I Think It's Time To Go Now

While scrolling through the very distant past of this blog, I discovered that years I previously thought were complete are actually incomplete.

It looks like everything between January 28 30 and May 16 April 26 are missing. Sorry, I just posted a couple of entries from 2003 so as to make it something like an even 20 entries that are missing.

This makes me wonder if I actually managed to snag everything from my old Diaryland site or if I missed something somewhere.

Actually, I know that I missed something. I have a link on one of the old entries that is supposed to go to a post there, but doesn't and I added a note in 2017 that I have no idea what it was supposed to say.  I guess I should probably work toward getting that restored so I can verify that I didn't miss anything.

Now for a LiveJournal throwback:

• Current Location: That place I call Home
• Current Mood: contemplative
• Current Music: Hotel California ~ The Eagles

 

Who Ya Gonna Call?

I guess I'll be a little more motivated to keep up with this one way dialogue.

I am pretty sure I have everything from 2023 through now from WordPress on here now.  I have other things from other places that still need to go up here, and I have rough outlines of things living either on paper or in my head that I need to expand upon (2025 goodreads year in review, I'm looking at you) that I need to still get up here as well.

It would be a little easier if I felt like I had more time to do any work though. 

If There's Something Strange In Your Neighborhood

Yesterday was kind of a weird day, I'm not going to lie.

I was adding something that I wrote elsewhere to this in it's proper place, and discovered that people somewhere are actually reading this thing for some reason?  

I don't know how I feel about that. Obviously, I'm putting it out there into the wild world of the internet so I'm not allowed to be annoyed or disappointed or anything, I'm just slightly curious about how people stumble across my little corner of the virtual world.

Word of mouth isn't the answer.  I said something to one person about it in the last, what? Ten years? That was something like two weeks ago (If you are one of the people reading this, feel free to let me know next time I talk to you!), and I wasn't exactly specific on how to find it.  All I said was that the title has been Every Which Way But Lucid for at least the last ten years.

This is an extremely roundabout way of saying HELLO WHOEVER YOU ARE! Feel free to drop an email or comment or something, I'd love to know something about my (presumed) audience. 

I'm A Poor Hawaiian Boy

All I have to say is that the pineapple is lying to you.

Pack Up My Belongings, I've Got To Get Away

 So about 20 years ago, I was trying to get things figured out for moving.  I was going to a place where I didn't have a great deal of personal space to work with and no internet access in any way, shape or form.  It was also almost an hour away from where I worked, so things were weird there too.

I only spent about a week living there before I packed up my stuff, again, and came back somewhere closer.

I'm entertained to note that the computer I was attempting to put together at the time, for the reason I was trying to put it together, wasn't easily done in those days, but now it is a way of life. Especially for me.

My aim was to downsize a desktop to a laptop footprint and use a USB hard drive as a permanent, high-speed storage addition. In those days, anything that I could get my hands on would not have come with a reasonable number of USB ports, and USB 2.0 was a maybe.  External hard drive? Hah!

I did end up building one out of a USB CD-ROM enclosure at some point shortly thereafter. It looked like a mess, but it did the job well enough.

I did eventually get a laptop for pretty cheap that could run what I needed it to run, but by then I was a little more established with life.

These days I have a few things going on that weren't a thing previously.

I spent several years running my home network data off an old Dell rack server (Which I don't appear to have ever mentioned anywhere here), and an HP network switch that were given to me.  I had to do a little updating on the server to get everything set up the way I wanted to, but it worked.  

Here is where things get relevant:

Once I moved into a smaller house, that didn't have someplace I could run a giant server and switch, I had to figure something else out.

I am now running everything that was previously on the server, which ONLY (I know, I know) ~6TB of storage space to a 8TB USB hard drive plugged into my primary desktop PC.

I could, however, run it off a laptop these days, because they are now powerful enough to stream high quality video and audio in the background and not suffer from too much in the way of performance issues.

It's crazy what twenty years can do. 

I'm Back In The U.S.S.R

 So I finally developed the pictures that I took with the Exakta.

More accurately, it is an Exakta VX IIa with a Carl Zeiss Jena Biotar 2/58 lens:

 The camera and lens were both pretty filthy, but after a decent cleaning, they didn't come out too bad.  Anyway, here are some of the pictures I took:

 

Given what the USSR had to say on the subject of religion, I found it both ironic and satisfying to use my first roll of film on one of these cameras at a Catholic Church.

There Ain't No Cure For The Summertime Blues

 Pictures.  I can actually place pictures in this space now, without paying for the ability to so.  Pity this wasn't a thing twenty years ago, since it caused me to migrate to a different platform.

I spent so much time not posting images to either of my LJ blogs, that I cannot bring myself to ruin the text-based world that I created here.

These posts will be (mostly) cross-posted on the blog that I migrated to, but I will not be bringing those over to this space.

And Bring Him To The Ground

This afternoon I went to an orchard for...Reasons.

Things got interesting when I realized that my D3500 only had something like 15% battery life left and my Nikon FE only had a single roll of film. By interesting, I mean fantastic.  I find limits to be amazing for getting careful pictures.

Here are some of the highlights from the D3500:

 As for the film, I had my Nikon FE with the Nikkor 50mm lens.  Here are some of the highlights from the roll of film:

By "highlights" I mean every picture that doesn't have people in them, because there isn't a single dud on this roll. I really like this camera.  As for the developing, I took care of that myself. No more sending them out!

• Current Location: Home, Home again.
• Current Mood: exhausted
• Current Music: Another One Bites The Dust ~ Queen + Paul Rodgers

 

 

Searching For My Lost Shaker Of Salt

The year is 2025.

I am laying on my couch typing this post on a Lenovo something or other PC. I have the screen flipped almost all the way over and am using the touch screen keyboard to type this.

As I do this thing, I am thinking of an article written by the late Douglas Adams, and published in The Salmon of Doubt wherein he is expressing his feelings about using a palmtop (or something similar) pc while in the bath and can't help but wonder what he would think of writing on something like an iPad (quite the Apple fanboy, he was), something like nine years later.

I vaguely recall writing a blog post on my phone on the side of the road in something like 2009/2010, but I cannot recall when. 

Nope, here it is: https://galeharpring.blogspot.com/2009/11/there-nothing-to-it.html 

That was a dumb smart phone. After that, things got real with the phones and many things were taken for granted.

But that isn't what I came to write about today. I was going to write about how I am currently reading Hunter S. Thompson's book Fear and Loathing On the Campaign Trail '72 and about how much more sense his writing style makes to me now.

Which is odd, because as I've perused the entries on this old thing, there are quite a few pieces I would almost call Gonzo Blogging.

Much of which predates me reading Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas in 2010.

Sweet Home Alabama

 Back in something like 2019, I decided to move this to WordPress for reasons that I'm currently unaware of.  I've become somewhat annoyed and disillusioned with WP over the last year or so. Again, for reasons that I'm currently unaware of.  It probably has something to do with the fact that they want me to give them an annoyingly large amount of cashey-money to be able to post whatever I want to on a blog that I've maintained for twenty-five years, across four (I'm pretty sure) platforms.

 All but one of those blogs I have access to and have considered writing in again in the last year or so, but since I would like to post pictures, I suspect this is the one to start leaning into again.

I would like to migrate everything from WP back over to here by the first of the year, but who knows how difficult it will be.  Easy if I can do an import/export, but more difficult if I have to copy paste.

I'm going to choose to be optimistic.