archy

Another housekeeping post
Last night I upgraded my blog. I clicked the button to move to the new blogger. After seeing the horror stories about the big kids trying to move over I was ready for the worst. I copied my template and saved my old posts to text files on my machine at home. I remember that Atrios was off line for most of a day before his attempt to move failed. For me, it took less than five minutes and everything moved perfectly.

I now have labels. Over the last few days, I've been updating my blogroll. Unlike the big kids, I didn't use this moment to forgive myself in advance for dropping a lot of small people. I tried to make changes to include the people I'm really reading at the moment. I still need to go through all of the addresses and make sure I have the current URLs for everyone.

Next, I plan to update the functionality of the site to better use things like feeds and recommendation services. I'm rapidly moving into last year. This is all typical of my approach to technology. I like advanced technology and new toys, but I'm fairly frugal (cheap to you non-Scots). I'm happy to have the latest goodies for things I use, but I'm slow to move into other fields.

Thirty years ago, I was an audiophile and had the best stereo I could afford. By the nineties, I was slow to move into CDs for the simple reason that I had 285 albums, many were not available for replacement, and I couldn't afford to replace them even if they were; I was a graduate student at the time. I finally went CD only when my turntable broke. I was still using a manual typewriter in 1988, but within three years I had not only gone electric and moved to a computer, but I had the best computer among my graduate school crowd (and stayed ahead of the others for almost six months).

On the other hand, I don't like phones and being available for every idiot on the planet to annoy. When I leave work, I want to be unavailable. I still don't have a personal cell phone and, although my job issued me one, I turn it off as soon as I get home. They can pester me on the commute, but as soon as I see a cat, they no longer own my time (as a wage earning contractor, I think they should pay for any time they use, so if I'm off the clock, I'm off the phone). I didn't have a good camera, so I was an early adopter of digital cameras. I spent 700 dollars for a low resolution camera that used a floppy disc and could only hold twenty pictures on a disc.

I place myself on a spectrum between complete Luddites and indiscriminate technophiles. I am neither smarter nor more practical than other users. I like technology, but I don't believe I have enough money to embrace new ways to spend what I have without being convinced that I have a good reason to spend in that direction. I'm also old and lazy in my habits.

Those last two do the most to explain the state of my blog and its features. Despite all of the griping that people do about Blogger and Blogspot, I do feel that I am getting my money's worth from them. The main reason I don't add more bells and whistles to my blog is mostly that my blogging guilt is primarily directed toward the amount of writing I do and not toward the functionality of the site. What this means is that I'll continue to pick at the site, but if I find myself with a lot of time and energy, I'll spend it writing about Nazi mammoths in flying saucers and their effect on the 2008 presidential race, and not on enabling the site for 3D podcasts.

I trust you will tell me if you think this is the wrong course to take.