The Motherlode
While sitting here in the dark of the junk room, bathed in the light of lamps that stand on either end of the desk, a server farm somewhere is having a quiet heart attack - having received every blog post I’ve written since 2003.
While sitting here in the dark of the junk room, bathed in the light of lamps that stand on either end of the desk, a server farm somewhere is having a quiet heart attack - having received every blog post I’ve written since 2003. The posts are slowly appearing - back-filling the past towards the present, re-constructing the “story of me”.
You’re probably wondering why. So am I.
The entire escapade was triggered by a conversation with a friend earlier - who mentioned they had been reading my blog recently. All of the over-think cogs started turning at once following the conversation, and I began wondering how I might bring “the motherlode” to life on the internet once more.
I’m nothing if not organised.
Hidden away on the internet, I’ve always had a backup of my blog in various states of disrepair, hidden away in a source code repository, stored as “markdown” (a plain text format used in the publishing industry).
After a few minutes of head scratching, and some re-purposing of old python scripts, I turned the collection of plain text files into Wordpress import files. Substack understands wordpress import files.
And so - as I write this, the Substack server farm is churning through somewhere in the region of six thousand posts - expanding the stories told here to include twenty years worth of traveling with work, running, IVF, adoption, parenting, cats, dogs, and everything in-between.
I’m not sure anybody would be mad enough to go back and read the whole damn thing, but you never know. Some of the older posts are a bit broken in places - the result of one too many migrations between platforms in the early days of the social internet - but the words are all there. Or at least, mostly there.
Anyway.
I’ll shut up. It’s been a bit of a day. The project I’ve been working on involves a lot of mathematics - lots of angles, distances, and coordinates. Trigonometry. I’m not quite sure how I remembered it, but I did - and the math miraculously worked - conjuring business graphics onto the screen more-or-less where I planned it to. I joked with a friend that I almost did a happy dance through the house.
We won’t talk about the next project coming down the pipe - which will apparently keep me busy until next year and beyond. Fun times.