Drab as a fool, aloof as a bard

A significant milestone has come around recently, and I thought it was a good time to be retrospective. That’s right, yesterday marked the end of my first year of having a blog (which I can determine from WordPress’s handy “Hello world!” post for 2005-07-30). Similarly, tomorrow marks one year of actually blogging, since 2005-08-01 was the date of my first blog post.

Three events happening at once that stopped me using the computer (and thus blogging) should give me a chance to take stock of my situation. I realised what a pressure it is to get two blog posts done in a month, but also what a rewarding activity it is and one I look forward to. It made me realise how lucky I am to have a computer and the Internet at all, although the number of people who have one or both is increasing. Finally, of course, it made me wonder how vulnerable I am to single or multiple failures in my hardware and connection (significantly mitigated by having a mobile phone with Internet access).

The three events were

1. A permanent hardware failure
2. An unexplained Internet connection outage
3. The start of my holiday (away from my computer).

Admittedly the last of these was not unexpected, but the fact that the first two happened at the same time as the third, turned an otherwise welcome occasion into a contributory factor. I’ll spoil the ending and tell you I am writing this from my (fixed) computer using the (fixed) Internet connection, but how did I deal with this situation? I’ll tell you…