or “I’m not dead yet”.

It doesn’t seem like it could possible have been so long but my (this) blog has been down since late 2009.  This can be largely blamed on the move to a new city (Tucson) with a new ISP (Cox Communications) which conveniently blocks both port 25 and port 80 for residential customers.  I’m sure the excuse is spam control but my assumption is they think it’s reasonable to charge $200+/mo for a “business” cable account just to host a vanity domain at home.  Anyway, SMTP was fixed by switching from Dyn Email Backup MX to the awesome Dyn Email Forward. HTTP traffic was more difficult to deal with.  For awhile I tried having a HTTP 302 forward from joker.com to my home server on an alternate port.  I quickly gave that up as I was concerned about having to support the alternate port forever or risk braking stored links.

The other major issue was that the blogger atom dump -> MT importer had been broken for years.  This stranded a bunch of content that I had in my first blog (on blogger).  The blogger “ssh” static content push to your own remote shell account kept breaking for weeks at a time so I bailed out and switched to MT.  The importer has apparently been fixed and allowed for a grand [puny] blog reunifications.

I finally broke down a few weeks ago and moved MT over to an AWS ec2 instance.  Shortly thereafter I ran out of time to mess with it.  I see that Google is now refer people searching for my name to the blog so it’s time to actually start using it again.  I have several long technical post planned to force me to organize some notes I’ve been keeping.

I also understand that MT is no longer in vogue and that folks are moving over to WordPress. An engine/theme update may happen if I can ever find the time.