Day two and nothing to write

Thar is simply nothing to write about on this 2nd day of the new blog. I already told you my story of woe about losing my blog. Kind of like R.E.M.s "Losing my Religion."

I think about the themes I worked on and the hours of blogging - all gone. It is sad. Time to get my own dotcom and host.

Nightmare Phone Rates

I guess November 1st is the doom and gloom for all of us who use phones. Seems the legislature of Florida has passed a law that enables the local phone companies to raise their rates much more than in the past - some $2.25 per month now, but in the next three to four years, those increases will grow to $2.50 - to $6.86, depending on your local phone service provider.

To be brief about this: Bottom line - a corporation's main goal is to maximize profits for its' shareholders. The market will bear higher prices, and if all the big companies that serve an area don't lower prices, then we won't get cheaper rates ultimately as Mr. Bush, (Fla Guv.) states. But it will be good to have a choice and not have to select Verizon as my phone company.

Just don't deregulate the power companies please. I can live without a phone, but I can't live without power.

Blogger Sucks

Okay - so we are on to our first post. Why do I say blogger sucks, you ask? Well, you see, about ten - twenty days ago, I logged into my other account and all my blogs were missing. Gone. Vanished without a trace. So, I followed their wonderful help suggestions and verified that I was logged into the right account, blah blah - nothing. Blogs are gone. Then I sent them a help request. They responded quickly with a bot response of possible help pages from keywords in my help message. Nothing I hadn't already read or tried - but I checked again and nothing. Where are my blogs? (Since Dec 2004, I was on blogger.) Now, the final thing they told me to do in the help message was to respond to the email if nothing in their suggestions helped. Nothing helped - so I did this. Then a nice person finally responded after more than a week, and referred me specifically to one of the five suggested help pages the autoresponse message had sent me to already - even though I had specifically pointed out in my email that I had tried exactly the procedures in the one she suggested.

Okay - so I sent back a slightly less nice email telling her that I did do that and if she had actually read my response email, she would not have suggested I do what I had already done.

This is where we are at right now. So, you ask - wouldn't this cure me of posting to blogger again? Well, you see, it taught me something very valuable. This is a free service and with that, there are no guarantees with it. If I was paying something, then I would demand immediate action and heads would roll - but since I am using their service on their dime, then do I really have room to complain?

Well, I think I do. I invested hours of time in compiling my unimportant thoughts (to anyone else) and I took great pride in my template changes and some of my posts really shined. I even created a few different blogs to enable a sort of topic based posting strategy.

For now, all of that is gone. But, perhaps, someone will read my email and they can retrieve the blogs from some backup tape prior to my eradication from blogspot.com.

What to do for the future?

Well - their is outside hosting of the blog - but instead of using my isp's home address, which I feel is less than wise, especially when you write controversial messages that some nefarious right-winger or left-winger takes exception to and then decides to hack into your ISP account or email bomb you - my only choice would be to pay for a host and get my very own dotcom. Now, that requires not a lot of mula - but somewhat more commitment to the whole blogging thing than I am willing to put forth right now.

So, in the meantime, I may develop a method to back up my posts onto my hard-drive to thwart those evil geniuses at blogger who have sucked me into their web of blogging and time wasting spewing my unimportant thoughts to the blogging world. At least I am not wasting my mind on inane junk TV that is standard fare. But, backing up my posts manually kind of defeats the whole purpose of the blog experience.

I will give blogger credit if they actually fix their mistake and give me my blogs back. More later.

My blog, my thoughts

You know, my opinions mean virtually nothing to no one but me. But the beauty of blogging is that I can spew my opinions without necessarily making any sense or being "right". So, this is my effort to spew thoughts I have, which aren't necessarily well thought out or cogent, but are my effort to put down somewhere what I think about this or that that crosses my mind. All this being said to introduce you to my thinking and the goal of this blog. If you enjoy it, great, = if not, then send me a note via comments and maybe I will respond. Happy reading - now it is on to my post of the day.