Will kick this off with the pending permanent closure of OpenDiary. That’s where I started writing in 1999. Its first death was something like 2013. I tried several other sites, but wasn’t completely satisfied. I’d started using WordPress, and, for a brief time Drupal, on my own shitty blog, but it wasn’t quite the same.
To go along with the zombie motif of the mid-and-early 2010s, OD came back. My lifetime membership was grandfathered in. I considered purchasing new subscriptions on the resurrected site, but neither was interested. One of them actually unfriended me on FB. No idea why, but luck wished.
The past year or so, OD has been beset by ads about how to purchase social networking accounts, earn money off crypto, etc.. Very few people actually writing.
I reconnected with my ProseBox account, but it really feels like an afterthought (which is why I stopped posting my outputs for years).
Yesterday, I noticed an announcement that the reanimated OD would shut down permanently by the end of the year.
I have what I’d written in ASCII files before the shutdown.
Export to PDF of everything is pretty straightforward, but there’s a lot of stuff that really isn’t for public consumption anymore. I don’t know if I want to spend the time to import it all into WordPress.
There’s a reason the tagline on ^H is, “everything gets deleted eventually.” Because it does. Or does it? The pre-9/11 despair about my life at the time can, and maybe should, be difficult to discover.
I will miss some of the interaction. I value some of the long-lasting associations I formed, but I’m not nearly as broken-up about it as I was the first time it died.
I appreciate, now, some of the design decisions at the time I really questioned. I’m thinking, especially, of using at database as the backend datastore. Shared data blocks/objects make a ton of sense. Some of what’s been happening the past decade or so shows that how pretty much everyone was operating in 2003-ish was really stupid in retrospect.
Now, that doesn’t mean Microsoft Exchange’s embrace of X.400 instead of SMTP end dusty, buy…emailing out the same 2K jpg is really masterful. Moreso when that 2K file is going to take up 4K for every recipient.
I seem to remember a promotional email that went out to thousands of folks on one of the radio stations’ lists. It took hours on the Frac T1 I was working with, on something like a P5-166.
But what else is going on?
Seeing my mom for her birthday. I’m tempted to see if I can dig through and find information about sojourns down here in the past. Trying to recall exactly when it was. 2003? I may look more later.
But post-Katrina reconstruction communed with technological progress has moved the idea of living down here from unthinkable to possible. I can live and operate pretty well, now.
My mother seems about the same as she has been. I think, for the most part, she’s being well cared-for.
Still difficult being so far away, but so it goes.
With me not working anymore, planning is a little easier, but the travel can still be grueling.