.

Well, except Taylor Lautner. There are some topics beneath even me.

UPDATE: Shit!

   
I posted here yesterday. Isn't that enough for you people?

And so it begins.

For years now, I've been debating whether or not I should pull entries from my first two blogs (DaveWorld/DaveSpot and DaveBlog) and fold them into my third (and current) blog... Blogography. There's also a chunk of entries I saved from the first go-round of Blogography before it got rebooted in April 2003.

The problem is two-fold.

1) All my entries from "back in the day" were written at a time when I never even considered strangers wanting to read my crap. Entries were created for my friends and family only, and contained a lot of personal information I wouldn't dream of putting on the internet today. Obviously anything I re-post now would have to either be heavily edited or rewritten.

2) For the longest time I couldn't get it out of my head that posting old entries to my current blog was "cheating." I'm the first to admit that doesn't make much sense... but George Lucas fucking around with the Star Wars films over the years has freaked me out on the idea of mucking with the past. HAN SHOT FIRST — BLOGOGRAPHY BEGAN IN APRIL 2003!

But now, thanks to some encouragement from y'all, I'm over it.

The first entry I've decided to retro-post is from December 2000 when I visited Rome for the first time. It pretty much had to be re-written from scratch, because a lot of the original text was written through the perspective of a recent break-up with my then-ex-girlfriend. It was not a happy time, and the trip to Italy was a fortunately-timed escape from heartache.

You can read the entry by clicking here.

After all is said and done, I'm liking the idea of retro-posting more and more. I'll definitely be doing more as time permits.

"It's not like anybody is blogging any more."

"I still blog every day."

"Good lord, why?"

For the first time... ever(?)... I had to take down a blog post.

Yesterday I said "If you don't hear from me again, I'm probably dead. After writhing in agony for hours." Right after posting that, I noticed there was a software update for my blog, so I installed it. After a few minutes I was all updated and good to go.

Until I sat down to write today's entry and noticed that the entry editor is... errr... "missing" for lack of a better word...

Uhhh... where do I type?

Well that's darn inconvenient! And since I am flying out early, early tomorrow morning it's not like I can fix it now.

So it's probably best that I take down yesterday's post telling people that if they don't hear from me I'm probably dead.

Now wouldn't it be ironic if I died right after removing it?

Almost as ironic as if my blog stays permanently dead and I never get to post this entry about my blog being temporarily dead.